ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. – If you grew up watching Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, or more recently (your children perhaps), Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, those shows existed, in part, because American taxpayers paid and continue to pay for them.
The Trump Administration is attempting to change that.
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According to several media outlets, the White House has drafted a memo to Congress expressing interest in cutting almost all Federal funding of public media - primarily PBS and NPR.
The White House’s official website posted this statement on April 14. The letter reads:
“For years, American taxpayers have been on the hook for subsidizing National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as ‘news.’ As President Trump has stated, taxpayer funding of NPR’s and PBS’s biased content is a waste.”
White House letter
The letter listed 15 “examples of the trash that passes for ‘news’ at NPR and PBS” such as:
- In 2024, NPR ran a Valentine’s Day feature around “queer animals.”
- In 2024, PBS produced an episode of the series “America Reframed” that examined the concept of reparations.
The letter also claimed “NPR and PBS have zero tolerance for non-leftist viewpoints” and included NPR’s refusal to cover the Hunter Biden laptop case, claiming there were many red flags.
The letter says that when an NPR reporter and editor spoke out about the decision, he was suspended. The editor in question, Uri Berliner, wrote an essay for another news outlet without permission, and when he was reprimanded, he chose to resign. The letter quotes Berliner as saying registered Democrats vastly outnumbered Republicans in the NPR newsroom.
Federal funding not only benefits NPR and PBS, but also their local public media affiliates, like the stations here in Central Florida: WUCF and Central Florida Public Media.
They operate independently from PBS and NPR, but they utilize their programming. Affiliates in Orlando have served Central Florida since the 80’s.
The University of Central Florida is home to WUCF, which is an NPR and PBS affiliate.
Jen Cook is WUCF’s executive director.
News 6 Anchor Erik von Ancken sat down with Cook for an in-depth question and answer session.
von Ancken: The White House has said that it believes American taxpayer should not pay for public media because the White House believes it doesn’t serve all American taxpayers. Could you tell me how UCF serves Central Florida taxpayers, the Central Florida public?
Cook: WUCF crosses nine counties in Central Florida. You don’t have to have cable. You don’t have to have a satellite system. We are free over the antenna. So right there we serve all of our area without anyone having to pay for anything. But besides the broadcast that you see, besides the shows that you know and love, we do so much in our communities for education. We do free events all the time to ensure kids are ready for kindergarten, to make sure people have access to tools and resources that they need. We provide entertainment, we provide warning alerts for different scenarios of weather emergencies or some sort of presidential crisis. We have so much infrastructure, to ensure that our community is alerted in a time of crisis. But we’re also really on the streets helping teachers and giving them tools, to teach and make sure that all of our children have access to educational tools and resources.
von Ancken: As you know, the White House has said that it believes that much of the public media is biased, biased toward the left. How does UCF make sure that its content serving the public here in Central Florida is not biased?
Cook: It is a priority. It’s always been a priority for us. Politics doesn’t come into what we do. We are here for everyone, regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, or on the economic spectrum. When we are producing our own content, we are doing it from the lens of how can we help our community learn. So when you’re watching a piece of content that we may produce, the goal is you walk away learning something. What did we learn about this issue? What did we learn about this place in Central Florida? And that’s the same thing we do with our events. So for us, it doesn’t become political. It’s about stepping back from the story and explaining why is this important to our community. And I think we have been able to do that in a way where we’re not hearing feedback that we are biased in what we’re producing. You know, PBS continues to rank as one of the most trusted media organizations in the country. So you can argue that there is a bias. But I think if you look at our programming spectrum and what we’re offering, you’re not going to find one.
von Ancken: According to NPR, the White House has said that it wants to cut more than $1 billion, $1.1 billion exactly, in federal funding for public media. How would that impact UCF and Central Floridians if they did?
Cook: UCF is such a valuable community partner to so many organizations. We work with the arts organizations, cultural organizations, or really any nonprofit in Central Florida we have done work with. And we as a nonprofit community know this. These are some really tough times financially. Grants have evaporated. Funding that was appropriated is gone. And what we have done is try to really work with our other nonprofits in this space to help leverage what we’re all really good at. So we work a lot with the arts communities who have had some funding challenges and tried to do events in their space to bring more people in and try to really tell stories of why it matters to our community to have a well-educated and culturally informed community. And so if federal funding were cut for us for WUCF, that would mean that we would have to cut back on some of those in-person services that we offer that really no one else can do, like Daniel Tiger, who kids love and learn from and bringing him into our community. That’s going to be hard because those things cost money and we don’t charge people for our events.
von Ancken: WUCF, to be clear, gets about you said 10% of its funding from the federal budget, correct?
Cook: About 10% of our funding comes from the federal government. But if that dried up, the loss wouldn’t just be to UCF.
von Ancken: It would also be to the PBS stations that provide a lot of your programming and your resources?
Cook: Correct. So we partner with a lot of PBS stations across the state of Florida, and we share content back and forth. Some of that content would go away because every station’s budget is different. On the national level, a lot of the programs that people know and love - “Antiques Roadshow,” “Nova,” “Nature,” a lot of conversations are happening on what happens if federal funding is cut because those shows, since they are made for a national audience, that federal funding will impact some of the shows people love and that is a big concern because we know people for years come to us for “Masterpiece,” “Downton Abbey,” “Sherlock,” all the shows that people have loved over the years - “PBS NewsHour” - all of these programs have a federal funding component in it. So the bigger question is not necessarily what WCF is going to do. The bigger question is how are we going to react when we potentially have some of the programming people can’t see anymore that they’ve come to know and love as part of their life.
von Ancken: How dire is this for you?
