Live Wire’s Luke Burbank and Elena Passarello interview actor and filmmaker Bruce Campbell during the variety show’s 20th year, at Revolution Hall in Portland, Oregon, on Dec. 24, 2024.
Jennie Baker / Courtesy of Live Wire
What do an internationally-acclaimed novelist, a comedian who starred in her own Netflix show and an amateur rock band composed entirely of Minnesota state court judges all have in common?
They’ve all been guests of “Live Wire,” a Portland-based public radio variety show with a mission to cultivate joy, discovery and connection.
Now, “Live Wire” is facing the consequences of a partisan divide over federal funding for the arts and public media organizations. After more than two decades on the air, the nationally-syndicated show says it needs to raise $150,000 in the next three months to stay afloat.
Hosted by Luke Burbank, “Live Wire” is recorded in front of a live audience and then produced into one-hour episodes airing on 180 public radio stations across the country, including OPB.
The show’s urgent financial plight is the result of a “perfect storm,” according to an emergency fundraising campaign it launched this month, because “public radio is in crisis. Government arts funding? Slashed. Station support? Drying up. Ticket sales and sponsorships? Down across our entire industry.”
The show didn’t directly receive any of the federal grants Congress zeroed out this year, but its distributor, Public Radio Exchange, lost funding through the now-defunct Corporation for Public Broadcasting, as did the national web of independently-operated public radio stations paying to carry “Live Wire.”
“We have a lot of smaller stations that can’t pay for the show anymore,” said “Live Wire” Executive Director Heather de Michele.
Instead of pulling the show off stations that can’t afford to pay, “there are a lot of people receiving ‘Live Wire’ for free right now,” she said.
Smaller public radio and tribal stations have said federal funding cuts pose an existential threat to their newsgathering and emergency alert systems, often in regions without alternative media outlets. “And we’re saying, keep your reporter. We want to stay on the air, and hopefully, we’ll see our way through this,” de Michele said.
Over the summer, Congress voted to rescind $1.1 billion in federal funding for CPB. Republican lawmakers had accused public media news organizations that received grants from CPB, such as NPR and PBS, of biased news reporting.
The vote to defund CPB fell along party lines in the Republican-controlled House, with just two GOP members against it.
In the aftermath, OPB successfully filled a 9% hole in its budget through a fundraising campaign that emphasized the organization’s commitment to news coverage of Oregon and Southwest Washington.
While “Live Wire” got its start broadcasting on OPB, it’s now an independent nonprofit organization with a national audience. OPB pays to broadcast the program, but does not otherwise financially support it, de Michele said.
“We have to raise all of our own money through our own memberships,” she said.
The show’s diverse guest lineup runs the cultural gamut, from classical music to fart jokes. The one thing its small staff doesn’t produce, de Michele said, is political coverage or news — “Absolutely not.”
In a press release, de Michele said the stakes of the fundraising campaign are bigger than the show’s survival.
“We’re fighting to preserve a legacy of joy, connection, and discovery at a moment when independent cultural programming is most under threat,” she said.
Notable “Live Wire” guests over the years include writer Salman Rushdie, comedian Maria Bamford, and, recently, The Reasonable Doubts, a cover band featuring Minnesota state judges.
The show reaches an estimated 300,000 listeners each weekend and is the only nationally-distributed public radio program from the Pacific Northwest.