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Most Americans are aware of Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) television programs, especially because of familiar figures like Big Bird from Sesame Street. Meanwhile, National Public Radio (NPR) is best known for its news and public affairs shows like All Things Considered and Morning Edition. Though viewers and listeners may remember hearing “funding provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting” at the end of a show or seeing the CPB logo, few know exactly what CPB does, or its history.
Now that Donald Trump has plans to eliminate the CPB completely, we need to examine why this would be disastrous for multiple communities, as well as a setback to decades of progressive media struggles.
Back in March, the Washington Post published this article titled “Trump’s public broadcasting cut would hit rural Americans the hardest”:
President Trump's budget director had a blunt explanation for why the administration wanted to eliminate federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting: It was inappropriate, he said, to ask working-class Americans — such as "a coal miner in West Virginia" — to pay for programs like the CPB. "We can ask them to pay for defense, and we will, but we can’t ask them to continue to pay for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting," added Mick Mulvaney, head of the Office of Management and Budget.
But is Mulvaney's hypothetical coal miner really getting such a raw deal from the CPB?
On the cost side, according to The Washington Post's Fact-Checker look at some back-of-the-envelope numbers, a typical coal miner in Appalachia paid a few pennies a year for CPB funding, if anything at all.
And in exchange?
Critics have often caricatured the programs funded by the CPB as playthings of the "liberal elite," but CPB funding disproportionately flows to rural, far-flung areas of the country. Precisely because of their far-flung nature, those areas — such as parts of Appalachia — often lack many broadcast options other than the ones CPB provides. CPB funding is "especially critical for those living in small towns and in rural and underserved areas," the organization's president, Patricia Harrison, said in a statement.
We have seen endless discussion and debate (from both sides of the political spectrum) on how the impact of policies and cuts affect the rural (read: white) demographic.
But in reality, “rural” often means Native American, Latino, and African American. When we think of civil rights battles fought by communities of color, we often fail to examine the decades of struggles to integrate and foster ethnic and racial representation in media outlets, in both staffing and programming. Public broadcasting has not been exempt
Political science professor Pearson Cross volunteers to do a weekly show, which features state and local politicians and issue experts in rural Louisiana, at KRVS-FM. He wrote “In Defense of Public Broadcasting”:
Currently 248 of the 575 radio and TV stations supported by the CPB are located in rural areas where they are often the only consistent source of local news and children’s programming. These stations provide other needed services as well, including “Amber Alerts” and weather reports, often, as in Alaska and other out-of-the-way areas, a crucial resource. The “market” does not provide many needed services for rural communities because there is not a strong financial incentive to do so. This requires government to step in, much as it does to provide high-speed internet and cell phone service to under-served areas.
My perspective goes beyond rural versus urban. You can be in an urban area with large communities of color, and yet have broadcast media outlets that fail to employ decision makers and producers from communities of color. Simply adding a “face” to a newscast does little to change that dynamic.
I have a keen interest in all things public broadcasting and due to serendipity, was part of movements to expand it and make it more diverse.
My journey into the world of public broadcasting got jump-started in a small village north of Congo-Brazzaville in the People’s Republic of the Congo in 1971. I already had experienced working in listener-supported radio at New York’s Pacifica station WBAI-FM. The public affairs program Pa’lante featured members of the Young Lords Party. However, I never thought about the internal workings of the station or how it was sustained beyond people in the listening community sending in donations during fundraising drives.
In the Congolese village, the group I was with met with village elders and we were introduced as coming from the United States. We were warmly greeted and as we sat in a circle to talk via interpreters, a man approached us carrying a radio. He was visibly excited by the fact that we were Americans and he shoved the radio at us, asking us to “fix it” because it was broken. The interpreter explained that the radio was the only contact people in the village had with the outside world for news and information and that because their radio was made in the USA, the man assumed we would know how to repair it. None of us could, and when we told him that he was chagrined and shook his head asking, “Why not?”
I hadn’t really thought about the importance of radio in many parts of the world, or even at home. I was from the TV generation, and radio was basically a device I used to listen to music. His “why not” stuck in my head and only a few years later I found myself in Washington D.C., joining a project to put a Pacifica radio station on the air in what was then called “Chocolate City with vanilla suburbs.”
