By Alice Fordham, KUNM
As the Trump administration moves to slash the federal government, some of its actions could threaten New Mexicans’ access to public television and radio.
Last week, the new head of the Federal Communications Commission Brendan Carr ordered an investigation into NPR and PBS stations’ use of underwriting and added in the letter announcing the investigation that he saw no reason why taxpayer dollars should go to NPR and PBS.
The president has also established a new entity called the Department of Government Efficiency, headed by Elon Musk, with the aim of cutting federal employees and slashing costs.
Musk is taking aim at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), a nonprofit which distributes federal money to public media. Its 2025 operating budget is $545 million, of which about 90% is distributed to radio and television stations, and as grants supporting programming.
Many people on the right view this money as wastefully supporting left-leaning media. In his recent campaign, President Trump called NPR a total scam and a liberal disinformation machine which should get not one dollar. Mike Gonzalez, of the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, is on the same page.
“The problem with the programming by NPR and PBS is it’s just too biased,” he said.
The Corporation was created in 1967, responding to a call for free television in the public interest. This was after commercial TV was called a “vast wasteland” by FCC chair Newton Minnow, who didn’t like Westerns or game shows. By the time the law was passed, radio was included too. But Gonzalez thinks the programming is not in his interest.
“Conservatives are made to pay for a service that not only does not reflect their views at all, at all, but it’s disrespectful to their views on a constant basis,” he said.
He cited an example of a recent NPR interview in which he felt the host didn’t push back enough against the views of interviewee Bianca Mabute-Louie, whose book Unassimilable argues against assimilation for Asians in the U.S. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 laid out plans for governance by President Trump; Gonzales authored a section calling to strip the CPB of federal funds.
The Pew Research Center finds NPR is the most trusted news source by liberals and the network was criticized last year by editor Uri Berliner (who has since left). Berliner said that as leadership prioritized diversity and inclusion of staff, he saw “an absence of viewpoint diversity”.
NPR’s chief news executive, Edith Chapin, rejected the allegations and said inclusion was critical to telling nuanced stories.
A recent poll by PBS found broad support for the channel including among Trump voters.
However, although the administration and its allies have been scathing about NPR and PBS, most federal funding does not go to those national networks. By law, at least 70% of the CPB’s funding goes directly to local radio and TV stations, some of them serving communities with few alternative media.
Listening local
In New Mexico, that means about $5.4 million shared among 18 organizations, for instance KCIE, licensed to the Jicarilla Apache tribe in Dulce. General Manager Mariah Elote started helping out there when she was 14.
“It was like an outlet to go to learn how to be more confident by talking on the radio,” she said. “And then also getting to listen to all your favorite music.”
She feels the station is a part of life in the community of about 4,000 people.
“A lot of [tribal] departments are playing the radio station when we go into them,” she said. “We’re also really popular around basketball season, because we broadcast the high school games.”
Like all CPB grantees, KCIE must use some of its funding to buy national or regional programming. They choose shows including Native America Calling, made by a Native-operated media organization. KCIE also works on a community level, collaborating with local health care providers to do things like raising awareness of how to tackle mental health problems.
“We try to incorporate our native language so we are able to teach the community,” said Elote.
The CPB determines each station’s grant each year based on factors including the size of the station and the amount of money it raises. In FY2022, federal grants made up 6.8% of the average public radio station’s annual revenue. But among smaller, rural stations, especially tribal stations, federal funding often makes up the majority of their revenue. Elote estimates KCIE’s federal grant is 85% of their budget.
The end of CPB, “would mean a lot of cutting for us,” she said.
It was a now-defunct federal funding program that got the Dulce station on the air back in 1990. Their infrastructure was built with the help of a man known as the architect for public radio in the Mountain West, the late Wayne Bundy of the Rocky Mountain Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
His daughter Heidi Brown remembered that project.
“Dulce is one of the stations that my father helped put on the air, and after they got on there, they sent him a belt, a belt buckle that was all hand beaded, and it is just beautiful,” she said. “Those are the things that people don’t know about, and that’s how much that station means to that community.”
