Public media in Austin: History, impact and what's next amid federal funding cuts

AUSTIN (KXAN) — On a November day nearly 60 years ago, a Texas man put pen to paper and made a historic impact on the structure and accessibility of television and radio. The system that was established then is now being dismantled, leaving the future in limbo for many local public media stations across the country.

President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, establishing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, or CPB. The CPB is a private, nonprofit corporation that acts as the “steward of the federal government’s investment in public broadcasting and the largest single source of funding for public radio, television, and related online and mobile services,” according to its website.

It has helped provide funding to hundreds of outlets, including a few in Austin that have contributed to the production of national, groundbreaking programs over the last several decades.

The purpose of the Public Broadcasting Act was to “encourage the growth and development of public radio and television broadcasting” for “instructional, educational, and cultural purposes.” It also encouraged development of “programming that involves creative risks and that addresses the needs of unserved and underserved audiences, particularly children and minorities.”

The CPB was created to achieve those goals and many others. The CPB’s website states that the corporation “strives to support programs and services that inform, educate, and enrich the public,” and that under the Public Broadcasting Act, it funds the “development of content that addresses the needs of underserved audiences, especially children and minorities.”

The CPB also funds infrastructure that delivers public media content and emergency alerts to local stations, which then deliver content to their audiences and public safety partners, the CPB website notes.

Now, the CPB is shutting down after public media became a target of President Donald Trump, and Congress passed a package clawing back two years of funding. Plus, the Senate Appropriations Committee excluded future funding for the corporation for the first time in more than 50 years as part of a broader spending bill, The Associated Press reported.

The CPB distributes more than 70% of its funding to more than 1,500 locally owned public radio and television stations, according to its website.

In Austin, those stations are Austin PBS (KLRU), KUT/KUTX and KMFA.

Public Media in Austin

Austin PBS produced the first bilingual Spanish-English children’s television series, “Carrascolendas,” which aired nationally in the 70s. The TV station is also behind “Austin City Limits,” the longest-running music series on television, which also inspired the famous Austin City Limits Music Festival.

KUT, Austin’s National Public Radio (NPR) station, carried the first-ever “All Things Considered” broadcast in May 1971, and the first broadcast of “Morning Edition” in 1979. KUT also launched the national radio series “Latino USA” in 1993, and the station produces “In Black America,” a long-running, nationally syndicated program telling stories illuminating the African-American experience.

KMFA is an independent public classical radio station. The station locally produces shows like “Classical Austin,” “From the Butler School” and “Early Music Now,” which airs nationally. It also distributes national programming from Public Radio International, American Public Media and National Public Radio.

All three outlets face budget cuts due to the rescission of federal funding. Here’s how it breaks down for each station:

• Austin PBS faces a $3 million annual federal funding cut starting in 2026; that’s about 10-12% of its operating budget, explained Luis Patiño, President and CEO of Austin PBS.
• KUT/KUTX will lose about $1.2 million annually due to the withdrawal of several grants it received through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, General Manager of the station Debbie Hiott said.
• KMFA expected to receive $140,000 in November as part of a grant from the CPB. Now, the station is planning for the loss of that funding, as well as losing approximately $200,000 in 2026 — 7% of their budget — according to KMFA’s website.

Viewers and listeners, along with business sponsorships, account for a majority of funding for Austin’s stations. Still, the federal cuts leave gaps the stations are strategizing to fill. But stations that serve rural areas and so-called “news deserts” stand to lose higher percentages of their funding and could even face closure due to the monetary loss.

Community journalism is the core of Austin’s public media stations

One argument in support of cutting federal funding for public media is rooted in the fact that the Public Broadcasting Act was signed at a time of less access to media in general, which is no longer the case, in the current era of the internet and streaming.