Pacifica was a proudly left-of-center group. Yet they had planned to found a station in D.C. that would have a national news bureau with coverage of the Hill, and the music portion of the programming would be European classical. The programming was aimed at white liberal elites in areas like Georgetown and the suburbs, with the idea that these people would be able to financially sustain the station via listener-subscriptions—that was the Pacifica model. A group of protesters from Pacifica’s first station, KPFA in Berkley, California (some of whom were white and others who were from KPFA’ s “Third World News Bureau”), stormed the Pacifica National Board meeting, demanding that the new station serve the D.C. community and that a black station manager be hired. They won, and Gregory Millard, a young black man from Houston, Texas, became GM.
WPFW became the nation’s first minority-controlled public radio station. I met Greg and he hired me to develop the program format. We determined we would do local news and public affairs and the music would be “jazz and jazz extensions” (see our first program guide). The public affairs offerings would cover local black community news, and also spotlight Native American programing (“Seeing Red” produced by Frank and Susan Harjo) and Asian-American and Caribbean, Latin American, and African programs as well. After two years of building and fundraising with very little help from Pacifica’s white-dominated national board and lots of help from the individual stations, we went on the air on Feb. 28, 1977, to the sound of Duke Ellington’s Take the A Train (Ellington was a D.C. native).
Working at WPFW introduced me to community broadcasting activists from around the country, including from the National Federation of Community Broadcasters (NFCB), a fledgling organization founded in 1978. That same year there was a shakeup in public broadcasting and CPB issued “A Formula for Change: The Report of the Task Force on Minorities in Public Broadcasting.”
The New York Times covered it in an article titled “Public Broadcasting Assailed on Race”:
Public broadcasting has been delinquent in meeting the needs of minorities in every aspect of management, employment, training, programming and decision‐making, according to a detailed and voluminous report issued by a task force that spent 18 months examining the problem. In the report, entitled “A Formula for Change,” the 28‐member multi‐ethnic Task Force on Minorities concluded that “the public broadcast system is asleep at the transmitter” when it comes to considering the needs and interests of blacks, Asians, Latinos and native Americans. Programming by and about minorities is “seriously deficient” both on public radio and public television. Few members of minority groups serve on the boards of directors of the medium's three major organizations, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service.
The investigation, funded for 8186,000, was initiated by one of the groups most severely criticized — the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a nonprofit private corporation that distributes government funds to the public broadcasters and helps determine policy in the field. The members of the task force were unpaid and the grant was spent mostly for transportation, hotels and meals in the seven cities where the task force met.
The force, headed by Dr. Gloria L. Anderson, who is also chairman of the corporation board Human Resources Development Committee and professor and chairman of the chemistry department of Morris Brown College, Atlanta, made 46 findings that detailed the failures of public broadcasting in the area of minority interests and listed 70 recommendations to remedy them.
As a result of the task force, CPB funded a “Minority and Women’s Training Grant Program” and the new director was Latino media activist Daniel del Solar. Daniel, who I knew from KPFA in Berkeley, hired me to be his second in command as program coordinator.
To be honest, I had never set foot in CPB’s D.C. offices and had had little contact with the powers that be in public broadcasting, an institution that was viewed with suspicion by those of us on the left. Some of the programmers at WPFW did get jobs at NPR and a few of those Pacifica grads are still there, like Patti Neighmond, (who got her start in the WPFW newsroom). The producers of color weren’t represented, something I discussed in my critique of NPR titled “NPR might as well be called "No People of color Radio" in 2014. But I digress.
Due to the task force and subsequent decisions by CPB to award expansion grants to stations operated by people of color, new voices began to hit the airwaves. I got the chance to travel to every public radio and television station in the U.S and the territories and to be a part of the formation of the CPB-funded National Minority Consortia (NMC).
Here’s a link detailing the CPB Expansion Grant Program:
CPB funds five organizations which make up public television's Minority Consortia as part of its commitment to develop and fund quality, culturally diverse programming for the American viewing public. They are: Center for Asian American Media (CAAM), Latino Public Broadcasting (LPB), National Black Programming Consortium (NBPC), Pacific Islander in Communications (PIC) and Vision Maker Media (VMM, formerly Native American Public Telecommunications), and other producers providing unique programming for radio listeners. These organizations provide much needed content about diverse communities to the public television system. Each organization selects and funds programs by, for and about its community, awarding grants to producers for program production and guiding the projects through distribution on public media.
When discussing communities of color, the impact of radio in American Indian and Native Alaskan areas is too often overlooked. In 1978 the Longest Walk came to DC and the African-American community opened its arms and homes to Indian walkers. Greg Zephier, an AIM activist, stayed in my apartment, and I would later meet AIM activist Mark Tilsen, a co-founder of KILI-FM.
