Collage by Julia Walck
Cincinnati Public Radio President and CEO Rich Eiswerth can now safely say that National Public Radio stations 91.7 WVXU and 88.5 WMUB, and classical station 90.9 WGUC, have survived the first year of their new reality.
Last summer, the public media organization lost about 7 percent of its annual budget when the Republican-led U.S. Congress voted to rescind support for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which had provided varying levels of funding to roughly 1,500 independent public radio and television organizations across the country since 1967. With no future funding in sight, the CPB dissolved in January, ushering in a new era for public media.
“Everybody’s scrambling to do what we can to reinvent the system,” Eiswerth says. “We’ve been buoyed by two things: Some cost-cutting measures and overwhelming support from the community.”
Southwest Ohio’s public television stations, CET and ThinkTV, are also holding on, despite losing roughly 20 percent of their annual budget, says Kitty Lensman, president and CEO of Public Media Connect, which represents the channels. As members of the Public Broadcasting Service, the stations will continue to provide educational and enrichment programming for children and adults—for now. “We also lost some state funding, which was a double whammy,” Lensman says. “In total, it’s about $3.1 million [a year].”
Since his first term, President Donald Trump has argued that NPR and PBS coverage is not “fair, accurate, unbiased, and nonpartisan.” The local media presidents contest his viewpoint.
“Public radio always comes down pretty much dead center—and there are very few organizations that do that,” says Eiswerth, who says NPR follows a rigorous editorial policy to produce up-to-date and unbiased news and information.
In March, a federal judge blocked Trump’s 2025 executive order to strip the stations of their funding, saying the move was unconstitutional and unlawful. That ruling is expected to have minimal effect on funding, because it does not alter Congress’s vote.
When the cuts came, both nonprofit organizations immediately sought ways to cut expenditures. Cincinnati Public Radio—out about $750,000 a year—chose not to fill an open music director position at WGUC 90.9, for example, instead entering into a contract with WDPR 88.1 Program Director David Crean to program both stations. CET and ThinkTV are also keeping positions open, and will stop producing a monthly magazine this month. So far, neither organization has had to lay off any employees.
Both media leaders say their organizations made it through this year because of increased support from individual donors and foundations, but Lensman worries whether that’s sustainable.
The CPB network had reached nearly 99 percent of Americans with its free programming and served as the backbone of the emergency alert system before it dissolved. Eiswerth anticipates consolidation, mergers, and some educational and informational services to be eliminated in this shift.
The strain has already been too much for some organizations, including WBGU, the PBS station produced out of Bowling Green State University, which had relied on the CPB for about half of its budget. The university decided to drop its PBS affiliation this summer and will continue broadcasting with limited operations focused on livestreaming services, meaning residents in 19 counties will no longer have access to PBS content.
The next fiscal year, starting in July, should come with fewer surprises, the public media presidents say, but the following year brings new challenges. The CPB had been paying for music rights and satellite rental fees for the entire public media system for decades. Before it dissolved, it put forth the money to cover those costs through June 2027.
“What happens beyond that? We’re not quite sure,” Eiswerth says. “But we will continue to be open to new ideas. We’re dead if we don’t.”
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