Leaders at both of Southern California’s largest public news and information radio stations said that a threat by Republicans in Washington to eliminate federal support for public broadcasting would be a serious blow to local programming.
While KCRW-FM (89.9) and LAist, which broadcasts under the call sign KPCC-FM (89.3), get the vast majority of their financial support from other sources, a loss of the government subsidy might threaten the kind of coverage exemplified in the aftermath of the Eaton and Palisades fires, executives at the two stations said in an interview.
The remarks came after a hearing Wednesday in Washington in which a congressional committee criticized the heads of NPR and PBS for what Republicans called biased coverage. The chair of the committee, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), vowed to end taxpayer support for the public broadcasters, which she labeled as “communists.”
The cut would cost Pasadena-based LAist $1.7 million from its budget of $41 million, while Santa Monica-based KCRW would lose $1.3 million from a budget of $24 million, the executives said.
“We have to balance our budget every year, so we would have to make definite changes,” KCRW President Jennifer Ferro said. “We don’t want to go backward and provide less service. We want to provide more service. With this cut, we’d have to raise an additional $1.3 million just to stay where we are. You can’t just snap your fingers and do that.”
While public funding for media has been questioned many times before, Ferro said the threat felt more serious this year, because so many programs and departments simultaneously have been targeted for cutbacks by the Trump administration.
Following the Washington hearing, LAist Editor in Chief Megan Garvey sent an email to listeners defending the station’s coverage.
“We provide in-depth news, thoughtful conversations, and essential local coverage free from commercial and political influence,” Garvey’s message said. “We believe hearing viewpoints across the spectrum makes us a stronger and more informed nation.”
The station said it saw an increase in donations during a recent on-air pledge drive, in which LAist staffers repeatedly said the station needed more donations to counter a potential cut in government funding.
Earlier in March, LAist development executive Rob Risko laid out the magnitude of the threat presented by the loss of federal funds.
“That’s $1.7m of funding for LAist — or more than 13 jobs — that go directly to bringing you in-depth reporting on housing, public safety, the climate, breaking news and more,” Risko wrote to listeners. “If those dollars go away, LAist will still be here for you every day.”
But he said it would be “significantly harder” for LAist to “uncover corruption,” provide the kind of breaking news coverage demonstrated during the fires and to accomplish in-depth analysis exemplified in LAist’s election “Voter Game Plan.”
Both stations called it unfair to label their news coverage as slanted when the majority of stories focus on nonideological topics. Ferro pointed, for example, to a forum KCRW conducted on Zoom, with an audience of 3,000 people asking questions about health concerns raised by the wildfires.
“I feel it’s so important now that people can have institutions they rely on and trust,” Ferro said. “Maybe that’s a quaint idea, but we are not here just to make money off you or to market your personal data. We are trying to bring news and information for the sole purpose of educating the community.”
Also threatened by the potential cut to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would be a roughly $11-million annual payment to support a satellite system that connects NPR stations. The satellite link helps stations deliver live news reports from anywhere in the nation.
The service would go away, unless stations could find a way to bridge the funding gap, said Ferro, who was in Washington for Wednesday’s hearing.
Stations in small and remote communities get as much as 40% of their funding from the CPB, Ferro said, making it difficult for them to stay on the air without the federal dollars.
