Public Media Meets To Plot Its Funding Future

Public broadcasting may have won its battle to retain federal funding in this year’s budget, but few are expecting any rest for the weary in the fight for money moving forward.

“It’s not over,” says Patrick Butler, president-CEO of the Association of Public Television Stations. “There are a good number of people in the congress who are quite committed to defunding public broadcasting and this is going to be a continuing battle for us for quite some time.”

The 2012 appropriations process is next on tap, he says.

Butler’s comments were part of a larger symposium on the future of public broadcasting held Tuesday morning at the National Press Club in Washington.

On a practical level, the symposium — which drew the top CEOs in the public TV and radio business — explored ways that stations can forge ahead to garner support, audiences and respect at a time when, in addition to facing financial threats, broadcast audiences are waning.

Creating partnerships, using multiple platforms, breaking existing public perceptions of bias and, most of all, engaging viewers were all means of furthering public media’s role discussed at the meeting. So were partnering with commercial stations, thinking outside-the-box for funding and debating whether the commonly held perception that Democrats like public broadcasting more than Republicans is really true.

But much of the discussion stemmed from public broadcasting’s very recent, and very contentious, fight to retain federal funding — the one that industry executives call the most serious threat to funding in public broadcasting’s 44-year history.

According to Paula Kerger, PBS president-CEO, the public television network receives 15% of its funding from the federal government, although the ramifications of losing that money could be much greater than the number of dollars itself.

TV stations that don’t have other sources of funding, like those serving rural towns, rely disproportionately on government dollars. That money is also a powerful tool to leverage grants and donations from other foundations and individuals, she says.

With the threat of losing that money still looming, symposium attendees stressed the importance of both broadcasters and their constituents rallying to the cause.

However, public broadcasters are going to have to walk a delicate line between calling on viewers and listeners for help after just asking the public to go to bat for them.

“The sustained nature of the attack is different than other years,” says Caryn Mathes, GM of WAMU-FM Washington. But, she added, “You can only say the wolf is at the door so many times. We have to strike that balance between not saying too much and keeping our constituency energized and informed so they will mobilize when we need them.”

Jim Lehrer, long the face and cornerstone of PBS’s NewsHour, sees the struggle to keep public broadcasting alive as part of a larger mission with roots that date to the beginning of the nation.

“Thomas Jefferson told the folks back when this country was founded that the only way this democratic society we just formed was going to work was if there was an informed electorate,” he says.

Lehrer adds that it’s incumbent upon public broadcasters to fulfill their mission of helping create that informed electorate by doing “serious journalism.”

“We must fill the gaps that are being created by our resource-starved commercial colleagues,” Lehrer says.

“Everyone of us must step up to the plate more than we ever have,” he says.  “We must declare that we are here … that we have a mission to perform.”