Documentary Leaders Urge Senate Not Axe Funding For Public Television And Radio

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Some of the most respected figures in documentary film are calling on Congress to protect funding for public television and radio.
'It's critically important,' Gordon Quinn, a founding member of Kartemquin Films, said during a recent panel discussion at DC/DOX, the prestigious film festival in the nation's capital – where senators will determine the fate of funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which supports the work of PBS and NPR.
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Last month by a 214-212 vote, the House approved a 'rescissions package' to claw back $9 billion in funding previously approved by Congress, including $1.1 billion for CPB, as demanded by Pres. Trump. Now the measure is moving to the upper chamber, where it could be voted on as soon as next week.
'It's up to the Senate,' noted Prof. Patricia Aufderheide of American University, a prominent media scholar and author of a widely read book on documentary film. 'There are only 45 Dems [plus two Independents]. We have to find… Republicans who want to not rescind public broadcasting's money. It has been advance-funded for two years as protection against exactly this kind of politicization. And now they want to claw it back.'
If the Senate does not act by July 18, the rescission effort will fail and the CPB funding will remain intact.
As my colleague Ted Johnson reported on July 4, documentary great Ken Burns is speaking out on the issue, saying it would be 'foolhardy' for Congress to strip federal funding from public media. Burns told CBS News, 'I couldn't do any of the films I've done without them being on PBS.'
The Republican-led push to claw back PBS and NPR funding follows an executive order issued by Pres. Trump on May 1 that called NPR and PBS biased, ordaining 'The CPB Board shall cease direct funding' those outlets. 'The CPB Board shall cancel existing direct funding to the maximum extent allowed by law and shall decline to provide future funding.'
PBS and NPR have filed separate federal lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the president's order. But if the Senate passes the rescission, that might nullify their legal action.
About 16 percent of PBS's $373.4 million annual budget comes directly from grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, according to the New York Times. But CPB also provides important funding support to public radio and television stations across the country – which buy PBS and NPR content.
'If stations have their core funding cut out from under them,' Aufderheide commented, 'which is what will happen with rescission instantly, NPR and PBS have no customers.'
'It's the small rural stations that will be most affected,' Quinn commented. 'We're not going to lose our station in Chicago.'
'But Peoria will be very affected,' Aufderheide said, referring to a much smaller Illinois market. 'And Carbondale will be very affected.'
Burns, in his interview with CBS News, addressed the impact of potential rescission on PBS outlets.
'It's the largest network in the country. There's 330 stations. It mostly serves – and this is where the elimination of funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is so shortsighted – it mainly serves rural areas in which the PBS signal may be the only signal they get,' Burns said. 'They also have not only our good children's and prime time stuff, they have classroom on-the-air continuing education, homeland security, crop reports, weather emergency information. That we're going to take away?'
Historically, PBS has been the most important platform for documentaries in the U.S., airing countless nonfiction films of every genre across its series including POV, Independent Lens, Frontline, American Masters, American Experience, NOVA and more. PBS has aired the full Burns canon, from The Civil War to Muhammad Ali and Hemingway. Many Kartemquin Films productions have likewise been released on PBS, among them Hoop Dreams, the Steve James film that is considered one of the greatest documentaries of all time.
Said Quinn, 'It's been a longtime partner of ours in many, many ways.'
PBS is home to diverse content not by coincidence but through legislative mandate: in 1988 Congress created ITVS specifically 'to expand the diversity and innovativeness of programming available to public broadcasting.'
'Some of that [CPB] money flows to independent producers,' Quinn said, 'and people who sort of represent the diversity of stories that should be a part of our democratic process.'
Quinn played an important part in arguing for the creation of ITVS and has testified on Capitol Hill in favor of continued funding of PBS.
'The most important thing about PBS is that 'public' in the name,' he said. 'When you deal with PBS, that little sliver of public money — and it is a sliver that Congress is just trying to claw back and take away from PBS — means they have to be accountable to a public. They have to be accountable to the country at large and all of the different parts that make up America… Public money makes them accountable in a way that is different from the marketplace.'
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