KILI Radio is an independent, Lakota owned and operated, 100,000 watt FM radio station located at Porcupine Butte on the Pine Ridge Reservation in southwestern South Dakota. On the air 20 hours a day, seven days a week, KILI’s broadcast area covers 30,000 square miles and includes the Pine Ridge, Cheyenne River and Rosebud Reservations, Rapid City, the southern Black Hills and the panhandle of Nebraska. KILI’s programming includes news and information, public affairs broadcasting, cultural celebration and entertainment with a variety of music formats including traditional, Indian contemporary, country, rock and roll, rap, blues and jazz. KILI is a very unique community radio station working hard to meet the needs of individuals and groups throughout the listening area.
KILI broadcasts in both English and Lakota, which is key in preserving culture and tradition.
When I got a chance to spend a little time on the Pine Ridge reservation, I flashed back to my experience in the Congo. I realized that the rural isolation on the rez was a similar situation that needed radio desperately.
Tilsen wrote this about the need for communities to report their own news:
Three weeks into the 1973 occupation, the U.S. Justice Department barred the media from entering Wounded Knee to interview the occupiers. Suddenly, there were no journalists to provide a record — except from the government side. Because of the blackout, academics, pundits and federal agents today still argue about the truth of what happened in 1973 inside Wounded Knee. And more than 40 years later, some critics still belittle or try to negate the gains of the Indian movement. And no professional — someone trained to report conflict and to comment on history — has managed to give us an inside, eyewitness account.
Until now
In 1973 Kevin McKiernan was a young NPR reporter who didn’t think the media should be embedded on one side. He defied the news embargo, walked 10 miles overland at night, penetrated the cordon of agents and soldiers around Wounded Knee and made his way into the village. He stayed until the end, smuggling out reports and film. McKiernan went on to cover wars in Central America and, more recently, in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. Now he has a new film on the way called Wounded Knee: A Line in the Sand (shot in part by the legendary Haskell Wexler). McKiernan is a non-Indian. You can disagree with his conclusions.
But he was there.
After Wounded Knee, we broke free of the dependence on outside reporting. For years, members of the Oglala Lakota tribe and the American Indian Movement worked hard to build KILI Radio (90.1 FM). In 1983, we became the first 100,000 watt Native American community-owned radio station in America. More than 30 years later, KILI Radio is still on the air.
Now that’s progress.
The history of the development of native broadcasting is told in Signals in the Air: Native Broadcasting in America, by Michael C. Keith.
Signals in the Air: Native Broadcasting in America is the first book-length study of one of the most unique communications enterprises in U.S. history. It is the remarkable account of how the nation's most exploited minority group overcame adversity by embracing the airwaves. Through their own radio and television stations, American Indians have found a way to keep their cultures and languages from perishing. This book examines the impetus behind the development of Native-run stations and how these stations operate today. It assesses the influence and impact of Native broadcasts in the Indigenous community and seeks to chronicle the formidable challenges confronting Indian broadcasters as they provide vital programming services to the often impoverished inhabitants of the nation's remote reservations.
The political prognosis for maintaining the victories we have achieved over the course of decades looks increasingly grim. Pressure from the Republican-controlled Congress has been wreaking havoc with poc funding. In 2013, CPB reduced aid to longtime grantees:
Citing shifting priorities and reductions to its congressional appropriation that have forced cuts in station grants and its own budget, the corporation has cut off aid to the National Center for Media Engagement and is reducing its annual funding to the National Minority Consortia, which back TV programs by and about minorities, while pressing them to restructure their operations.
I hope you have found all or some of this history of interest. As activists resist cuts to health care, the environment, civil rights, and human rights programs, we also have an administration in power that is relentlessly attacking journalism and constitutional rights to a free press.
If you are like me, you have probably lobbed some pretty harsh critiques toward certain highly visible and audible segments of what we see/hear from public broadcasting.
It is, however, a platform that does a lot that is positive and necessary—and it’s now at risk. Many of us have been waging struggle to push our public media forward into more representation of diversity for decades. In spite of setbacks, we are not ready to throw in the towel and give up.
The CPB’s Federal Appropriation Request & Justification for fiscal year 2018/2020 is online.
For what amounts to a drop in the bucket in federal spending, the far-flung network of public stations and the programming they provide to listeners and viewers is priceless.
Let your legislators know that we must keep funding public broadcasting, along with related agencies like the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities, which provide programming, funding, and assistance.