How Much Does Public Media Actually Rely on Federal Funding?
15.6% on average. But the answer is more complicated than you think.
Today, President Trump is expected to ask Congress to rescind the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s federal funding, most of which is earmarked for supporting local public media stations for the next two fiscal years. It’s not unprecedented (as I noted in an article I penned last week for the public media trade journal Current, the House of Representatives successfully passed a bill blocking funding for NPR in 2011 before it was rejected by the Senate), but there’s something undeniably different about this latest effort.
The White House has been no stranger to voicing its displeasure about public media, after all: FCC Chair Brendan Carr explicitly stated he didn’t believe NPR and PBS should continue to receive federal funding when opening an investigation in their underwriting practices in January, and President Trump has posted about the topic multiple times on Truth Social. On top of that, there’s been a notable lack of any meaningful Republican opposition to the rescission order, even among lawmakers that have supported public media in the past. The threat is coming from several directions all at once, and public media’s leaders are treating it as deadly serious.
It shouldn’t be a surprise, therefore, that the messaging regarding federal funding from NPR and PBS has been incredibly tight. These are the typical numbers you’ll see:
NPR receives about 1% of its funding directly from the federal government, and a bit more indirectly; its 246 member institutions, operating more than 1,300 stations, receive on average 8% to 10% of their funds from CPB. In turn, they pay NPR to air its national shows. By contrast, PBS and its stations receive about 15% of their revenues from CPB.
“Trump plans order to cut funding for NPR and PBS”, NPR.org
Note the way the numbers are described: “About” 1% and 15%, giving a range estimate between 8-10%. The reader is asked to accept these as imprecise and move on. But what could any reasonable person do with these statistics? Are they good? Are they bad? How can we make a judgement on whether to take action or not?
On average, public media stations rely on federal funding for 15.6% of their revenue.
That is, according to my dataset.
I’ve spent the past few months collecting every publicly-available financial record for public media stations (from the most recent fiscal year available, 2023) and compiling them into a dataset. These records, used by CPB to determine how much federal funding to allocate for a specific station, are incredibly detailed: They list everything from number of station donors, to investment dividends, to real estate holdings. What we’re mostly focused on is how much of each station’s total revenue was comprised of federal funding (and not just from CPB).
15.6% doesn’t exactly split the difference, but it certainly lands somewhere between how public media talks about its dependence on federal funding and some of the rhetoric used by the industry’s critics. In terms of pure financial stability, losing nearly 16% of your year-over-year revenue isn’t ideal, but probably not enough to sink your station. “Not great, not terrible.”
I often think about this famous scene from the 2019 miniseries Chernobyl when discussing the overall average for two reasons: First, like the doomed nuclear plant’s chief engineer, I know that this number is misleading; and second, I know that it doesn’t accurately reflect the real danger of the situation.
Dividing the stations up by network shows something fascinating. NPR affiliates fell well below the overall average reliance, while PBS stations’ reliance was slightly over 18%. One reason for this discrepancy, mostly given by public television outlets, is that television has higher production and transmission costs, and therefore more federal funding needs. If this explanation is true - and I have no reason to think otherwise - this presents a massive hurdle for public televisions stations that radio stations don’t necessarily have: You can reduce your headcount and other discretionary spending while preserving your core offering, but you can’t reduce the base operating costs. Fundraising, too, is also less efficient for these stations because they need more overall donors. A $5-a-month donor means more to an NPR station with an annual revenue of $3 million than a PBS station with a revenue of $10 million.
The starkest difference in federal funding dependence occurs when looking at the median across all stations. The average, if you don’t remember 4th grade math, is the sum of all the values divided by how many values there are. The median, on the other hand, is the value that occurs in the exact middle of the dataset.
PBS stations had the smallest difference between the median and average of its stations’ dependence on federal funding, about 2%. This means that the network’s affiliates are more evenly distributed above or below the average of 18.1%. Note that none of these stations have a reliance above 50% - that’s good.
NPR, on the other hand, had a much larger difference between the median and average of its stations’ federal funding dependence. As I reported for Current, the network commissioned a study in 2011 that, among other things, strongly urged stations to reduce their reliance on federal funding. Based on the nearly 5% difference between the average and median, you could say that NPR, in part, was successful. As you can see in the graph above, a majority of their stations fall below the overall average.
I consider this another misleading “not great, not terrible” metric. Yes, more NPR stations have a low reliance, but the 5% difference between average and median means that there are NPR stations that have such a high reliance on federal funding that they skew the average. Six of these stations rely on federal funding for more than 70% of their total revenue. If Congress were to rescind CPB’s federal appropriation, these outliers would have little hope of surviving.
Sitting, waiting, wishing
As of the writing of this post (2PM ET on Monday), the White House has not sent its rescission order (though I’m sure it’ll happen at the most inconvenient time possible, like directly after hitting “Publish”).
In the meantime, you can expect a flurry of activity from public media leaders, lawmakers, and pundits alike. Keep the numbers from this post in mind for when they begin to discuss the system’s dependence on federal funding.
They’re not great, but not terrible either.
Click here for a handy dashboard of each of today’s graphs for you to explore on your own.