‘We are going to survive this’: After cuts to public broadcasting, radio station KAZU fights to keep local news alive

In boxing, it’s known as a “one-two combo,” two quick but damaging punches to the gut. And millions of Americans are now feeling the aftereffects.

Last week, Congress passed a bill to strip away already allocated funding to public broadcasting, more than $1 billion which represents about two years’ worth of funding, crippling government support for the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR). Less than 24 hours later, CBS/Paramount announced that it was canceling “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” for (allegedly) financial reasons.

For local fans of NPR, the news about public broadcasting is a blow, though not necessarily a knockout. KAZU (90.3 FM), which serves Santa Cruz, Monterey and San Benito counties, receives about 10% of its revenue from federal grants, which amounts to about $264,000 that the station was counting on to pay its bills. Other member stations are in similar pickles.

“Everyone had prepared their budgets with those numbers in mind,” said KAZU general manager Dan Larkin, “and now those funds are no longer available.”

Larkin said that 10% still represents a significant part of KAZU’s budget. The loss could mean fewer regular NPR programs or even worse: “It could mean an inability to expand our local news coverage. It could impede our ability to alert people in cases of emergency, such as the Moss Landing [battery fire].”

Financial records for the station show that the amount it received last year was a reduction of 30% from the year before. 

San Francisco’s KQED, representing public TV and radio, is laying off 15% of its workforce. The cutting of funding means a loss of more than $8 million in each of the next two years. In a public statement, KQED president and CEO Michael J. Isip called the congressional decision “a grave setback, but this is not the end for public media or KQED.

KAZU’s Larkin struck a similarly defiant tone: “We aren’t going anywhere,” he said. “We’re going to survive this.”

On its face, the public broadcasting cuts and the cancellation of Colbert look unrelated — one is the province of the public sector; the other is a private company doing what’s in its best interests. But the MAGA movement has turned “the marketplace of ideas” into a WWE cage match, and in that fake-theatrical, zero-sum arena, this double blow means more MAGA triumphalism and more liberal pain.

For millions in the anti-Trump left and middle, this double shot of bad news feels like a threat against two primary — in many cases, beloved — media sources, the first sober and meticulous in its journalistic standards, the other lacerating and merciless in its satire. One buttoned-up public service, the other humor and entertainment.

But neither of these two seismic media stories is likely to go away soon. Going after public broadcasting has been a strategy for conservative Republicans for decades, but it’s mostly been a campaign fundraising gimmick. Until now. The CBS move feels even more sinister, given that network’s settling of a lawsuit with President Donald Trump over an interview of Kamala Harris on “60 Minutes,” a craven capitulation to Trump’s abuse of the legal system for his own ends. (At the time, Paramount was seeking the administration’s approval of an $8 billion merger — none dare call it a coincidence.)

In fact, Colbert’s cancellation offers up a compelling justification for the support of public broadcasting, if anyone would have the courage and the forum to make the argument. For millions of Americans, public broadcasting has been a vital part of daily life for generations. And for millions more living in remote or thinly populated areas, it’s a crucial connection to the rest of the world. Most of us have grown up taking it for granted, but it was a product of a time, the 1960s, when it was seen as reasonable government policy to preserve a part of the public sphere — in this case, the finite broadcast spectrum — and to carve out a realm beyond the reach of all-consuming commercialism. 

Whatever you might think of them in theory or practice, journalistic standards exist as a firewall against powerful interests — be they autocratic politicians or corporate boardrooms — shaping the truth for their own purposes. The rationale for the creation of public broadcasting was that the news needed at least some protection against the whims of commercial forces. 

What does that have to do with Colbert? It’s tempting to write off Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel and Jon Stewart as rodeo clowns or frivolous commentators, but we live in a world where the president is almost entirely a product of television who was launched on his path to power through a fake spectacle we all absurdly refer to as “reality TV.” In that regard, our late-night hosts are the equivalent of Mark Twain, our most effective Davids against the Goliath. 

For their part, conservatives have roundly rejected the idea that the media business needs some kind of public-funding umbrella to protect it from market forces. Besides, they say, public broadcasting was created in a world with three commercial broadcast networks and pretty much nothing else. In today’s let-a-million-flowers-bloom world of online media, public broadcasting is a tired anachronism. Yet, whether it’s three networks or a million flowers, all these media voices are still after the same things — ad revenue, clicks, followers, the financial sources for which they could all conceivably pull their punches. For today’s Republican Party (and plenty in the Democratic Party as well), capitalism is the only language that needs be spoken in the public realm. 

Does this latest congressional kneecapping represent an existential threat to public broadcasting? For some stations that rely disproportionately on federal grants, particularly in rural areas, it could mean closing down. It could mean that NPR becomes just another luxury-goods item for communities that can afford it. 

So, you may ask, am I biased when it comes to public broadcasting? 

Yes.

Half a lifetime ago, I was an aimless young post-collegiate nobody living an embarrassingly marginal life in Humboldt County. One day, on a borrowed TV, while living in a drafty house with five other nobodies, I watched a PBS series called “A World of Ideas,” produced by Bill Moyers. It was nothing more than an interview show, and Moyers was talking to someone I’d never even heard of.

Still, I was transfixed. It became appointment TV for me, and eventually, I scraped together a few dollars to buy the companion book of the series. 

This was not journalism devoted to delivering the news or exposing the wrongdoing of powerful people, but something more noble. The interviewees were writers, scholars, thinkers, teachers, spiritual leaders, scientists, artists. The subjects of the conversations were religion, art, poetry, the cosmos, history, mysticism, the broadest and widest reaches of the human mind. The goal, as Moyers saw it, was nothing less than to illuminate the essence of being human and the meaning of life.

Stirred by Moyers, I quickly went to my local public radio station and volunteered to produce taped interview segments, which I did for close to three years. Armed only with curiosity — which I became convinced was Moyers’ superpower — I sought out those thinking big thoughts in my own community. I was teased a lot for my over-the-top Moyers-aphilia. At one point, some of the volunteers mockingly painted a vinyl album gold and presented it to me as the “Bill Moyers Award.” 

Snap your fingers and zoom forward, and I’ve somehow maintained a career as a journalist for more than 35 years, without ever resorting to delivering pizzas. 

Obviously, I owe a lot to Bill Moyers, who died in June at the age of 91. But I owe just as much to the public-television apparatus that allowed him to do what he did best, as well as the local TV station in Eureka that broadcast the show so I could discover it.  

I was thinking this week of Moyers, and perhaps the blessings of his not witnessing the gutting of public broadcasting. Before his outsized role as the face of public television, Moyers worked in the LBJ White House, and later became a newsman at none other than CBS.

In those days, CBS was known for its unimpeachable journalistic independence, a legacy of Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite and Mike Wallace, among others. 

Despite his pain at watching Congress betray public broadcasting, Moyers would have not been indifferent to the Colbert story. You might even call it a one-two combo. 

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