Every morning, Gwen Johnson, a resident of the small Appalachian community of Jackhorn, Ky., wakes up to the voices and sounds of her favourite public radio station.
Johnson, 67, listens to FM over breakfast as she gets ready for work, while driving in her car and throughout the day.
“Through the highs and lows of my life, it’s always been a real comfort to me — when you can just flip on the radio and maybe get a human voice,” said the non-profit professional and former radio programmer. “It’s really added a lot of happiness in dark times.”
Johnson’s preferences are mountain community radio station WMMT 88.7 and NPR affiliate WEKU. But now, they’re among the stations set to lose crucial financial support as the administration of President Donald Trump rescinds congressional funding to public media.
Trump argues the cuts will save the U.S. government billions of dollars a year in wasteful spending.
The rollback, however, will have a serious impact on rural communities, where public radio is a disseminator of news and entertainment, and a lifeline during public emergencies and natural disasters, according to residents, media interests and others who spoke to CBC News.
Johnson thinks public spending probably needs to be “reined in” in certain areas.
“But this is an area that has been very troublesome,” she said. “I am greatly concerned.”
She added she’s worried about whether this move infringes on freedom of speech and freedom of the press.
“I feel like one of our freedoms, our First Amendment rights, is being upheld with the radio station.”
‘It’s pretty overwhelming’
Federal funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) is part of the $9.1 million US worth of cuts outlined in the Rescissions Act, which rescinds congressionally approved funding allocated to public broadcasters and foreign aid.
Congress approved the cuts on Friday morning, sending the package to Trump’s desk for his final signature.
The CPB, a private corporation, disseminates some $1.1 billion to NPR, PBS, and local TV and radio stations across the country every year, with the bulk of its operating budget set aside for direct grants to local public radio stations.
Senator Mike Rounds said last week that he had secured a carve-out for more than a dozen Native American radio stations in which they’d receive funding from the Interior Department. But it’s unclear if that has been approved or how much it would help.
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Already, some community radio stations are looking at different funding models and revenue streams to offset the blow of the cuts. One of them is the aforementioned Kentucky station, WMMT 88.7.
Based in the heart of coal country, it has operated for nearly 40 years. Outside Kentucky, its signal stretches into Virginia, West Virginia, parts of East Tennessee and a bit of Southeast Ohio, reaching 18,000 people weekly, according to the station’s Nielsen survey data.
“It’s hard to imagine,” said Roger May, director of artistic programs at Appalshop, an independent Appalachian media company. WMMT is its flagship radio station.
“I mean, I’m looking at it through the lens of our community radio station, and when I pull back and try to imagine what that’s like for all the other stations, it’s pretty overwhelming.”
About a third of the station’s funding comes from the CPB, and a clawback on that money would drastically impact its operations over the next two fiscal years, according to May. It currently has one full-time employee and relies on a network of local disc jockeys to run its programming.
The station’s development team is looking for ways to source the money from elsewhere. It has long received support from within the community — some small businesses, including a bakery that Johnson manages, serve as underwriters for the station.
“It isn’t a political issue. It’s a community service issue, one that everyone is going to be impacted by who relies on community radio stations and public radio in the country,” said May.
“We’re just one example of many in the country of rural spaces that really do rely on something as simple sounding as community radio. It really is a vital key in how we share information.”
An emergency service
When widespread flash flooding hit eastern Kentucky three years ago, WMMT — after being briefly knocked offline — became a vehicle for disseminating public service announcements, news and “a slice of normality” as people recovered from the disaster, said May.
When Hurricane Helene made landfall in the U.S. last year, devastating parts of North Carolina, another community radio station shared a constant stream of updates and emergency guidance from the government.
“We hear stories upon stories of people telling us, ‘OK, well, we got a crank radio or we had a crank radio, and we knew you’d be on,'” said Ele Ellis, CEO and general manager at Blue Ridge Public Radio in Asheville, N.C.
Some would crank up the volume and put the radio on a mailbox, and neighbours would gather to listen, as the story goes, while the station reported on water distribution sites — Asheville’s water system had shut down. “That’s what they had to do to get information that was going to help them live,” said Ellis.
Blue Ridge covers more than a dozen counties in the western part of the state, reaching about 90,000 listeners on a weekly basis.
“We hit every valley and every mountain in this 14-county area. So there are people that wouldn’t get any other public radio if they didn’t have us,” she said.
The station stands to lose about six per cent of its budget, or $330,000 a year, because of the cuts. That could lead to job losses or taking down signals in communities where it’s more expensive to keep signal towers operating, said Ellis.
The U.S. uses an emergency alert system that blares out over the radio’s AM and FM channels, overriding other programming to deliver crucial information during a national emergency. But the integrity of that system is at risk without public funding, critics of the Rescissions Act have argued.
“If there’s a tornado watch, tornado warning, a flood watch, a flood warning, a blizzard, anything Mother Nature could dole out — people can know it’s coming,” said Ellis.
That would change without the funding, and if people don’t notice a change right away, they might not understand the role that public radio plays in a community, she added.
“But they don’t think about what happens in eight months, when one of our towers fails for some fairly fixable reason, that we’re going to have to make a decision about whether we want to spend money on that tower.”
Trump’s battle with public media
In May, Trump signed a separate executive order calling on the CPB to cease funding to NPR and PBS, though the organization has argued it’s not a federal agency subject to Trump’s authority.
The president has also frequently criticized NPR and PBS for what he characterizes as left-wing bias, framing funding cuts as an end to “taxpayer subsidization of biased media.” The leaders of both organizations testified before a House oversight committee in March in response to the allegations of ideological bias.
NPR’s CEO has argued the cuts would be a risk to public safety, and Rep. Lisa Murkowski — one of two House Republicans to vote against the Rescissions Act — argued that public broadcasting saves lives.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt disagreed, saying, “I am not sure how NPR helps the public safety of our country, but I do know that NPR, unfortunately, has become really just a propaganda voice for the left.”
Public radio plays a vital role in the small communities where these cuts would hit hardest, both on a daily basis and in emergency scenarios, said Laura Lee, a former NPR producer and editorial director of NC Local, a statewide media organization in North Carolina.
“We’re talking about communities where local news outlets have shuttered, where there’s not access to quality, vetted, independent news and information that people need about their school board, about their city council, about the agriculture industry in their communities.”
While a 2023 Pew research paper showed public radio audiences had been steadily declining in the years prior, it found that a fifth of U.S. adults get local news from the radio.
“The word ‘news’ has even gotten somewhat politicized, but people need information and these outlets are very consciously conduits of that information for people,” Lee added, noting many journalists and editors who report on these communities also live in them and understand their needs.
“The Trump administration has been vocal in their explicit criticism of the media, and I’ve watched as local journalists have sort of set that aside and continued about the business of getting the community the information that they need. And so, I’m heartened by that diligence.”
