“I see the impact our local stations have in communities; red states, blue states. I see the work that our stations are doing for advancing civil conversation,” PBS President and CEO Paula Kerger said. | Zack Stanton/POLITICO Women Rule PBS chief: ‘I wish I knew’ why Trump wants to defund us Paula Kerger, the longtime president and CEO of PBS, worries that local stations in underserved areas have the most to lose in the administration’s latest budget cuts.

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For the third year in a row, the Trump administration’s proposed federal budget would zero-out funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. And PBS President and CEO Paula Kerger doesn’t understand why.


“I wish I knew,” Kerger said in an interview for POLITICO’s Women Rule podcast . “I don’t understand why we seem to be perennially in this fight.”

“I see the impact our local stations have in communities; red states, blue states. I see the work that our stations are doing for advancing civil conversation,” Kerger said. “I am in places where local journalism has really collapsed, and our local radio and TV stations really are the local media presence.”

Trump’s cuts could, she worries, create new media deserts across vast expanses of America.

“When you look at the entire economy of public broadcasting, about 15 percent of the funding for our stations comes from federal appropriations — but that’s an aggregate number,” Kerger said. “For some of our stations in rural parts of the country — so Cookeville, Tennessee, for example, it’s probably about 40 percent.”

President Trump’s proposed 2020 federal budget, which was released on March 11, would eliminate all taxpayer funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting over a two-year timespan, cutting the organization’s annual appropriation in the first year from $465 million to $30 million, or 94 percent. More than 70 percent of the CPB’s annual funding goes to local public TV and radio stations.

Kerger fears that a funding cut of that size could imperil universal access to public broadcasting, restricting the ability of Americans in rural communities to watch arts and educational programming or show their children “Sesame Street.”

“When public broadcasting was created,” said Kerger, “the federal appropriation was going to be particularly critical to ensure universal access, particularly to those that live in parts of the country that either have less people or that don’t have an economic base to support a local media organization.”

The past two years, Congress has essentially ignored Trump’s suggestion to defund public broadcasting, continuing its appropriations at essentially the same levels that have been doled out annually for the past decade.

Now, Kerger is again relying on Congress to dispense with the president’s recommendation.

“We have very strong support in the House and the Senate [on] both sides of the aisle,” Kerger said. “I’m very sympathetic. [There are] very hard decisions to be made about where federal money should be spent. I don’t think it’s inappropriate to scrutinize it every year, but to be in this battle every year is really disappointing.”

Even so, Kerger promised that PBS will continue its mission to be a platform for civility and education.

“The late, great Gwen Ifill used to say often, ‘Our job is to bring light, not heat to the conversation.’ And I really take that so much to heart,” Kerger said. “If we can focus on having an honest conversation where we can truly talk to one another, I think that is really at the heart of how our democracy was founded. And I think that … is a huge effort towards bringing civility back to conversation, so that we truly listen to one another and look for those areas of common purpose.”

To hear more from Paula Kerger — including on why diversity makes PBS a better business, and how “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” changed her life — listen to the full podcast here. Women Rule takes listeners backstage with female bosses for real talk on how they made it and what advice they have for women looking to lead.