In early July, at the behest of President Donald Trump, Congress approved a $9 billion rescission package that canceled $1.1 billion in federal funding for public broadcasting. NPR CEO Katherine Maher called the cut an “irreversible loss” to the public radio system, “an unwarranted dismantling of beloved local civic institutions, and an act of Congress that disregards the public will.”
PBS has since slashed its budget by 21 percent, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) is winding down. Hardest hit by these cuts will be rural stations that rely on CPB funding to stay on the air. At least 70 rural stations rely on CPB money for 30 percent or more of their funding, while some rely on CPB for as much as 65 percent of their budget.
Steven Bass, who stepped down as president of Oregon Public Broadcasting in 2024 after 19 years, calls public radio a “lifeline” for rural communities in his state—one that’s now in jeopardy.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. Watch or listen to the full interview at iTunes, YouTube or Spotify.
Anne Kim: Steve, tell us a little bit more about Oregon Public Broadcasting and about its history—which is more than 100 years old!
Steven Bass: OPB was started as a single radio station that went on the air in 1923 with the call sign KFDJ—now it’s KOAC AM 550. It was at a time when public radio, or what we know now as public radio, was “educational radio,” and it was sprouting among land-grant universities primarily. The early days tended to be in places that were rural and agricultural. Oregon, Iowa, Ohio, Wisconsin had the earliest stations dating back to 1917.
The Oregon station began as a physics department experiment, and it broadcast from the physics building [at what’s now Oregon State University]. When I got to OPB in 2006, we were still operating in the original studio from the 1920s. We eventually had to shut it down because equipment became more computerized, and the studio had no air conditioning.
I remember the host would have to open up the single-pane window to keep the equipment cool, and it would be really bad when the marching band was going by, which would happen occasionally.
Anne Kim: What does OPB look like now, and whom do you reach?
Steven Bass: OPB operates a network of about 17 AM and FM stations scattered around the state. Our coverage extends from the Portland metro area all the way east to Idaho, all the way south to Nevada, and to west side of the Cascade Mountains to Eugene and Cottage Grove. There are five TV stations that serve the same area, and there are loads of little translators that rebroadcast the signal. It serves about 85 percent of Oregon’s population, and the only place where OPB doesn’t have broadcast coverage is in southern Oregon.
But what I would say is that “service” isn’t just about where you’re broadcasting but about where you’re reporting as well. I think the whole nature of what service means in a community has changed over the years from one that’s just defined by where you broadcast.
Garrett Epps: Steve, let me tell you that just last month, my family and I had a sleepless night in Florence because we were waiting to hear whether the tsunami from the Russian volcanic eruption would cause flooding, and we would have to move quickly to higher ground. We were listening to KLCC, and I thought that as a KLCC listener, I’d ask you to talk a little bit about the role that public broadcasting plays in emergency communications in places even more rural than Florence.
Steven Bass: This is something that’s gotten a lot of attention, and emergency alerting systems ride on the technical infrastructure of public broadcasting. The national-level emergency alert system comes through OPB and then gets distributed.
What I think is even more critical is how public radio combines technology with boots on the ground. I’m thinking of what happened around Asheville, North Carolina after the hurricane, and Blue Ridge Public Radio was there. They had a resilient old technology called FM radio that you can get with a hand crank radio, or in your car or, if you’re lucky enough to have internet service – which tends not to stick around when you’re in those kinds of emergency situations – that you can stream on your phone. More importantly, they had the personnel there who could report on what’s going on. This also happened with the flooding that occurred near San Antonio, and in Alaska, where the public radio station was reporting on the incoming tsunami.
It’s the part of public media that people kind of forget—that combination of a resilient technology that is able to reach people, plus people there to report it. In many communities, public media is the only institution that has any reporters that can do this because somebody who’s 400 or 500 miles away is not going to understand the nature of the terrain, and they don’t understand the community.
It’s going to be very unfortunate that with the loss of federal funding, many of these organizations, particularly in rural communities, are really going to be hard pressed to survive.
Garrett Epps: People don’t necessarily realize how big the West is. Oregon is the ninth or 10th largest state in the United States. All the others that are larger are in the West, including Alaska. Oregon’s about the size of the United Kingdom. Can you talk about what is available to people in those rural areas and how much they use public radio as opposed to commercial radio?
Steve Bass: It varies by community, but I will say that when I was at OPB, we had the opportunity to extend our radio coverage, and people were very thankful for that service.
And the beauty of public media is that it’s available for free. It’s not just that it’s non-commercial. Anybody with a radio or a television can just turn it on and it’s there. There’s no gate, there’s no paywall.
And I think people use it quite a bit. I’ve traveled a lot around the state, and everywhere I go, I would find lots of fans of OPB. In June, I was in Pendleton, Oregon, which is about three and a half hours east of Portland. It’s out in wheat country, and it’s a community of about 17,000 people.
Everywhere I went, people were asking about what the impact of federal funding cuts was going to be on OPB because it’s a lifeline service for people.
We were looking at a small community in Oregon a little further out called Halfway where we had a tower that needed to be replaced, and it was going to cost about $150,000. It’s a community of 288 people, and when I asked our membership people if we had any members there, 50 of the households in that community out of 288 were members.
