There’s a secret room of treasures at Austin PBS. Hidden in the depths of their studios on the ACC Highland campus, it contains artifacts from over six decades of public broadcasting television in Austin. News clippings from the station’s earliest days. A framed poster from when the station was still just an affiliate of San Antonio’s KLRN-TV. Early sketches and abandoned designs for the Austin City Limits backdrop, and a list of alternate names. Seriously, you have no idea how close the show came to being called Austin Country.
Austin PBS CEO Luis Patiño smiles as he leans over a rough wooden desk, the original beer table from Studio 6A when the genre-busting music show was still recorded on the UT campus. “It still smells of Lone Star,” he laughs. “No one else is preserving things like this.”
It’s not just objects. It’s a representation of the massive impact of public broadcasting over the years since President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, creating the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the organization that provides federal funding for NPR, PBS, and their local affiliates.
On July 17, the Republican-dominated U.S. Senate approved House Resolution 4, but they may as well have just rolled a pipe bomb into every local public radio and TV station. It’s a rare act of rescission – the unilateral canceling of a contract. In this case, it was the U.S. government canceling $8 billion in foreign aid, and $1.1 billion for CPB.
This is – and there is no other way to view this – a broken contract. The money had already been allocated, and local broadcasters had been deep in financial planning for the upcoming year when congressional Republicans tore up their budget. Now Austin PBS, like every other public media outlet, has until the end of the financial year on September 30 to completely rebuild their budget.
Actually, the rescission is the second cut the Austin station faces. Earlier this year the Department of Education clawed back $400,000 allocated to the Ready to Learn initiative. “That paid for some of our outreach in the community,” Patiño said, but that was a small loss compared to the cut from CPB: $2.3 million for FY 26. Combined, that’s about 10% of Austin PBS’s budget suddenly gone. “Is it crippling? Is it debilitating? Will we cease to exist?” Patiño pondered. “No. But take away 10% from anybody’s budget. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a hot dog stand or a large corporation, 10% is 10%. You can’t necessarily continue to operate and look the way you did prior to then.”
It came as no surprise. Ultra-conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation had laid out the plans to erode every pillar of our democracy in its now infamous Project 2025, and in there was the defunding of public broadcasting. As in so many areas of policy in the Trump era, the GOP majority in Congress has just followed the foundation’s marching orders. “It’s played out pretty much to the tee,” Patiño said, but that doesn’t make the blow any easier to take. “It hurts, in more ways than just the dollars and cents.”
No Dead Air
At least Austin PBS knows how big a hole has been blown in their finances. A few miles away at the offices of KUT and KUTX, the local NPR affiliate, CEO Debbie Hiott was calculating the financial impact. She was on vacation when the rescission vote was taken but, like Patiño, she’d been presuming the rescission was “a done deal” for months. She had already been talking to major donors well before the first House vote, she said, “and yet I found myself really surprised when the Senate took it up.” Since final passage, Hiott and her team have been adding up their losses and communicating/commiserating with their peers at Austin PBS. “We’ve been in touch a lot, as you can imagine.”
The headline number they’ve been dealing with is the loss of their annual community service grant, which totaled close to $1 million. On top of that was an additional grant from CPB for state coverage and then a grant through Harvest Media, a coalition of Midwestern stations, dedicated to encouraging agricultural and rural coverage. Both the state and rural coverage grants go toward paying reporter salaries.
But there’s a big unknown in the form of expenditures that CPB covered like satellite rental, and the digital infrastructure behind KUT.org. “We don’t even know how much they pay on our behalf,” Hiott said. Top of the list of known unknowns is music licensing, and that means they’re bracing for a big bill for KUTX, their music station. Hiott said, “We think that for a station like KUTX, with as many listeners as it has and as many songs as we play – because we play a lot more songs during an hour than a typical commercial station because we don’t have all the commercials – because of that, we think that could be as much as a hundred thousand dollars.”
Those cuts and costs could have a direct impact on programming. One area of particular pride for KUT and KUTX is how little they depend on automated programming, meaning staff handle breaking news and deejaying late into the night. “If we can’t fill this gap, we may have to ask, ‘OK, how much hosting do we do live?’ … It lends us fewer opportunities for those very local touches.”
A News Oasis in the Desert
Bad as it might get, in contrast to many cities and counties, Austin will be OK. The great fear is that this canceled funding will increase the number of news deserts in smaller communities and rural areas.
