With The Corporation for Public Broadcasting shutting down, The New York Times travelled to the other end of the country to remote regions of Alaska to bring stories of doom and gloom, but some of congressional reporter Megan Mineiro’s Tuesday claims came across as problematic.
Mineiro wasted no time:
“Attention: A tsunami warning has been issued for this area,” the message said. “Move to high ground immediately. Tune to your local radio station for details.”
Residents of Unalaska, Alaska, hopped into their cars and tuned to KUCB, the only local station on the island, to listen for live updates as they drove uphill and away from danger.
The next day, the Senate passed the bill, acceding to Mr. Trump’s demand to cancel funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides money for KUCB and stations like it all over the country that serve listeners in remote areas — many in Alaska reachable only by plane, boat or, in the winter, ice bridge.
The order of events is interesting. Residents got the warning and then tuned into KUCB not were listening to KUCB and then got the warning. As recently as last year Alaska Public Media itself noted that private industry is revolutionizing media in rural Alaska:
The availability of high-speed internet from Starlink satellites has, by most accounts, been revolutionary in rural parts of Alaska.
Elders in villages can have face-to-face conversations with their grandkids living far away. The owners of broken-down snowmachines are able to watch videos showing how to fix them. A search-and-rescue crew even used Starlink to see social media posts that helped them find teenagers lost in a snowstorm.
And as Starlink continues to gain users, it's forced traditional telecommunications companies, who've raked in hundreds of millions of dollars in federal subsidies, to compete.
However, Mineiro also gave moderate-to-liberal Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski some sympathetic treatment, “But in a Senate remade by Mr. Trump’s threats of political retribution, Ms. Murkowski found herself in a lonely fight, with her fellow Republicans declining to join her in moving to protect funding for stations that serve as a lifeline of communication for many rural Americans… It has also raised questions about whether someone like Ms. Murkowski can still be effective in Donald Trump’s Senate.”
Returning to KUCB, station manager Lauren Adams told Mineiro, “I worry about what will happen when we have an emergency alert situation.”
Mineiro lamented that so much of the CPB fight in Washington had little do with life in Unalaska, “Even in the age of cellphones and Wi-Fi, residents said radios here were constantly tuned to KUCB, which brings them local news and emergency alerts as well as City Council meetings, high school basketball games and public health programs on topics ranging from the seasonal flu to suicide prevention.”
She also cited “Kristin Hall, the station manager at KYUK in Bethel, Alaska, which broadcasts in both English and Yup’ik, an Indigenous language commonly spoken in the region. Raising donations to keep stations on the air in rural Alaska, where some households still collect human waste in ‘honey buckets,’ is not realistic, she added.”
Is it? The CPB sent all of Alaska around $12 million. It wasn’t that long ago, that The New York Times was promoting various groups raising tens of millions of dollars to keep such stations afloat.
After more such lamentations, Mineiro returned to Murkowski and concluded, “She also suggested that she was reluctant to leave Congress given that she is one of the few remaining Republicans who openly criticize Mr. Trump. Her voice in Washington, she said, ‘is important for my constituents here, but I think it’s important for the broader discourse as well.’”
The entire argument for federally funded public radio seems to rely on the premise that it actually isn’t 2025. Even if one omits the Starlink revolution, if Alaskans still want or need public radio, they should take it up with their governor or state legislators.
