Donald Trump had the abolition of federal funds for public audiovisual, which he accuses of progressive drift. But with these new cuts, hundreds of TV and radio stations scattered throughout the territory may see their means disappear.
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New blow to local information in the United States, under the leadership of the Republican President, the Congress approved the abolition of $ 1.1 billion in funding already allocated for the next two years at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB).
Created in 1967 by President Lyndon Johnson, this organization finances a minority part of the budgets of national radios and televisions NPR and PBS.
But also, and more importantly, some 1,500 local radios and partner TVs which broadcast part of their content, from New York to Alaska.
“Without federal funding, many local public radio stations will be forced to close,” warned the president of the CPB Patricia Harrison.
“Daily people”
On their websites, stations have been ringing the alarm for months.
Radio-Télé Prairie Public, in Northern Dakota, estimates that it could lose 26% of its budget between combined drop in local state aid and CPB.
Pour Vermont Publicfour million dollars are at stake in the next two years.
“We will have to make very difficult decisions on the programs that we can preserve and those that we will have to cut,” sums up Ryan Howlett, the president of the financial arm of the Southern Dakota public broadcasting company (SDPB), which oversees a dozen radios and as many local TVs.
In this very rural and conservative state, “we will lose a connection point that binds us to each other,” he adds to AFP.
Donald Trump describes as “liars” and “enemies of the people” as information media, a very popular speech with his base.
The president ordered the end of the aid at NPR and PBS in early May, drawing up a long list of grievances on their “biased” information processing.
“These are left-wing support media funded by taxpayers, and this administration does not think it is a good use of taxpayers’ money,” said spokesperson for the White House Karoline Leavitt on Thursday.
“We do not undergo the same criticisms here at the local level[…]we are part of people’s daily life, ”said Ryan Howlett.
“Life buoy”
Advocated by the “2025 project” of the conservative reflection circle Heritage Foundationthe total abolition of CPB funds is a turning point.
Other attempts in the past have come up against the opposition of elected officials to the congress, including Republicans based in rural regions.
For Dan Kennedy, professor of journalism at the Northeastern University in Boston, it is in these areas far from urban centers that the suppression of subsidies risk “having a devastating effect”.
However, “these stations are sometimes the last life buoy[…] When there is a tornado, that’s where people learn, ”he explains.
Within theHeritage Foundationthis argument had been rejected by Mike Gonzalez, author of the chapter on public audiovisual in the “2025 project”.
For him, “local states and executives can design systems [d’alerte] At a lower cost than the whole of the public broadcasting apparatus, and without the ailments that accompany the current system ”.
The end of these funding is a new blow for local information in the United States.
Due to the decrease in readers and mergers of titles in the hands of large groups, more than a third of the country’s newspapers, or 3,300, have ceased to print since 2005, according to the latest report from Medill at Northwestern University.
According to a recent cartography established by the analysis company Muck Rack and the “rebuilding local information” coalition (“Rebuild Local News”), there is only the equivalent of 8.2 journalists per 100,000 inhabitants in the United States, compared to 40 in the early 2000s.
