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By Megan Kamerick, KUNM
On March 26, the CEOs of NPR and PBS will testify at a House subcommittee in a hearing dubbed “Anti-American Airwaves: Holding the heads of NPR and PBS Accountable.” The push to end funding for public media has come up numerous times since the founding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 1967.
But this year feels different, according to Franz Joachim, general manager of New Mexico PBS. He spoke to KUNM about his recent trip to Washington, D.C. as part of America’s Public Television Stations. It’s an organization that promotes the interests of noncommercial stations at the national level.
FRANZ_JOACHIM: Now we’ve got at least five efforts.
There’s the general defund in the House effort, just take us out of the budget.
There’s the DOGE effort, which is somehow get rid of us because we’re not efficient.
There is the FCC, where the chairman has come out specifically and said he believes that there are no federal dollars should go to public media, and that he’s going to investigate our underwriting practices to help make the case for Congress to not fund us.
And then there’s the FCC that they’re considering changing our license structure to take away the licenses that public media operates under, which is called a non-commercial educational license, to just make them all commercial licenses.
We operate under a specific license, which puts specific responsibilities and restrictions on us, public radio and public television both. That also means that that license cannot be transferred to anybody else unless they’re doing the same thing. In other words, they’re operating as either a public media outlet or a religious broadcaster. We operate under that same license structure. That means the value of that spectrum, the value of that channel, is relatively low. Not that the University of New Mexico would do this — we have great relationship there. But just for example, Baylor went through this. They actually did this. Baylor sees an opportunity to make some money off the spectrum. They’ve got a budget crunch, and this is a one-time fix. So they sell off the station, sell the spectrum. Baylor reaps rewards. They pay off whatever debt they have. But the station no longer exists, and now the Waco area is not served by a public television outlet. So that’s because there was an opportunity where the spectrum had value that it doesn’t normally have. Well, if you make this a commercial license, the value of our spectrum goes really high, 10 times what it is now.
So you can see the pressure that’s going to put on, specifically, states, universities, colleges, school districts that own these licenses where they’re severely — particularly now — where they’re getting cut anyway, and now there’s this windfall of $50 million that they could reap by selling off this channel and not doing public media anymore, that’s a that’s a pretty scary threat.
I feel lucky here in New Mexico that I don’t feel like we face that threat anywhere near as much as we do elsewhere, but we got to be realistic here. I mean, anybody who’s kind of offered that kind of money, it’s going to be a tempting offer, and you’re going to see that happen around the country, particularly in red states that do not support public media the way New Mexico does. That’s when the dominoes start falling. You see stations go away. That means less dues going to the national organizations NPR and PBS, so they need to contract, they’re offering less services. Now, the stations that have survived are getting less from them. They’re struggling more. It just kind of feeds on itself. And you can see the whole system starting to fracture under that and that’s just because federal dollars disappeared, or just because the FCC changed our license structure.
KUNM: Oh, my.
JOACHIM: Yeah. Wasn’t it kind of doom and gloom, isn’t it?
KUNM: It is.
JOACHIM: Well, I will say that I think the chance that the FCC re-licenses us is pretty darn small. Okay, it’s a threat we can’t ignore, nor should we. The other threat when they’re looking at our underwriting language and using that as some kind of threat they’re going to investigate is, well, all I can say is, the FCC has been watching public media stations and their underwriting for Oh, longer than I’ve been alive, maybe as long as I’ve been alive. I’m kind of old. Rarely do they find any issue. We’re following their rules. We’re very rigorous about it. It isn’t going to be a hard investigation for them to do, because they have all the documentation.
KUNM: What do you say to critics like the head of the FCC who say government just shouldn’t be funding public media?
JOACHIM: What should government fund? I mean, that’s the existential question for all of these things. What should government fund? Viewers and listeners, they’re voting with their pocketbooks. They’re voting with their feet. If they don’t like what we’re doing, why are they donating to us? The federal dollars that come to us are a function of how many dollars we already raise ourselves. Because we’re telling the federal government, here’s how much our community values us, so much so that they take their hard-earned dollars and give it to us. And we’re asking that everybody give a little bit more.
The final reason, and I think this is a hard one for them to argue, is public safety public information, public safety information that is transmitted over both radio and television, that reaches communities that are not reached any other way. So, any emergency alerts for wildfires or flash floods are getting to them through that. Another method for sending emergency alerts that you’re getting on your cell phone also comes from PBS broadcast signals at the last mile. It goes to these local cell phone providers and that’s how it gets to your cell phone, and we’re doing that for dollars a year. I challenge the DOGE committee to find a more efficient way of getting emergency alert information to the citizens of this country.