Comment by atonse
21 hours ago
As others have said, the big guys (WGBH in Boston, WETA in DC, etc) will have minimal impact since they have a large pool of donors.
But the little guys will suffer more. Ultimately, I think we can all agree that we hope the impact won't be catastrophic as far as the number of listeners impacted.
Yep. Public media operations in rural and small-city markets are often as small as one full-time employee and cover large spans of territory. A cut to each of those stations might be as small as $150k but could represent much of their ability to do much more than minimal playback of out-of-market packages (which also degrade since many are published in part or full through CPB grants).
My guess is that things will largely continue as they have been, but we'll get a lot fewer of those cute little stories about a random one-off issue in a town of 300 people or whatever.
Probably not the biggest loss if I'm right, but still a major bummer, and yet another connection between the rural and the urban is severed.
I think people are interested in local news, so the gap will certainly be replaced but by monied interests, e.g. Sinclair [1] or similar. Who will promote their narrative and further polarize the information landscape.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_Group