PBS chief Paula Kerger warns public broadcasting could collapse in small communities if Congress strips federal funding

As Congress moves to make massive cuts to public broadcasting this week, Paula Kerger, president and CEO of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), gives an unflinching look at the organization’s financial reality if its federal funding is stripped, and how she’s battling to protect the network’s iconic programming—from Frontline to Sesame Street. Kerger shares the role of corporate philanthropy in PBS’s future, its relationship with streamers like Netflix, and how she handles allegations of public media bias. Whether or not you’re an avid Nova or Ken Burns viewer, PBS’s challenge captures critical lessons about focus, mission, and the need to evolve or die trying.

This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by Robert Safian, former editor-in-chief of Fast Company. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.

A lot of people, I guess, misunderstand what PBS is. You mentioned these 300-some local member stations that control their own programming. So what’s the role of PBS in that system?

Since I’ve been in this job, I’ve spent a lot of time on the road visiting stations. I came into it from our station in New York. I was the station manager there, and I knew a lot about public broadcasting from the lens of WNET. I worked on an island off of the coast of North America, and so when I first took this job, I went on the road. I went to every state across the country, and I wanted to see what public broadcasting really looked like at the ground level because people do misunderstand. We’re not a network. We’re not like CBS or NBC. We don’t control any of these stations. We were built by the stations themselves to be able to deliver at scale the things that individual stations wouldn’t be able to do by themselves.

Even my old station in New York would not have been able to produce a NewsHour and a Sesame Street and a Masterpiece and a Great Performances and a Nature and a Nova. But if you put all of the resources together and people sort of shared in program acquisition and also shared in an ability to move content in between stations, you actually have something that is. Actually, the S in PBS represents the service that we provide for our public broadcasting system. And so, each station is independent. They make the decision what they air. I always say if you want a lesson in humility, run a federated organization because you have a lot of responsibility, but you absolutely don’t have ultimate authority over a whole series of things that people assume you do.

Federal funding accounts for a portion of your budget, right?

Yes.

There are legislative challenges to that underway. There’s an executive order that you’ve sued to block. I know you’re hoping none of this comes to pass, but do you have to prepare now in case the funding goes away?

So in aggregate, the amount of federal money that comes into public broadcasting is about 15%. The federal money that we’re talking about, that’s under debate in Congress, 70% of that actually goes directly to stations, and then a little bit of it comes to us. So 15%, someone just said to me a little while ago, well, that doesn’t sound like a lot. Maybe you could make that up. For us, the amount of money that we would lose would be significant, but if you’re sitting in a small community and 40% of your budget is the federal support, you probably can’t make that up. And this is actually why we fight so hard to try to hold onto that funding.

You mentioned the name of that hearing, and the impression is like, oh, PBS and this funding is a conduit for a certain kind of content to be infiltrated into some of these smaller communities as well as larger ones. Do you think there’s anything you could do to sort of change the impression of PBS from this administration, change the programming, change the talent, anything? Do you think about that?

We’ve always had really passionate supporters all across the political spectrum. . . . I think in some ways, perhaps we’re a talking point. I don’t know. During the hearing, some of the programs I was asked about are more than 10 years old, and I think someone just looked through a list and pulled some titles rather than actually understanding what it is that we have on the air. And I’ll tell you, Bob, I actually just got a note from someone over the weekend that said, “I think there may be some bias in what you do.” And I said, “Well, can you give me an example of what you’re talking about?” And many times they can’t.

Usually I think at that point they’re talking about news, which is a piece of what we do. It’s an important piece. We do the news every night. And then, we also have Frontline, which I often say is the most important series we have on our air. So few media organizations are doing investigative journalism anymore, and I know those programs have been heavily used by legislators and policy makers as well as the general public. So to me, all of this feels not exactly what people have represented. I don’t know.

The brand of PBS, you mentioned the historical bipartisan support, and it’s almost like the brand has been turned into meaning something different than it meant in a very short period of time.

Well, we’ve done a lot of surveys, and we do all the time. I take to heart our obligations to serve all of America. And I feel in this moment, people have put themselves into these little bubbles where they’re only getting information or interested in information that reflects back their own perspectives. And I think the role of any media organization should be to challenge people to understand that people have different perspectives. We can agree that we may not agree with someone’s point of view, but we can accept the fact that that’s a legitimate point of view. We seem to have lost all of that. Everything has devolved into “I’m right and you’re wrong.” But at our heart, I think we agree with a lot of key ideas and principles. And so, how do we get back to that again? How do we get back to helping people understand information that is going to be important for them for their lives? And that’s what we do.

And when you choose to take legal action against the Trump administration, against the executive order, how much do you worry that there’s a certain part of the country that’s just going to say, yep, that confirms that they’re against our president? I mean, those are tough decisions, right?

Yeah. This was a really tough decision, and I had people that were very anxious that we file immediately, “Why haven’t you filed yet?” And I had others that said, “Just make sure that you really have looked at this carefully.” I mean, the decision to file was not one that we took lightly, and frankly, we filed with a great amount of sadness. And it was sobering to look at the first draft of our complaint that begins PBS v. Donald J. Trump, to the fact that we would ever be in a position where we would be involved in legal action against the president of the United States is nothing that I ever thought we would be in, but the executive order was one we had to respond to. It made it illegal for any federal money to come into public broadcasting. This executive order would’ve restricted any of our stations from using any money that they received from the government. I mean, it would basically unwind our system. So we then made the decision that we were going to go forward, but it is not anything that I wanted to do.

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