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Is Congress About to Kill This Local Radio Station?

Is Congress About to Kill This Local Radio Station?

Update: 2025-07-114
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Description

From the moment President Trump and Republicans took control of Washington this year, they set out to turn their longtime threats against public media, which they see as biased, into action.

Now, a piece of Republican legislation would cut more than a billion dollars from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which finances PBS and NPR.

As the bill makes its way through Congress, those who work in public media are warning that radio stations in red, rural and Republican America will feel the deepest impact.

Guests: 

  • Jessica Cheung, a senior audio producer at The New York Times
  • Tom Abbott, the general manager of KFSK-FM in Petersburg, Alaska
     

Background reading: 

For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

Photo Credit: Ash Adams for The New York Times.
Caption: The town of Petersburg, Alaska, voted for Donald Trump by an almost 2-to-1 margin in the last election. Now Republicans in Congress are trying to pass cuts that would defund the community’s radio station.


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Comments (2)

Joe A. Finley II

These Hillbillies do next to NOTHING to improve their rep among us so-called "Coastal Elites." I mean the guy open admittedly the whole town is a bunch of homophobes: their "big problem" with NPR is that it carries "too much LGBTQ programming." When confronted on the fact that station managers have BROAD discretion over national NPR content to carry locally, he both fumbles the LGBTQ programming issue while BARELY acknowledging that NPR regularly DOES talk about ag/steel/wood/fish & game.

Jul 17th
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Is Congress About to Kill This Local Radio Station?

Is Congress About to Kill This Local Radio Station?

The New York Times