Week of May 8, 2025

From the editor’s desk

A week ago, a Trump executive order called to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting—the private nonprofit that receives federal funding and distributes it to NPR and PBS—claiming bias and irrelevance.

As for bias, here’s what Ad Fontes Media, one of the main trackers of media bias, reports: NPR skews 4.19 points left, and PBS skews 3.95 points left. (For context, The Hill and the Daily Mail skew about that far to the right. Skewing 25 points in either direction is considered hyper-partisan; 35 is considered extreme. (Here’s the full chart. It’s fascinating. If you are even a little bit of a data nerd, budget some time for a rabbit-hole.)

Pulling subsidies for the 1,000-plus radio stations and 350-plus television stations the CPB helps fund—scrapping much of their news, educational programming and emergency alerts—because of a four-point leftward skew would be throwing out a lot of babies with a barely detectable amount of bathwater. 

This is not a radical, leftist viewpoint I’m posing.

“We have very good bipartisan support from our Nevada congressional delegation,” said Kurt Mische, president and CEO of PBS Reno, in a phone call on Tuesday. “In fact, Congressman (Mark) Amodei is the Republican co-chair of the Public Broadcasting Caucus … a bipartisan group of congressional representatives who discuss and advocate for funding for public broadcasting out of the federal budget.”

In this video appeal, Amodei defends public media’s many offerings—including “life-saving emergency alerts and warnings” and “celebrating our local history and culture”—and calls the system “a lifeline.”

Here’s what Trump’s executive order says about the perceived irrelevance of public media: “Unlike in 1967, when the CPB was established, today the media landscape is filled with abundant, diverse, and innovative news options.”

Here’s what Mishe says about the relevance of PBS in Nevada, a state in which not all households have internet access (a 2022 press release from Sen. Jacky Rosen’s office puts the number of those without at 14%): “Those households probably have a functioning television set, and on that television set, they can get commercial-free, educationally based public television on PBS Reno.”

Mische said that between the PBS stations in Reno and Las Vegas, PBS broadcasts all over Nevada and in portions of northeastern California. The situation with public radio is similar—KUNR, Reno’s NPR station, broadcasts to 14 regions in Nevada and Northern California using translators. I asked KUNR general manager Brian Duggan last week if this means that, in many rural areas, NPR coverage is the only radio news available, and he confirmed that it is.

To provide the programming that they do, NPR and PBS stations don’t rely entirely on federal funding. For PBS Reno, it’s about 17% of the annual budget. For KUNR, it’s about 15%. (These numbers vary from region to region, with large cites that have deeper-pocketed donor bases receiving lower percentages of their budgets from the fed, and some smaller or less-wealthy cities receiving higher percentages.) 

In any case, these stations raise the rest of their own funding. Most of it comes from businesses, philanthropists and other community members. They do a lot of good on modest budgets, and they work pretty hard for the share of their budgets that are not federally subsidized.

According to both Mische and Duggan—and to the CPB—the executive order is not legal, and they do not expect it to stand. As of today, both local stations—while they are calling on people to reach out to congressmembers to state their support of public media—are proceeding with business as usual.

Take care,

—Kris Vagner, managing editor