Public media leaders sound alarm over federal funding cuts
Public media has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember.
When I was a teenage student at Central New Mexico Community College (mumbles indistinctly) years ago, I would listen to KANW and KUNM on the way to class nearly every day.
I'd listen to the local news from local anchors and the national news from NPR's Morning Edition on the way to morning classes and All Things Considered on the way to afternoon classes.
Even younger, on the weekends, my brother and I would listen to Car Talk and Whad'ya Know on the stereo in our room. We’d listen to a few minutes of A Prairie Home Companion each week before realizing that it was more wry than laugh-out-loud funny.
Even earlier, I remember watching Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers Neighborhood on KNME with my parents. I still get the "12" count from The Pinball Number Count on Sesame Street stuck in my head at least once a month. Did you know that The Pointer Sisters did the vocals for it?
After becoming a journalist, I would occasionally be a panelist on New Mexico In Focus on New Mexico PBS or the KUNM Call-In Show. Any time I would appear, I’d inevitably get text messages from friends and family telling me that they saw me on the air.
It’s definitely something that, even in the internet age, people in New Mexico still pay attention to.
With all of that backdrop, I wanted to be sure to go to a roundtable discussion hosted by U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich at KANW-FM in Albuqeurque, where he and his fellow Democratic U.S. Sen. Ben Ray Luján heard from leaders of local public media.
The two Senators also had their own public media memories.
When growing up, Heinrich said “when I wasn’t directly at school or if I was in the car, my dad was listening to NPR in the evenings. The programming that really fed my interest as an individual were very much part of public programming. There were shows like Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, Nova, Nature. As somebody who is intellectually curious, I am very much the persian I am today because of public broadcasting.”
The cuts
Last month, at the behest of President Donald Trump, Republican majorities in Congress voted to claw back $9 billion in previously allocated funding, which included $1.1 billion for CPB. The organization announced it would wind down operations at the end of its fiscal year, which is Sept. 30.
NPR CEO Katherine Maher said at the time, “Parents and children, senior citizens and students, tribal and rural communities — all will bear the harm of this vote.”
Porfirio Delgado, the General Manager of KENW-FM and TV based out of Portales, New Mexico, said that it would not be an existential threat to the outlet, but it would fundamentally change the services they were able to provide.