It’s easy to say that the only people that care about public radio are in urban areas, but it’s not true.
Anne Kim: OPB’s website says that it’s going to lose about $5 million in federal funding a year—or about 9 percent of its annual budget. What does that mean as far as the ability of OPB to deliver the services you’ve been talking about?
Steven Bass: Well, I’m not there, so I can’t tell you precisely what the plan will be. But back in the day when I first started in public media and when I first started at OPB, the only predictable source of support was effectively what you got from CPB [Corporation for Public Broadcasting].
CPP would also pay out in a very predictable manner, which is somewhere around November or so, and you could count on getting a check for 75 percent of your grant, and then more later on in the year. So for those that were looking at how to manage their cash flow, that was an important infusion.
As we look forward, I think that for organizations like OPB that are financially strong, they are likely to figure out some way to handle this. It’s going to hurt – nine percent is a significant number. But compared to many other organizations where you’re talking about 20 percent or 40 percent—and in the case of a tribal station in Eastern Oregon where 99 percent of their funding comes from CBP—there’s no way to make up for that.
But federal funding is only among the challenges that public media faces now – it’s not the sole challenge. And in some cases, it may not be the biggest challenge because what we are seeing is a fundamental reordering of the media ecosystem with more people turning to on-demand media. This is particularly true in the television business where in the month of May, streaming and on-demand viewing eclipsed all linear viewing. In other words, compared to all viewing on broadcast, cable, or satellite, there was more on Netflix, Roku, and YouTube TV.
So if you’re in the business of basically being a redistributor of broadcast content, you have a big shift you need to make. If you add those two challenges together, what’s really going to be needed is a significant transformation throughout the ecosystem, and that’s where organizations like OPD are focusing right now.
Garrett Epps: One claim I’ve seen online is that a lot of smaller stations will switch to more NPR content because it’s cheaper than having boots on the ground. Do you see that as a problem?
Steven Bass: Well, I see it as an economic solution, but what I fear is that it is not a long-term strategy because you’re rebroadcasting content that people can now get online. How long is that going to hold up?
The thing that is truly unique is the reporting that is being done on the ground, so I think that’s the shift that needs to happen. What organizations may need to think about is how to make this shift with no federal funding. It is not going to be easy.
Anne Kim: I want to go back to what you’re talking about on the journalism and reporting, because I know that that was a priority for you in your tenure as president of OBP. You grew the journalism staff substantially and your newsroom has covered some amazing stories, including some groundbreaking reporting about the decline of salmon in the state, problems with the foster care system, groundwater contamination by a mining company, and other major scoops. How do you go about preserving this sort of hard-hitting public service journalism that OPB has pursued for so long?
Steves Bass: You know, that’s a really great question. Because I know my successor really well, and I know what her values are, I expect that’s going to continue at OPB. I think that OPB has seen this as a very important part of its future in terms of its public service.
When I came to OPB in 2006, I thought I was being hired to run a television and a radio network. I did not think that within a period of about five years, we would be on a path to becoming a primary news source. We’re the only statewide news organization left in Oregon.
Garrett Epps: What is the long-term solution? Have you got one for us?
Steven Bass: There is no one-size-fits-all solution, nor one that is going to work in some of the most remote and rural organizations. I Iook at the state of Alaska, where public radio in particular is a lifeline, and many of these organizations are going to lose 50 percent or more of their funding.
The only thing I can think of that would allow them to continue doing what they’re doing now is if the state of Alaska stepped in and said they’ll pick up a larger share. But Alaska has long ago defunded public broadcasting.
In1986, when I was working for PBS, I was sent up to Alaska to work with all of the public broadcasting stations because they had been defunded by the state. People in rural communities didn’t have money to give the station, but they had just gotten a whole bunch of salmon. So they put them on ice and brought them down to the station as their gift. It was a remarkable thing, but I don’t see an easy solution for those organizations.
In other places, I think we’re going to see more consolidation and common backroom operations. My view is that we really need to increase the number of boots on the grounds in all kinds of communities and not to put that at risk. If you don’t have duplicative infrastructure in all of these places, that’s probably a fair price to pay.
And then of course, I think the public is going to step up a bit more. I know that OPD and other organizations have seen a nice bump in fundraising as a result of this, and that’s important. But the question is whether that’s a long-term amount of support or in the short-term? My hope is that it’s going to be long-term in nature.
Garrett Epps: What can ordinary listeners do beyond writing checks to try to help their local public radio organizations? What would be constructive and what would not?
Steve Bass: Writing checks or becoming a sustaining donor if you can do it certainly helps. I think that in some cases, public media organizations need expertise on their boards of directors. If people have some sort of specific expertise, volunteering your time and energy is a good way to get involved.
And I think the other thing people can do is just spread the word. The brand of public radio is not the same as NPR, but it’s been kind of mushed together. I think that there needs to be some rehabilitation of that brand, if you will, because for many people who don’t listen all the time or at all, they have no idea what to think. I think if people are out there saying, you know, really, there’s a lot of good stuff on your local public radio station, you should really check it out online or on the air, that would help.
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