Not that Republicans seem to believe that. The presidential executive order instructing the CPB to cancel all contracts stated that “unlike in 1967, when the CPB was established, today the media landscape is filled with abundant, diverse, and innovative news options.”
The fact that Marfa Public Radio is basically the only broadcast media game in town disproves that argument, and the “town” in question is actually 30,000 square miles of West Texas, an area roughly the size of South Carolina. The station also has costs that more urban stations don’t have, like maintaining a broadcast system in the middle of the desert. Station Executive Director Anne Pitts Marozas explained, “We have unrelenting sun and heat to contend with, we have air conditioning units that are constantly under repair so that our equipment doesn’t fail.”
“We’re considered one of those vulnerable stations that was talked about a lot on the floor of the Senate and the floor of the House,” Pitts Marozas added. “We’re a rural remote small public radio station that receives 30% of our operating budget from CPB.” It’s a small operation, with eight staff and a cadre of volunteer deejays, but their work in this sparsely populated region is what makes their programming so essential. “It’s so incredibly important for us to lean into covering local news and making sure that everyone in our far-flung communities feels connected to what’s going on in their own backyard, and what’s going on in the community next door.”
That’s where the idea of abundant news outlet alternatives falls apart. “You’re not going to tune in to major network news and hear about the city council meeting in Marfa, or major events in Midland or Odessa that may affect your life,” Pitts Marozas said.
That only amplifies the tragedy that Marfa’s is one of the NPR stations heaviest hit by the rescission, losing $463,000, roughly a third of their annual budget, with all those hidden costs still to be calculated. “It’s a crisis,” Pitts Marozas said, “but crisis always presents opportunity.”
Pitts Marozas only took on her new position in April, and it’s not the first time she’s joined an organization in the midst of a cash crisis. She became executive director of the nonprofit startup running Memphis’ Levitt Shell auditorium just before the 2008 economic crash, then joined the City Leadership initiative a month before the pandemic lockdowns of 2020. She’s used to rebuilding financial plans on the fly. Luckily, Marfa Public Radio has spent the last few years diversifying its revenue stream, so the federal share of its funding has dropped from 50% to 30% now. Pitts Marozas noted that they’ll be looking particularly to listeners in places like Midland and Odessa for support but also hope that people who have visited from cities outside of their coverage area will help.
What she hopes is that people realize the value that Marfa Public Radio adds to their lives, and to the region as a whole. Bucking the industry trend for rural outlets, it’s actually added reporters over the past few years, focusing on local issues, as well as launching several podcasts like Marfa for Beginners and So Far From Care, highlighting the difficulties people in the region face in finding and receiving health care. (On a lighter note, there’s also the award-winning Marfa Public Radio Puts You to Sleep, where the team recites boring documents; the latest episode is just a list of lawmakers who voted for the rescission.)
There are local papers, such as the weekly The Big Bend Sentinel in Presidio County, that provide news coverage to their own communities, Pitts Marozas said, “But we’re able to bring these stories across a widespread area. … We’re a significant network for emergency alerts, we’re a significant network for news that impacts people’s daily lives and understanding what happens in this community and the next community over.”
The Smaller Screen
Another essential element of public broadcasting is that it produces the kind of show that commercial stations just won’t handle. Case in point: Austin City Limits, which just celebrated its 50th anniversary. Patiño said, “The ratings would have dipped one year and they would have canceled it. Advertisers would have fallen out one year, and they would have canceled it.”
That show is just one on the slate that Austin PBS makes available to other stations. In total, 35 Austin PBS Presents shows are listed through PBS’s sIX programming platform, from On Story to Central Texas Gardener to Taco Mafia, and are available to all fee-paying PBS stations. This content-sharing is key to how PBS works as a system, but now there will inevitably be shows disappearing from the listings. Boston-based GBH, producer of Nova, Masterpiece, and Antiques Roadshow, has already announced that it is laying off 13 members of the American Experience team, and canceled production of all future episodes of the Emmy- and Peabody-winning series after 37 seasons.
However, one of the biggest blows in the rescission has actually been delivered to independent filmmakers, due to the complete defunding of a little-known but essential entity called iTVS, the Independent Television Service. Aside from creating PBS’s landmark documentary series Independent Lens, it’s the biggest single producer of documentary features in America and has received 32 Peabodys plus 23 Oscar nominations. It’s actually federally mandated to fund local documentaries across the country, and most of the money received from CPB went straight to productions.
