Details from President Donald Trump's first budget suggest federal dollars for public broadcasting might be slashed — a move that would have an averse effect on WOUB, the local PBS affiliate.
The budget plan Trump is considering, produced by a conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation, was leaked the day before he ascended to the presidency. In that plan, federal agencies across the board would face budget cuts while some programs would be eliminated entirely, including the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The plan also suggests privatizing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
"Privatized is just a word for zeroing out," Mark Brewer, the general manager of WOUB, said. "Most stations would not be able to generate the same amount of support that they would be losing."
The Corporation for Public Broadcast is best known for its public radio and public television networks, NPR and PBS, but it helps fund more than 1,500 public radio and television stations around the country, including WOUB. CPB's 2015 budget was $445 million, most of which went to local stations and was just a fraction of the nation's $3.68 trillion in expenditures.
According to Brewer, the corporation covers a quarter of WOUB's budget. He added that the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities pay for a lot of the programming on public television.
"That's a double whammy because we'd be losing funding and some content providers," he said.
Those budget changes are not set in stone and could still be voted down.
"The Administration has not submitted a budget or budget statement to Congress detailing their approach to public broadcasting," Letitia King, CPB's senior vice president of communications, said in an email. "The media coverage has been on a third-party proposal."
But in order to stay ahead of the issue, the corporation released a statement stressing the importance of public media to the nation.
"It is not a large investment compared to most of what government does — just about $1.35 per citizen per year — but it pays huge dividends in education, public safety and civic leadership to millions of Americans and their families," the statement said.
Trump is not the first president to threaten the funding of public television. Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and George W. Bush also tried to cut funding for public media.
"It's part of the nomenclature for that particular party," Brewer said.
But Brewer felt that the failure to eliminate public media in the past showed the strength of its support in Washington.
"One of the reasons that it's always failed before is there (have been) pretty good bipartisan efforts that show the value that CPB brings to the country," he said.
Robert Stewart, the director of the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism, said he was unsure what Ohio University would do if WOUB lost a major funding source, since he wasn't sure what the future would hold for the CPB.
"It would certainly be damaging," he said.
