When Congress passed President Trump's rescission bill defunding PBS and NPR, there were many eulogies from liberals in the media. Meanwhile, conservatives insisted that if liberals want more liberal media, they should pay for it themselves. According to Monday reports from The New York Times and The Washington Post, they are doing just that.
Post media reporter Scott Nover wrote, “Major philanthropic organizations said Monday they are committing nearly $37 million in emergency funding to keep public media stations afloat after Congress passed President Donald Trump’s rescissions bill, which eliminated $1.1 billion in federal funding from PBS and NPR stations over the next two years.”
Back in his article, Nover adds, “The names are already ones you might hear on an underwriting announcement on your local public radio station: The Knight Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, Ford Foundation, and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, plus the Schmidt Family Foundation (created by Google co-founder Eric Schmidt) and the Melinda Gates-led group Pivotal Ventures.”
The Ford Foundation bankrolls Chinese government infrastructure priorities. The MacArthur Foundation gives out politically motivated “genius grants” and hundreds of millions of dollars to liberal activists, as have other foundations, but Nover did not mention this.
Nor did his Times counterpart, Benjamin Mullin. Mullin also reported, “The Knight Foundation is committing $10 million to the fund, which aims to disburse the money before the end of the year. Together with Knight, the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Schmidt Family Foundation, Pivotal Ventures and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation have already committed nearly $27 million for the effort, called the Public Media Bridge Fund.”
Mullin also interviewed TKF CEO Maribel Perez Wadsworth (pronouns she/her/ella), who claimed, “We believe it’s crucial to have a concerted, coordinated effort to make sure that the stations that most critically need these funds right now have a pathway to get them.”
He then repeated another common scare tactic that was common throughout the rescission debate, “Ms. Wadsworth anticipates that many applicants will come from rural areas, where numerous stations have long relied on government funding to operate. One of the stations, KUCB in Unalaska, Alaska, relayed a tsunami warning to listeners even as the Senate was debating federal funding cuts last month, said Mollie Kabler, the chief executive of CoastAlaska, a nonprofit company that provides services to a consortium of Alaskan public radio stations.”
It would appear that if public media defenders were to have a point about local stations, it would be hard to top the example of Unalaska, but even Unalaska has private music stations that could also do emergency content.
On X, Nover similarly worried about the future by declaring that private donations are not enough and claiming that conservatives have been vindicated is analogous to claiming a knife wound survivor doesn't need skin.
[Cleaning up my knife wound.] Ah, yes, further proof I didn't need skin. https://t.co/Lm71WsWC3N
— Scott Nover (@ScottNover) August 19, 2025
Mullin closed with a similar warning, “[Public Media Company CEO Tim] Isgitt said roughly $100 million would be needed over the next two years to avoid widespread closures. He predicted that if those stations did close, other buyers could swoop in to acquire the stations’ valuable broadcast spectrum and eliminate local news and emergency services.”
That doesn’t make sense. If the station still exists but is just in the hands of someone Isgitt doesn’t like, there is no reason to suggest that Unalaska residents will be without tsunami warnings. Does Isgitt really believe that other people are indifferent to such things?