Brown is now the director of development and marketing at public radio station KANW in Albuquerque, which promotes New Mexico music with events including shows in Santa Rosa.
“It’s mostly in the summer where they bring in New Mexico music artists to entertain the community, and they’re all free events,” she said. She sees the shows as a microcosm of the station’s not-for-profit mission, and public media generally.
“Santa Rosa also has a really high poverty rate and a high unemployment rate. So should we not be there?” Brown said. “Well, no, of course, we should be there because that’s the population that we should be serving. But we don’t get a ton of donations from Santa Rosa.”
Her station does receive more in donations than it does in federal funding, but still, she said, losing more than $200,000 a year in federal grants would be a big hit.
And if one outlet suffers, it has wider impacts, said New Mexico PBS General Manager Franz Joachim.
Knitted together
“I do not think that New Mexico PBS would go off the air because of an elimination of federal funding,” Joachim said. “But that’s really not the point. The point is that this is a network of stations around the country that we have knitted together.”
He thinks dozens of smaller rural stations could go off the air, and they would stop paying dues to PBS, which could then struggle to make shows.
“PBS begins to suffer. Rural areas start going without services at all, communities do not have any over-the-air television because we were the only service available to them,” he said.
Part of this knitted-together public network is, of course, KUNM, licensed by the University of New Mexico, where I work as part of the biggest public radio newsroom in the state.
The station also airs music and public affairs shows, and its annual CPB grant represents about 12% of total revenue. The rest comes from grants, individual listeners and underwriting.
General Manager Richard Towne said the loss of the federal grant would mean some painful decisions
“It certainly is difficult to forecast,” he said. “But this year’s grant is $280,000. We won’t be able to afford NPR programming, in my opinion, or we might have to downsize or scale back.”
If KUNM can’t afford to air shows like All Things Considered or Democracy Now, the producers of those shows miss out on stations like KUNM’s revenue.
Plus, said Towne, a lot of listener donations come in during fundraising in prime time news shows. So, there could be a negative feedback loop whereby the end of CBP funding would mean both the end of news programming and a drop in donations.
He added that he, too, is concerned about small and rural stations, and communities that need access to free, high-quality information.
“We have access here to a population that is generous and has kept us going,” he said. “But I think about KGLP in Gallup, where they don’t have a lot of opportunity to raise the kind of money from individual donors that we do.”
Will CBP really be cut?
Federal funding to public media has been under threat before. In 2017, in his first term, Trump proposed cutting the corporation’s funding entirely. The CPB’s CEO Patricia de Stacy Harrison, a Republican, spoke about local stations in a House Appropriations Committee hearing in 2017.
“Sometimes we miss the power of what stations do on a local level. And I have seen this, people have a great deal of pride. They may be poor, but they are proud of their culture. They’re proud of where they are and when they can connect to local history, local music,” she said.
“Telling these stories in a profound way that starts locally, it’s what connects us to one another as Americans.”
That time, and all previous times, enough people from both sides of the aisle eventually voted for the funding. Representative Tom Cole (R-Oklahoma) was the chair of the appropriations subcommittee to which Harrison spoke. He praised public media in his opening remarks.
“In addition to providing education, public broadcasters are often the only source of content in remote areas of the nation,” he said. Many smaller stations are in red states, or red districts, and many public stations are part of emergency alert systems.
The CPB is funded two years in advance, meaning funding now under discussion is for FY2027.
However, after Trump’s re-election, the New York Times reported, leaders of NPR’s biggest member stations warned in a report that “it would be unwise to assume that events will play out as they have in the past.” Representative Majorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) has asked the heads of PBS and NPR to testify in March before the House Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency.
The Times also reported that in some states, public media leaders are petitioning for more state support for media. In New Mexico, public television already receives some state support through the Higher Education Department, though radio does not. So far there have been no formal efforts to lobby for more.