NPR/PBS. Public support will be even more crucial if/when that happens.
this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2025
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My understanding is that only a tiny portion of NPR funding is from the federal government. I honestly don't think that it'll have a huge impact even if it's defunded at the federal level.
goes looking for numbers
https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finances
On average, approximately 1% of NPR's annual operating budget comes in the form of grants from CPB and federal agencies and departments, excluding CPB funding for the Public Radio Satellite System (PRSS).
I mean, I don't think that NPR is a bad use of funds
frankly, I think that they put out some of the most-worthwhile content out there, and I'm particularly a fan of NPR Planet Money, which does a lot of podcasts covering basic economics concepts
but I don't think that a whole lot would actually happen to NPR if federal funding went away.
EDIT: I'd also suspect that if state governments wanted to do so, they could probably take over that 1%. It makes sense, I think, to make radio content widely-distributed, since most of the cost is in production, and not widely-distributing it means that you're not getting some of the good of increased user base, while paying the costs of production. But...radio isn't really a public good, not at the (broad) state-government funding level -- it doesn't really have the property of non-excludability. That is, you don't have to broadcast radio content everywhere. You can't stop radio broadcasts from spilling over state boundaries somewhat, so maybe if tiny Delaware didn't want to fund it, viewers in Delaware could still consume it, but someone in most of Wyoming isn't going to be able to receive NPR on the radio if Wyoming doesn't fund it and it can't be broadcast in Wyoming.
EDIT2: It looks like NPR has a budget of about $300 million/year. So to put some perspective on this, 1% federal funding would be about $3 million a year, or less than a penny a year per American. That's not nothing, but if we're talking about something that most people in the US are willing to fund, I really don't think that it'd be that hard to find states willing to chip in a total of $3 million a year. Frankly, I can think of a lot of things here in California that the state does pay for that cost a lot more and that I think are a heck of a lot less-worthwhile than NPR; I'd be perfectly fine having California pay the entirety of that (less than a dime a year per Californian), or to just participate in a group of states that chip in.
I just ate a sandwich and cup of soup at Togo's, a sandwich place. The cup of soup was about $5. It wasn't a bad cup of soup, but it cost 50 times what I'd pay per year even in that "California takes over all of the federal funding of NPR solo" scenario. I am absolutely confident that having NPR for the next 50 years
disregarding the time value of money, even
provides me with a hell of a lot more benefit than that cup of soup provided me with.
EDIT3: And to give NPR an additional kudos, I'd like to emphasize that this "I'd be fine with my own state covering the costs if it has to do so solo" is coming from someone who leans right-libertarian, would generally rather have the private sector provide solutions than the government where possible. I think that over the years, the quality of the material that NPR has put out relative to most purely-private-sector media has more than earned it the benefit of the doubt, and a place in the media landscape.
NPR and PBS lol
They don't get most of their funding from the government, that is a misnomer.
Yeah, NPR gets most of their funding from Walmart and progressive insurance
"Local" news sources tend to be more trustworthy than national ones.
And those who aggregate local sources, like Jon Stewart:-).
Depends on what you mean by “local”.
Local papers are frequently owned by national conglomerates and just reprint mostly national wire stories. Same with local tv and radio stations. Didn’t you see that video going around of Sinclair-owned TV stations all parroting the same right-wing talking points? Most local tv news now is just corporate PR and network news feeds pulled down from satellite. Another recent example — The Dallas Morning News didn’t cover the downtown anti-Trump protests in Dallas. At all.
Local blogs from actual journalists can be good depending on the source. And those independent freebie newspapers you can pick up at the grocery store entrance can be decent local news coverage (like Creative Loafing, The Stranger, Community Impact).
True but then I would not call those as "sources", since as you say they are very obviously merely redistribution outlets of prepackaged material made elsewhere. It does make it so difficult for a common person to know what to trust or not - most especially someone coming in from the outside. Everywhere you look is bias... and worse.
I like sourcing news from newswires like Reuters and AP as their customers are other news agencies. I feel this incentivizes accuracy as their customers want just the facts style reporting; they’ll add whatever spin they want on top of the actual news on their own to attract the eyeballs. The kicker with this approach is it will have a pro corporate bent as that is their customer base.
Propublica does real public interest journalism.