Don’t worry about the recent recission of federal funding for public broadcasting insofar as Louisiana Public Broadcasting goes, as if you couldn’t tell from comments made by the organization itself.
Of course, before the Republican Congress triggered the cuts starting Oct. 1, there were all sorts of panicked howls coming from the political left about how the country would fall apart with the billion or so bucks missing from coffers of public broadcasting. This reaction was, or course, disingenuous, such as the argument that rural areas would be cut adrift from emergency warnings when there exist so many other less-costly way it could be done, and without the relentless liberal bias effused through public broadcasting (most recently displayed through woke older social media posts and statements made by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s head and blog posts made last year by a former senior employee outing the virulent leftism within the organization).
Naturally, this crisis on the left isn’t shared by the American people. A recent survey showed nearly half of respondents thought the federal government shouldn’t use taxpayer resources to fund public broadcasting, while only just over a quarter thought it should.
In Louisiana, that means $2.4 million fewer. However, LPB put out a statement essentially saying the show would go on with minimal disruption to its service delivery. Perhaps the impact would be minimal because the state gave its umbrella organization that runs LPB, the Louisiana Educational Television Authority, almost $10 million in last fiscal year, which is higher than the per capita average among the states. In fact, over a dozen states don’t provide any funding to public broadcasting at all.
This current fiscal year, public television in Louisiana will get boosted even more, up to nearly $12 million from the general fund, plus nearly $1.5 million more from two dedicated funding streams. But that’s not all: there exists the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting, a charitable nonprofit with some members selected by LPB dedicated to supplementing LPB funding, which it did to the tune of nearly $1.3 million last year – while it sits on $48 million in investments (88 percent of that available for distribution, according to its own rules). Doubling its support would hardly eat into the endowment and wipe out the loss from no more CPB grants.
The five public radio stations (some have repeater stations) in the state operate differently. Four receive indirect state support from being housed at universities, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. Baton Rouge’s WRKF has a corporate structure. For the university-based stations, a couple of options exist if budgets need balancing. The universities could increase their subsidization and/or programing could become less expensive, such as cutting out National Public Radio programs and replacing it with local news content or music. After all, there’s almost nothing that NPR covers that other for-profit news networks don’t cover as well, and the vast majority of potential listeners have easy access to NPR from cell phones and other devices.
WRKF, unlike the others, has little music content and has carved a niche as essentially an all-news station and without direct government support. It, however, has sought out some efficiencies, such as combining some functions with New Orleans’ WWNO, housed at the University of New Orleans, and perhaps more can be done in this area.
Keep in mind, of course, that more aggressive fundraising can solve all of these problems. If audiences really value current the content that may be threatened by reduction of CPB grants, these listeners will step up to fill in the gap. It makes much more sense to do this than to charge taxpayers, most of whom never bother to listen to public radio (only 12 percent of the public even spends more than a few minutes a year listening to it, and total listeners disproportionately are white, better educated, and live in urban areas).
By this time next year, while perhaps a few poorly-run stations might go off the air, the whole issue will have receded as most stations likely will have adjusted to the new reality, to the benefit of their audiences and taxpayers.
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