For Trump and some of his supporters, though, the objection to public media is primarily what they call “biased media.” Trump has often criticized public media and, in a “fact sheet” about the funding cuts, said, “NPR and PBS have fueled partisanship and left-wing propaganda with taxpayer dollars, which is highly inappropriate and an improper use of taxpayers’ money.”

Patiño argued that the point of public media — at least when it comes to Austin PBS — is to tell community stories that would otherwise be untold and to create content that educates, informs and inspires communities.

“What people I think sometimes forget, is that when public media first started, when LBJ in 1967 signed the Public Broadcasting Act, it was all in an effort to create educational television, because he saw the future and the writing on the wall that it was going to be really, really difficult for commercial broadcasters who have to turn a profit for them to be able to focus on educational kids programming,” Patiño said.

“Our main focus has always been creating content that educates, informs and inspires communities. Therefore, we were able to invest in kids’ programming, educational programming,” he continued.

Patiño pointed to Austin PBS’s early days, back in the 70s, when the station was still housed at the University of Texas. That’s when “Carrascolendas” was produced and broadcast, a significant historical step for bilingual children’s media.

He also pointed out Austin PBS programs like “Austin City Limits” and “Central Texas Gardener.”

“We’re not a huge market, we’re not LA, New York, Chicago — but we have an abundance of productions that actually have national distribution because they have relevancy, because they’re great stories,” Patiño said. He also mentioned “Overheard with Evan Smith,” “Live From the LBJ” and “City of Songs,” and referenced a partnership with a local documentarian who produced a docu-series in east Austin called “Taco Mafia.”

Patiño emphasized that covering the local news of the day is not the primary focus of PBS.

“Here locally, we really focus more on arts, culture, music, public affairs. We’ll dive deep into some news stories,” he said. “But outside of that, I find it a little disingenuous to be able to say that — you know, what’s biased about Central Texas Gardener? What’s biased about Austin City Limits?”

“At the end of the day, while there may be a lot more outlets covering certain aspects of culture, music, sports… there’s not a whole lot of people supporting documentarians. There’s not a whole lot of people allowing local storytellers to get local, regional and national distribution the way we make it so easy to partner with us,” Patiño said.

“And I think those are the types of stories and programs and productions that I think, you know, only public media has the capacity and the willingness to really fund and to promote, and so we’re really blessed for that, right?” Patiño said.

Patiño said that as long as PBS has been in Austin, it’s been the station’s “North Star” to “tell stories that would otherwise go untold by people that don’t always get the platform to tell their stories.”

It’s a similar story for KUT(X), the station’s general manager, Debbie Hiott, explained.

KUT was initially created around 100 years ago through the University of Texas’ physics department as a demonstration project to “figure out how radio works,” Hiott said. It evolved into a licensed station with the KUT call letters, but wound up getting discontinued for about three decades. Eventually, Robert Schenkkan, who was heavily involved in the creation of the Public Broadcasting Act, came to UT and set the stage for what would become a radio station partially funded by the university and community, according to the KUT website.

Hiott said the benefits of being a public media station mostly come in the form of the risks KUT(X) can take in its coverage.

“You know, we can take risks in a lot of ways that some other media can’t,” Hiott said. “Other media may need to have a specific audience in order to meet their revenue needs, their financial needs, that are related to advertising, and so what we can do is we can sometimes cover some things that maybe aren’t, you know, going to bring in the largest audience.”

She gave the example of local arts and music coverage.

“We’ve seen less and less of that from traditional media, because it may not necessarily be the kind of thing that drives page views and digital audiences as much,” Hiott said. “But we think it’s really important from a mission point of view, because it’s something that says a lot about, you know, the quality of life in Austin — how we live as Austinites… And so we can make an investment there in a way that isn’t entirely based on, ‘Okay, will this investment bring in X many new advertising dollars?’ And that’s just a reality between public media and corporate media.”

Hiott also talked about the station’s ability to take a different approach to coverage than what traditional, commercial media outlets typically do. Like their “ATXplained” series, which asks the public to tell KUT what they want investigated and reported.

