Defunding Public Media Through Project 2025: Implications for Rural/College Radio Funding and Media Diversity
by Faith Ellis
In the United States, public media stations similar to PBS and NPR, have long served as critical platforms for local journalism, non-commercial programming, and cultural education. However, the political initiative Project 2025, endorsed by President Donald Trump, aims to implement policy that will significantly reduce federal support for public broadcasting. Cuts in federal funding will have severe economic consequences, leading to significant job losses in journalism, shifting media revenue models toward privatization, and eliminating grants that sustain many small and rural radio stations.
Proposed by the Heritage Foundation, a large portion of Project 2025 aims to reshape the federal government by reducing funds spent on publicly funded programs, including public media. The project’s aggressive solution to combat national debt is to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which provides federal funding to NPR and PBS. Additionally, Project 2025 calls for NPR to revoke its status as a noncommercial station, therefore forcing NPR to relocate its position on the FM dial. Religious stations are intended to fill NPR’s old position on the noncommercial broadcasting dial. The CPB currently receives an annual sum of about 525 million dollars from the federal government and the cut to funding is expected to shake the public media market. The downstream effects of the cut will result in a large decrease in journalism, broadcasting, and media production job opportunities.
The role of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) is crucial in sustaining small, rural, and college-affiliated public stations by providing funding for operations, equipment, and programming. Many rural NPR and PBS affiliates lack the commercial ad revenue that major urban stations rely on, making federal support their primary financial lifeline. The CPB website notes that 245 of the total 544 radio grantees are considered rural and that rural stations employ more than 5,850 people. Without funding, underserved areas will be forced to shut down, leaving millions without access to free educational and journalistic programming. College stations will also struggle to remain viable in the broadcasting market as competition will narrow and prices to retain airwaves will increase. Similarly to today, 2005 senator Ed Markey commented on Bush’s attempt to defund public broadcasting by noting “The question is not: ‘Can we afford it?’ but rather: ‘Can we afford to lose it?” (Markey). The cut funding will certainly limit and significantly alter the free media market.
The future of public media is bleak as hope for federal funding diminishes. Public media firms will be forced to adopt privatization strategies to survive. This shift from public to private financing will likely result in a reliance on increased advertising, paywalled content, and corporate sponsorships. Privatization could lead to greater editorial influence from corporate donors, raising concerns about journalistic freedoms and shifts to market preferences. After Brendan Carr opened an investigation into PBS and NPR on January 29th, 2025, it has become a reality that “supporters of public media must confront inconvenient truths about the system’s structure and adopt a new approach to protect an essential public trust” (Swerdlow).
Defunding PBS and NPR through Project 2025 threatens to dismantle vital U.S. public media landscape aspects. Thousands of jobs will be lost, small/rural stations will lose the funding necessary to operate, and public media will be forced to restructure to a private media framework. In the United States, it is the responsibility of policymakers to uphold the democratic principles of a free and varied press. With this cut in funding, it is important to consider the potential loss of accessibility and diversity in broadcast media. Moving forward, it will be necessary for college and rural stations to establish alternative funding sources, such as state grants or private philanthropy, to survive this detrimental transition.
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“CPB Support for Rural Stations.” 2015. Cpb.org. May 7, 2015.
Nowell, Cecilia. 2024. “Trump’s Threat to Defund All US Public Media Has NPR and PBS on the Back Foot.” The Guardian. The Guardian. December 28, 2024.