JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has helped fund public radio and television for nearly six decades. Today, it announced it is shutting down. The move follows the decision by Congress last month to claw back $1.1 billion in funding at the urging of President Trump.
NPR's Frank Langfitt is covering this story. And I'll just note, while NPR receives money from CPB, no NPR executive or news leader helped prepare this story. Hi, Frank.
FRANK LANGFITT, BYLINE: Hi, Juana.
SUMMERS: Frank, so let's just start with the basics. Why is the corporation, which is known to millions of people as the CPB, saying it now has to shut down?
LANGFITT: Well, without any funding, Juana, it has no way to keep operating. That's what it's saying. And it tried to get money from Congress another way, but that effort failed yesterday. And so the president and CEO, Patricia Harrison - here's how she put it in a statement today. She said, despite the extraordinary efforts of millions of Americans who called, wrote and petitioned Congress to preserve federal funding for CPB, we now are facing the difficult reality of closing our operations.
Now, Juana, Harrison says most of the staff would leave at the end of September, and there'll be a small transition team which will close up in January.
SUMMERS: Frank, I mean, not everyone in the country knows the CPB. Just spell it out for us plainly - how big of a deal is this?
LANGFITT: Yeah, I mean, this is a watershed moment in American media, whether you like CPB or not. You go back to 1967, President Lyndon Johnson and Congress - they created the CPB. It was to support public service media as an alternative to commercial radio and TV. Now, the CPB provided money to NPR and PBS but a lot more to hundreds of member stations across the country. In a statement today, NPR CEO Katherine Maher - she said the CPB, quote, "empowered countless journalists, producers and educators to create programming that has enriched lives, fostered understanding and held power accountable."
SUMMERS: President Trump does not share her views. He pressed Congress to slash funding to the CPB. Remind listeners what his reasoning was for that.
LANGFITT: Yeah. Well, Trump and many Republicans in Congress said that NPR and PBS were politically biased against the GOP and frankly, from their perspective, a waste of taxpayer money. Now, NPR and PBS have denied any bias.
More broadly, though, Juana, many analysts, when they look at these funding cuts, they say they're part of a broader attack on news organizations in the U.S. that cover the president critically. Trump, as we've reported, has sued CBS, ABC and even recently the Wall Street Journal.
SUMMERS: Frank, you talked earlier about the stations that received CPB funding. What has been the reaction among them to this news?
LANGFITT: Well, I talked to some people today, and some saw the closure as inevitable because of those cuts, but others had kind of been holding out hope that somehow the CPB might hang on. I talked to Tim Bruno. He's the general manager of Radio Catskill. That's an NPR affiliate in Upstate New York. This is what he said.
TIM BRUNO: I really had hoped that I wouldn't see the day where public funding for stations went away. That happened. OK. But I didn't really see a day where this separate institution, which is set up to serve the public, would be shut down. I don't know what stage of grief I'm in right now. I guess, is this acknowledgment?
LANGFITT: Acknowledgment that the era of federal funding for public media is - looks to be pretty much over.
SUMMERS: Frank, as far as we know right now, what has been the financial impact of these cuts so far on stations?
LANGFITT: Well, stations were already laying off staff in expectation of the cuts this week. WQED there in Pittsburgh - they announced they would lay off 35% of their staff. Other stations say they're receiving donations - big donations, record donations - in response to the cuts. The question, of course, Juana, is how long that will last.
SUMMERS: NPR's Frank Langfitt, thanks so much.
LANGFITT: Good to talk, Juana. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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