“It’s the ability to kind of look 90 degrees off of the story, you know, where a lot of the media might be focused on,” Hiott said. “The ‘this thing that happened,’ — we can look at something that people aren’t focusing on as much… It allows us to kind of take a different view of the news.”

Plus, Hiott said, the station doesn’t have to expose its viewers to a “huge amount of commercial advertising,” as she put it.

“There is a lot of access to information now, but there’s not a lot of access to local information,” Hiott said, especially not without having to dodge several pop-up ads on a website, or endure minutes of commercials per every half hour of airtime.

“All news is not created equal, you know. And all news sites are not created equal,” Hiott said.

How Austin PBS and KUT are trying to move forward

Headlines about federal funding cuts for public media have circulated for the last few weeks, the most recent ones specifically addressing the CPB’s dissolution and what it means for PBS and NPR.

Neither platform will go away, but leaders within both organizations have addressed the need to reassess.

Both Austin PBS and KUT have received boosts in community support since the funding rescission became official, but they’re still having to weigh how to cut back without cutting too deeply, Patiño and Hiott explained.

Hiott has been through similar media industry declines in the past, having come from a newspaper background

“I spent seven years leading a newspaper newsroom, and every year involved a certain amount of contraction, because that’s the way the newspaper industry was headed,” Hiott said. “One of the things that you learn when you go through that contraction process is, you really start to focus a lot more on, ‘okay, what are the most important things for the audience, and what are the things that are going to have the largest impact on the community?'”

“You learn to focus the coverage that you do in a way that provides something that is unique to the community, and it is additive,” she added. “So that’s one of the things we’ll be doing… We’ll really take a close look at what we’re doing and make sure that we’re providing things that really are unique… And we’ll be working more in partnership with some other organizations, too.”

Hiott said that’ll come in the form of moving some positions around rather than adding new ones, and continuing to push their fund drives to expand community support.

KUT(X) recently had an emergency fund drive that lasted for about a week and a half, and in that period, the station gained 1,500 new members and raised around $700,000 (about half of the station’s annual budget), Hiott added.

As for the partnerships she mentioned, that’ll look like working more with other public media outlets like Austin PBS and affiliate NPR stations throughout the state, to lean on their support but also to offer support in return.

“Public media is a very intertwined system, and so it’s important that — even though some of us will be able to weather the storm — it’s important that we’re able to help others weather the storm as well.”

Austin PBS will take a similar approach. Patiño said that may come in the form of producing 10 episodes of a program’s season instead of 13, for example. He also said the station will look for more revenue-generating opportunities, like Austin City Limits, and that there are opportunities to partner with other digital distributors for content.

“We’re really blessed in a market like Austin, Texas, where we have a very robust and giving philanthropic community. So most of our money always has come from the community,” Patiño said. “And then we have foundations’ grants that we seek, and then there is the opportunity for us to go out and get corporate sponsors, like we do for ACL.”

Patiño said first and foremost, they’re reaching out to the community to let them know that Austin PBS “needs their support now more than ever.”

“But I think that really the onus is on us to make sure that we’re not just filling the gap, but that we are providing a strategy about resiliency, about sustainability, about growth,” he said. “Here in Austin, we actually have the opportunity to grow into other markets,” Patiño said, mentioning plans to expand into Waco and to expand the network of support among other PBS stations in Texas.

“So we’re actually thinking that this could be an opportunity for us to reinvent ourselves, who we are, who [are] the communities that we’re able to go out and reach,” Patiño said. “And while, yes, this is definitely a setback, I think it allows us to reexamine what are the nice-to-haves versus the must-haves, and we will focus on that, and focus on what we’re really good at and what we do well — music, in our case, being one of them — and look to fill those voids in other parts of our state as well.”

KXAN also reached out to request an interview with KMFA’s CEO. This story will be updated after that interview occurs.

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