Republicans finally got to the Holy Grail of media bias – defunding federal support for public radio and television. To the tune of $1.1 billion, Congress in July passed a bill rescinding the next two fiscal years’ appropriations for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), something that conservatives had been seeking since at least the mid-1990s.
Despite this, local outlets such as Colorado Public Radio (CPR) remain on the local taxpayer dole via “sponsorship” by governments, public agencies and taxpayer-funded non-profits.
They said it couldn’t be done
Past Republican presidents, sometimes operating with large congressional majorities, had been unable to get the federal cuts passed. In 2012, Mitt Romney’s promise to do exactly this caused a stir during his presidential debate with President Obama, but he never got the chance.
It turns out that it took a president who’s a committed disruptor operating with wafer-thin majorities to get it done, because nobody wanted to be the one senator or representative who killed the entire package.
The bulk of the cuts go not to CPB directly, but to local stations who use it to buy PBS and NPR produced programs. CPB for its part has announced it is simply closing its doors.
The conservative case for cutting the funding rested on two major points. First, federal funding was around 5% of the total money spent on public broadcasting, which now had many other sources of revenue including merchandising and a broader “underwriting” (public media’s term of art for advertising) base. Second, the news, and even the entertainment programming, was so monolithically left-of-center that it functionally constituted a taxpayer-funded in-kind contribution to the Democratic Party.
Still on the taxpayer dole
But fear not, Colorado public broadcasting fans, there’s still plenty of taxpayer money going there, it’s just not coming from the federal government, or at least not directly.
If we take a look at the very long list of CPR sponsors, we see a large number of corporations, but also a large number of municipal governments, government agencies, public schools, a public school union, public colleges and universities, and government enterprises.
I counted over 50 such sponsors. They range in size from the small, like the Marble Charter School or the US Air Force Band, to the much larger, like CollegeInvest, the Colorado Education Association (CEA), Pinnacol Assurance, and the major state universities and many of their departments. The Denver Public Schools and Denver Public Library are sponsors, along with HistoryColorado, the Colorado Lottery, and the cities of Lakewood and Westminster.
Taxpayer subsidized non-profits
More interesting are the non-profits, many of which are quite large and are heavily dependent on public funding for their revenue. For instance, the Denver Metro Convention and Visitors Bureau took in $42 million of its $46.5 million from government grants. Another sponsor, the Denver Art Museum, gets about 30% of its $42 million revenue from government grants.
Those non-profits are fairly benign. More troubling is the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless, a leading member of the Homeless Industrial Complex that profits off of Denver’s large homeless population . Three-quarters of its 2023 revenue of over $100 million came from government grants and Medicaid-funded services. So it shouldn’t be any surprise that it supports CPR, which persistently presents the homeless problem as one of funding.
Likewise Jewish Family Service, which gets roughly one-quarter of its funding through government grants. CPR recently featured it in a pitch for sponsors, where JFS explained how showing up as a CPR underwriter sent all the right signals to potential contributors, which sends a signal itself.
Murky money trail
For both government and non-profit supporters, it can be difficult to know exactly how much money ends up at CPR. Most government institutions don’t have their checkbooks online, and even government-created non-profits and enterprises may not respond to open records requests for specific expenditures.
None of this is to impugn the mission or value of any particular non-profit here. Most – the CEA being a notable exception – are noble, helping people who need help, promoting the arts, conserving nature for recreation. If they rarely solve problems, that’s often as much due to the hardy perennials of the human condition as it is to their meliorative approach.
It is to suggest that there remains plenty of taxpayer money flowing to public broadcasting from both governments and non-profits heavily dependent on governments, or in some cases purpose-built by them. And it is to suggest that they use that money to support a platform that advocates for even more funding, and frames issues in such a way as to demand it.
Joshua Sharf is a Denver resident and frequent contributor to Complete Colorado.
