Roanoke-based Blue Ridge PBS has faced challenges before.
When state budget cuts in 2013 led to the shutdown of broadcast towers in Marion and Norton, the station faced a setback to its mission to provide Central, Southside and Southwest Virginia with educational and cultural programming.
Ten years later, PBS returned to Southwest Virginia with the launch of PBS Appalachia, which has its studio at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Bristol and is breaking new ground as a network station that uses an all-digital format rather than traditional over-the-air television signals.
Now Blue Ridge PBS and other public media around the U.S. face a new challenge: Congress is considering a bill to cut federal funding to PBS, NPR and local public broadcasting stations.
If the bill passes, Blue Ridge PBS might not have the money to pay for national PBS staples such as “Antiques Roadshow” and “Sesame Street,” said Will Anderson, president and CEO of Blue Ridge Public Television, the nonprofit that owns Blue Ridge PBS and PBS Appalachia.
“Those things are critical to what our identity is. … We would have to rebuild. It would have to be something different,” Anderson said.
The Senate has a deadline next month to vote on a House-passed bill to eliminate $1.1 billion that Congress already approved for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, or CPB, for the next two fiscal years.
The nonprofit Washington, D.C.-based CPB distributes federal funding from Congress to NPR and PBS stations. The bill follows an executive order from President Donald Trump that called NPR and PBS’ news coverage inaccurate and biased and said taxpayers should not be subsidizing it.
Officials weigh possible programming cuts
Blue Ridge PBS reaches Central, Southside and Southwest Virginia plus counties in neighboring Tennessee, West Virginia, and North Carolina.
It operates on a “three-legged stool” of federal, state and viewer-supported funding, Anderson said. Annual federal funding varies based on viewership and other factors, but it typically accounts for around 29% of the PBS operation’s budget, which today is more than $4 million.
PBS Appalachia launched in June 2023 to serve 14 counties and three cities in Southwest Virginia. Instead of using a traditional broadcast format with call letters and transmitter towers, it offers its programming on cable and internet streaming services.
Because it doesn’t transmit over the air, it doesn’t receive direct funding from CPB, said PBS Appalachia general manager Julie Newman.
But PBS Appalachia gets its PBS programming through Blue Ridge PBS. If Blue Ridge PBS can no longer pay for that content, then PBS Appalachia loses it, too, Newman said.
Newman emphasized that neither station is in danger of shutting down or laying off staff. The two stations have 26 employees between them.
Even if the CPB money went away, the stations would continue to produce local programming such as the “Hometowns” series that showcases Southwest Virginia communities, she said.
“What we’re doing in Southwest Virginia is innovative and it matters to the people who live here. It’s impactful,” she said.
For public radio, music licensing questions arise
For Roanoke-based NPR station WVTF, the potential loss of federal money comes as donations from individuals are holding steady but corporate support is down.
“It’s going to hit us at a bad time,” said WVTF general manager Roger Duvall.
CPB provides about 6% of the station’s $5.1 million annual budget. The station is owned by the nonprofit Virginia Tech Foundation and run by Virginia Tech.
It features a mix of local and national programming, including locally produced news segments and NPR features including “All Things Considered,” “Fresh Air” and “Morning Edition.”
Losing the approximately $300,000 in federal funding could mean the station would have to pare down the programming it purchases from outside sources. Duvall declined to specify which features might be at stake.
But there’s more at play than just the grant funding from CPB.
The corporation handles negotiations for music rights on behalf of public radio stations. When a listener turns the radio dial to WVTF and hears Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the CPB helped make that possible.
“That allows stations like ours to play music. We don’t know what’s going to happen” if the CPB can no longer handle music licensing due to a lack of funding, Duvall said.
The CPB also provides resources for public radio stations to have satellite connections and emergency alert systems.
“It’s not just the dollars and cents to the local stations,” Duvall said.
Stations would ‘have to rethink an awful lot of things’
The CPB’s role in negotiating music licensing rights also is of particular concern to Mark Keefe, general manager of the Charlottesville-based radio station WNRN.
WNRN is an independent, listener-supported music station whose programs include “Les Temps Perdu,” featuring grunge, punk and rock from the 1970s into the 1990s, and “Bluegrass Sunday Morning.”
The station covers a large swath of Virginia “from the Blue Ridge to the Bay,” as Keefe put it, including Roanoke and Lynchburg.