Like everyone else in public media, iTVS leadership knew these cuts were coming and had already been bracing for them. In June, the organization laid off roughly 20% of its staff and canceled its latest open call for grant applicants, instead refocusing its finances on the 45 feature films it already had in production. Carrie Lozano, president and CEO of iTVS, said, “We intend to make it through this, but that means that we have to make different decisions about different resources in order to make sure we can reach audiences.”
iTVS has funded a multitude of films by Austin filmmakers, such as Karen Skloss’ Sunshine, Bradley Beesley’s Okie Noodling, Don Howard’s Nuclear Family, Mat Hames’ When I Rise, and several films from Heather Courtney, including Where Soldiers Come From and Breaking the News. Former UT RTF Chair Paul Stekler is another iTVS alum through his 2014 film on post-Hurricane Katrina reconstruction, Getting Back to Abnormal, while his 2000 documentary, George Wallace: Settin’ the Woods on Fire, screened as part of Independent Lens. “iTVS funded a lot of great broadcasting,” he said.
Austin filmmaker Keith Maitland attributes the very existence of his career to iTVS. They gave him a grant and essential feedback for his first film, 2009’s The Eyes of Me, while it was Independent Lens executive producer Lois Vossen who provided the essential $15,000 that allowed him to create a proof-of-concept for his animated documentary, Tower. “iTVS is so important,” he said, “and it really boils down to the ‘I’ in iTVS.” After all, not only is it mandated by the 1988 Public Telecommunications Act to “expand the diversity and innovativeness of programming available to public broadcasting,” but unlike any other studio, the non-public media rights to any film remain with the filmmaker. Maitland said, “Independence is something that they value, and that’s not true of many quarters of this industry.”
Moreover, iTVS is almost unique now in its advocacy for documentaries. Lozano noted that the larger studios and streamers have pulled back from the form, most especially the kind of public interest stories that her organization supports. However, they often indirectly benefit from iTVS, acquiring the rights to films it already supported. The service’s films also are a major part of festival lineups before appearing on public television. Moreover, its grants are a vital stimulus to filmmaking outside of the established production hubs. Lozano said, “I don’t think that the public in general understands that the independent film community has such close ties to public media, and there will be a domino effect across the country.”
Shared Pain, Shared Strength
Those public broadcasting entities that have a future know that it’s an uncertain one. Hiott estimated that it could take her team as long as six months to know the full economic impact of the rescission, and in that time “there could be small stations that don’t make it.” That in turn will have consequences for those shared costs like satellite and digital infrastructure, as the remaining stations have to cover a bigger portion of the bill. Conversely, just as stations may face extra hidden costs, show producers like GBH and Austin PBS may face reduced income as other outlets cut back on syndicated content or simply cease broadcasting.
Moreover, the loss of local affiliates won’t just create news deserts. Smaller stations contribute reporting to shows like KUT’s Texas Standard, giving urban listeners a chance to find out what’s happening in rural communities. “It’s not great to cover a state from one city,” Hiott said. “The benefit of having all of these smaller stations out there is the ability to cover from those cities, and I’m worried about that.”
While fundraising continues, the questions will mount about what is to be considered core business. Hiott said that the free events the station mounts “are the kind of events that get threatened when something like this happens.” She noted that KUTX remains committed to the Rock the Park concert series at Mueller Lake Park Amphitheatre, but it’s not impossible that it might have to change or be scaled back due to costs. “I’d hate to do that, because I love that event because it’s so community-focused.”
To prevent making those decisions, KUT management have already started considering ways to make their events more sponsor-friendly and, of course, they’ve amplified their ongoing requests for donations. Since the rescission vote, Hiott said, they’ve gained 500 new members, “which is a good number for us.”
The greatest concern is that this economic assault isn’t the end, but simply the latest attack on editorially independent media. The CPB defunding came after the dismantling of Voice of America Radio, and now the question is, what’s next? If the end game is to destroy public radio and television, how long before broadcast licenses become a target?
For Stekler, the complete annihilation of public broadcasting funding is a worrying indicator of the state of American politics, and the current administration’s willingness to use extraordinary tools like rescission. He called it “mind-boggling” that PBS and NPR had no support from any Republicans in the rescission vote, and a huge change from his own experiences filming GOP politicians across the years. “John Cornyn told me he loved PBS,” he said. “Rick Perry, Dan Patrick, a number of other people, the only reason I got time with them, filming them, interviewing them, following them doing stuff, is because I told them I was making a film for public television. So it couldn’t have been that bad.”