Cook: For us, it is the most serious funding threat that we have ever had in the history of public media. For us, it is serious. We will exist and we are going to continue to work our hardest to exist in whatever happens. At the same time, things are going to have to look a little different. And on the national landscape, I think things will look different. Some stations will not survive this. And that is going to be hard in a world where small towns especially are already cut off in these “news deserts” from local information. And so it is going to be incumbent upon stations like us at WUCF to really help keep some of that access alive for people that don’t have it on a regular basis.
Central Florida Public Media, formerly known as WMFE, is an NPR affiliate.
Judith Smelser is president and general manager of Central Florida Public Media.
von Ancken also had an in-depth conversation with Smelser.
von Ancken: Same question for you, Judith, how does your public media serve the public here in Central Florida?
Smelser: Central Florida Public Media is the only local nonprofit news organization serving the entire nine-county Central Florida region. And our mission is to empower Central Floridians to really fully participate in the civic and cultural life of our region to make decisions about their own lives and the direction of our communities. And we do that by providing trustworthy, independent journalism and fact-based conversation and discussion on multiple platforms.
von Ancken: You broadcast national NPR programming, but you are also heavily invested in local programming, that’s what you’re talking about?
Smelser: Yes, absolutely. So we do provide international and national news and programs from a multitude of partners, NPR, the BBC and a number of other program providers. But the real value-add to Central Florida public media in this community is our local service. We have a local newsroom of a dozen journalists. We’ve actually expanded our local newsroom by 50% in the last 2 or 3 years, and we’ve made that investment because we understand that the business model for local journalism is challenged right now because of the digital landscape and the digital media shift. 3,000 newspapers have closed over the past 20 years or so. And as a nonprofit news organization, we really see it as our responsibility to be a bulwark against that, both by expanding our own local news presence and also by bringing other local news organizations together to be better together and to work together. So we provide local news and local journalism, we take our news and journalism out into the community. We really believe in being a convener, and we believe in providing a safe space for people even who disagree with each other to have civil and civic conversation based on a shared set of trusted facts. And we want to get back to the place where we can do that. And one other thing I should mention that we are committed to doing is providing life-saving emergency information during hurricanes and other emergencies. You might notice as you’re driving around, particularly in coastal areas of the region, those blue evacuation signs, they all have a radio frequency on them. That’s our frequency. We have the responsibility for providing emergency information in times of crisis. And that’s a that’s a responsibility that we take very seriously.
von Ancken: How does Central Florida public media ensure that its local reporting is unbiased?
Smelser: Well, the first thing I want to point out to is that I can’t speak for NPR because we are a separate organization from NPR, and a lot of people don’t realize that. A lot of people think that we are owned by NPR, governed by NPR. Some people even think we’re funded by NPR. And none of that is the case. We are a local, independent nonprofit, and we are incredibly strongly committed to nonpartisan reporting that covers not just both sides, but all sides of a story. In fact, our written journalism ethics code requires our journalists to seek multiple perspectives in their reporting. And we acknowledge that usually there is more than one, two or even three sides of a story. And one of the things that makes us unique is that we do have the time on the air and on our digital properties to go deeper into stories and to really get into the nuance of the stories that we tell.
von Ancken: You were telling me Central Florida Public Media gets about 10%, a little under 10% of its funding from the federal government? What would happen to this station and what would happen to Central Florida, the people that it serves, if you lost that money?
Smelser: So we do get about 8 or 9% of our funding from the federal government. And I want to be clear, Central Florida Public Media isn’t going anywhere if this funding is cut. But some of the things that you love about Central Florida Public Media might be. Let me explain what I mean by that. So over the past couple of years, we have made some really significant investments in our local service. As I was saying, we’ve grown our local newsroom by about 50%. We’ve added a paid fellowship position for emerging journalists to launch their careers. We’ve added two local shows in the past couple of years, and we’ve also made some significant investments in our community outreach and engagement.
von Ancken: And this is based on the expectation that the funding would be there because Congress allocates it for the next two years?
Smelser: That’s correct. That’s based on that assumption. And so if that funding goes away, we will have to make some difficult decisions. That funding is worth the equivalent of about three reporters, local reporters. It’s the equivalent of the cost to produce our new local public affairs show “Engage.”
von Ancken: You were telling me that number in particular is $300,000 a year?
Smelser: The total that we received from federal sources this year is just under $300,000. Yes. It’s the equivalent of about 40% of the program, national and international programming that we pay NPR and the BBC and other providers to provide to our audiences. It’s about half the cost of our community engagement efforts. So these are real impacts that we’re going to have to be looking at. Obviously, we are going to do everything that we can to preserve the core of our mission, which is local service to our local community.
Once the White House memo is delivered, it gives Congress 45 days to make a decision to either support the federal funding retraction or not. If Congress does not approve the recission, the Trump administration is legally required to release the money to the news agencies. You can learn more about the process on Congress.gov.
Currently, there’s a bill moving through Congress called the No Propaganda Act that aims to prohibit federal funding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which helps fund PBS, NPR, and its local affiliates.