If the CPB lost its funding and could no longer handle music licensing, WNRN would face a difficult and expensive choice, he said.
“We would have to negotiate our own rights or band together with other public radio stations and attempt to do it ourselves, which would be a pretty mammoth undertaking, and also tens of thousands of dollars in expense to us as well,” Keefe said.
Meanwhile, grant funding from the CPB accounts for about 7% of WNRN’s approximately $3.1 million in annual revenue.
If that dried up, Keefe said, “it would definitely cause us to have to rethink an awful lot of things.”
“No one will lose their jobs, but some programs will definitely go away and some things will be adjusted,” he said.
The money helps support WNRN’s ability to spotlight local nonprofits through its “Hear Together” program. Keefe said it has featured more than 1,000 organizations over the past decade.
“We care about other people in our listening area doing good things and making sure that people are aware. … We will do everything we can to maintain our service, but this just makes it more and more difficult,” he said.
Senate vote is next in timeline of events
Congress created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 1967 to fund public programming and stations. Today, it distributes nearly three-quarters of its money to more than 1,500 public radio and television stations.
In the 1970s, Congress switched CPB to a “forward funding” model, in which the corporation’s money is appropriated two years in advance, to help insulate it from political influence, according to CPB.
The CPB has faced political resistance before, such as in 1994 when then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Republican, wanted to eliminate its funding.
Today, Trump is a vocal critic of NPR and PBS’ news coverage. He has called the networks “radical left ‘monsters’ that so badly hurt our country.”
On May 1, he issued an executive order instructing the CPB to stop funding NPR and PBS, either directly or indirectly by funding local stations.
“Unlike in 1967, when the CPB was established, today the media landscape is filled with abundant, diverse, and innovative news options,” the order stated. “Government funding of news media in this environment is not only outdated and unnecessary but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence.”
Furthermore, the order stated, “Americans have the right to expect that if their tax dollars fund public broadcasting at all, they fund only fair, accurate, unbiased, and nonpartisan news coverage.”
NPR and PBS, the order stated, do not present “a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens.”
NPR and PBS sued the Trump administration, arguing that the president’s order violates the First Amendment and federal broadcasting laws and that he does not have the authority to block their funding over news coverage.
Separately, the CPB has been battling the administration in court over efforts to remove three board members.
On June 12, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 214-212 to rescind the $1.1 billion in CPB funding that Congress had already approved for fiscal years 2026 and 2027.
That $1.1 billion was part of $9.4 billion overall that the House voted to claw back not just from CPB but also from the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development and various other agencies.
All who voted in favor of the bill were Republicans. All against it were Democrats, except for four Republicans.
Among those who supported the bill was U.S. Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Salem.
In a statement to Cardinal News, Griffith did not specifically address the bill’s impacts on local PBS and NPR stations but said, “In light of the nation’s significant fiscal deficit, I thought it was appropriate to support the bill.”
Now, the bill is in the hands of the Republican-majority U.S. Senate. Senators have through July 18 to vote on it or the funding continues.
U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said in a social media post that NPR and PBS funding must be protected.
“It’s telling that an administration that promised transparency is aggressively targeting news outlets that have held power to account,” Warner said.
Some Republican senators have expressed concern about the bill, too.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, who sits on the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee, said she supports public broadcasting and called it an “invaluable resource that saves lives in Alaska.”
Anderson, of Blue Ridge PBS, said that while a PBS show like “NewsHour” deals with politics, the content of the national PBS programming is out of his hands. Regardless, he said, his local staff’s focus is on what matters to Southwest Virginians.
“I always say, if you can find anything that we do at Blue Ridge PBS that has a political slant, one way or the other, I want to hear about it,” Anderson said.
WNRN’s Keefe said that although his station is an NPR affiliate, the only NPR content it runs is music programming such as “World Cafe,” which spotlights emerging musicians.
“We don’t do any news, we don’t do any politics, and so we’re just caught in this,” he said.
He’s also concerned about the impact that the proposed cuts could have on smaller stations, many of which are more dependent on federal funding than his station is.
“This will be debilitating to them,” Keefe said. “This will cause some of them overnight to turn off. They will not have enough money to operate. We’re fortunate that we’re not one of them, but this will be a kick in the pants, no doubt.”
