Eliminating Public Media Funding
Cookie Monster stares into the middle distance from a control room at a PBS station in 2025, the year the federal government ended support for public broadcasting.
Katie Oyan/AP

After federal funding, cuts and ‘rage giving’ at Illinois public media stations

It's been one year since the Corporation for Public Broadcasting began winding down. That came after the Trump administration realized a longtime conservative goal of ending federal funding for public radio and television in America.

Since then, hundreds of NPR, PBS and independent stations across America have been working to carry on. We'll check in with the leaders from three Illinois stations: in Champaign-Urbana, Charleston, and Macomb.

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a white woman with blond hair wearing a black top and colorful scraf; she sits behind a broadcast microphone with an NPR logo, in front of a grid of honey brown sound-dampening squares on the wall of the studio
Illinois Public Media

NPR president Katherine Maher on a year without federal funding

It's been one year since the Corporation for Public Broadcasting began winding down. That came after the Trump administration realized a longtime conservative goal of ending federal funding for public radio and television in America.

Since then, NPR has had buyouts and layoffs and programming changes, but CEO Katherine Maher says as difficult as that's been, she hopes it's not led to noticeable differences for listeners.
 

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