{"id":232552,"date":"2025-10-17T23:21:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-17T23:21:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/232552\/"},"modified":"2025-10-17T23:21:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-17T23:21:07","slug":"pbs-head-lays-out-how-bleak-this-is-all-about-to-get","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/232552\/","title":{"rendered":"PBS head lays out how bleak this is all about to get"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Public Broadcasting Service is not in good shape at the moment, to put it mildly: We\u2019re swiftly coming up on November, when the broadcaster would normally get its life-sustaining infusion of funds from the government-backed Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Except, of course, the CPB has been basically demolished over the last few months<\/a>; as we\u2019ve previously reported, Congress (at the guidance of the White House) voted to remove more than a billion dollars in public funds<\/a> from the organization, which funds both local PBS and NPR stations and the overall organization. We\u2019ve already reported on individual PBS broadcasters, like New Jersey\u2019s, preparing to shutter<\/a>; now, PBS head Paula Krieger has given a new interview to Variety<\/a> where she reveals just how bleak this is going to get.<\/p>\n

Noting that she\u2019s been worried the most about smaller stations\u2014often serving markets where they\u2019re one of the only primary news outlets\u2014Krieger has said her focus of late has been on putting together enough money to give those channels a \u201cglide path,\u201d hopefully one that results in some kind of survival, and not, well, the other standard outcome of a controlled plummet toward the ground.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s Krieger:<\/p>\n

Some of the smaller stations are looking at coming together in some sort of shared agreement, which would change the way they operate, but would keep local media in communities around the country. I think that\u2019s a really good model. There are some stations that are looking at merging with an adjacent station and serving a larger market. And then I think there will be some that will find this a bridge too far and will decide not to continue.<\/p>\n

New Jersey PBS will shut down next year due to budget cuts<\/a>PBS cuts 15 percent of its workforce amid federal budget cuts<\/a><\/p>\n

One way or another, though, change is coming to public broadcasting, because it\u2019s simply inevitable with that kind of loss of funds. (Krieger says she holds out hope that Congress might someday walk back these cuts, but is honest about the fact that no \u201cwhite knight\u201d is going to come in and save PBS.) She also expressed some mild frustration at the suggestion that PBS has tried to curtail or edit the creators working under it in order to curry favor with legislators or the executive. (Who went ballistic, in the lead-up to the cuts, to things like local channels airing segments about drag story hours at libraries.) \u201cThey\u2019ve already taken away our funding. I think if there was a risk of that, you would have seen it before, which we obviously did not do\u2026 I just feel like we have been buffeted through this entire year, and we have not held back from the programs that we put forward.\u201d<\/p>\n

Programming-wise, Krieger noted that the reduced funding will, obviously, impact which national PBS programs are tapped to continue, with top priority going to NewsHour. \u201cObviously, the first priority is PBS NewsHour, because that\u2019s an ongoing news operation where you\u2019re burning through money all the time,\u201d according to Krieger. \u201cAnd we\u2019re looking at some of the big series where CPB was helpful, like Nova, Nature\u00a0and Great Performances.\u201d But programs like\u00a0American Experience are probably screwed, at least in the short-term; the series\u2014which recently caught flack after one of its directors accused PBS of cutting a politically charged Ronald Reagan quote from an episode\u2014is set to go on hiatus once it finishes airing its current\u00a0Kissinger\u00a0series.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Public Broadcasting Service is not in good shape at the moment, to put it mildly: We\u2019re swiftly…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":232553,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[88,92],"class_list":{"0":"post-232552","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=232552"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232552\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/232553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=232552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=232552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=232552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}