While the cuts have seemed inevitable as Project 2025 has gathered steam, Maitland was recently reminded how avoidable this all is while talking with Swedish filmmakers about the wide array of funding sources available to them compared to their American peers. The documentarian lamented the situation: “It’s not that we can’t do it, it’s that we seemingly have no interest, at least from the top down.”
Even if Republican lawmakers have turned their backs on public media, the hope is that donors, including charitable foundations, will continue to see the value of its uniquely community-minded programming. For example, Austin PBS is already strategizing about filling that $400,000 cut to Ready to Learn’s budget. Patiño said, “Our hypothesis is that, once we go out to the marketplace and say, ‘Hey, these are the needs that will go unmet, these are the communities that will no longer receive the educational services that we provide and have for years and years and years,’ we hope that people that fund and support educational services in other nonprofits will support us in some way to fill that gap.”
Right now, the priority response for all stations is to raise bridging funds to fill the gap in next year’s budgets. KUT had a pledge drive on the air almost immediately, and Austin PBS is launching its own campaign on August 1. That month was already scheduled for a pledge drive, Patiño said, “but the messaging needs to be a little more intentional and cover our needs at least for next year.”
What’s astonishing is that the sums being talked about are not that huge. The whole federal contribution to national public media was only $1.1 billion, almost half a billion less than Paramount+ paid for a five-year streaming deal for one show, South Park. iTVS alone produces 20 to 40 features and shorts a year for under $10 million a year, a sum that, “in Hollywood terms, is not a lot of money,” said Lozano. “You could get a handful of amazing donors to fill those coffers and to help iTVS do what it’s done very well for the last 35 years.”
The complicating factor is that, due to a combination of destructive federal policies and the economic downturn, nonprofits everywhere are suffering right now, and fundraising is going to be tougher. That’s why Patiño described this current fundraising effort as a “stopgap” to buy them time to create solutions within the public broadcasting community. Even if CPB is gone, the national infrastructure of PBS and NPR still exists, and local affiliates are already used to having each other’s backs. In 2011, when Marfa Public Radio was playing a key role in keeping locals informed about the deadly Rock House wildfire, KUT literally flew an engineer to West Texas to help keep them on the air when they lost power. In this new crisis, there’s already a lot of similar creative and collaborative thinking going on. For example, Patiño said that there have been conversations about having Austin PBS assist smaller stations with back-office tasks like accounting and marketing. That would just be one element of approaching PBS in Texas as “a regional opportunity to share services, to collaborate with our brothers and sisters in Corpus Christi and Amarillo and Midland-Odessa.”
KUT already has formal links with other Texas stations, including KERA in Dallas, Texas Public Radio in San Antonio, and Houston Public Media, through the Texas Newsroom collaboration. Hiott said, “We meet weekly and have been talking about, ‘OK, are there certain things that one station excels at that they can take on more of as we try to grow, and are there things that would cost less if we do it together.’” There are also ongoing conversations about deeper collaboration with Austin PBS, “and that’s something Luis and I both are pretty committed to,” Hiott said.
Patiño added that Austin PBS is also looking into partnerships beyond public media, with Texas Monthly and Texas Tribune, and noted that nonprofit collaboration always appeals to philanthropic foundations. “When they see that they’re giving to KUT/KUTX, and Austin PBS, and to the symphony, and to the opera, and we’re all working together, it makes everyone’s gift and support go further.”
For now, all the stations are concentrating on doing what they’ve always done: building communities. Austin PBS is continuing with due diligence to expand to Waco. Marfa Public Radio still hopes to hire another news reporter and management are accelerating plans to bring in personnel to focus on underwriting and sponsorship. Similarly, Hiott explained that KUT is continuing to develop a new daily news show, launching in the fall, “but we’re probably going to have to do more of that with shifting people around rather than hiring new people.” She laughed. “We’ll all get on a 24/7 shift.”
For Pitts Marozas, the people who really matter in this are the ones for whom public broadcasting is a lifeline, a companion, a messenger from a bigger world. “Human connection, community connection, is one of the best services we can provide.”
This article appears in August 1 • 2025.
