Congress overnight voted to send a rescission bill to the president that eliminates funding for public broadcasting, including KSMU and OPT. How much money will Ozarks Public Broadcasting lose going forward?
Knight: This amounts to about $1.3 million each year for Ozarks Public Broadcasting.
What percent of each station's budget — both KSMU and Ozarks Public Television — is made up of federal funding?
Knight: It's really different for each station, so it's about 10% of the budget for KSMU Radio. It's more like 1/3 of our budget for the television station.
Where else does OPB get its revenue?
Knight: Well, we're fortunate to have, you know, varied sources of funding. The largest share comes from our community. So that's individuals who are members of our stations, businesses who support us through corporate support, foundations who make grants. We also get some money from our license holder, Missouri State University. And we also are part of a group of cultural partners who share some revenue from the State of Missouri.
What will the impact of the federal cuts be for Ozarks Public Broadcasting?
Knight: Yeah, unfortunately, like we've been saying over the last several months as we knew this was looming, these won't be invisible cuts. I mean, we operate so efficiently right now that there's nothing easy to cut. And so, you know, with any budget gap, what you have to do is try to increase revenue. And we will do that. We are asking our community to show their support, and they have been. They are showing up for us, and we trust they will keep doing that. But it's also going to have to require some reduction of expense. And as I said, we operate in a lean way already and so reducing expense means reducing things that people will hear and will see on the air. So fewer programs, less of what people count on and love about public media, that's how we're going to have to get by in this time.
How will you make those decisions?
Knight: Well, that's a great question. We have a leadership team here at Ozarks Public Broadcasting, and we'll be making those decisions together. We aim to do that in a transparent way, in a way that maintains the service to the community and in a way that allows us to sustain our future. What we don't want to do is make short term cuts that make it hard for us to rebound and be around for the long term. We're committed to being here for the community, so that's how we'll approach this.
So it sounds like KSMU and OPT will continue to be here, just not exactly the same as it looks right now.
Knight: That's exactly right, yeah. We've been here for 50 years. We are committed to maintaining our service to the community. This is an enormous setback, you know, across our organization. Twenty-five percent of the funds we rely on have been taken away overnight. And so it will be a hard, you know, battle to get back from that. We definitely have hard days ahead of us, but we aim to be here for our community.
And talk more about what happens next. I know you've got a team in place, right, to work on finding other revenue sources?
Knight: Yeah, exactly. So we're, I mean, this is where you sharpen your pencils and you start looking at every single expense line and see what we can do without, what we have to do without, where we can negotiate things with some of our vendors, some of our program distributors, and then also where we can increase revenue, you know. We will be asking our community for their support, and we know there's support in this community for public media. We'll also be looking at grant funding and other revenue opportunities.
And I wanted to ask, what do you think the vote means for fair and independent journalism in the U.S.?
Knight: I think this is a real hit for the free press. You know, public media is different. What we've seen in the last several months is that commercial entities, in the end, exist to produce revenue for shareholders, and nonprofit media is unique in that way. Our objective, our absolute bottom line mission, is to serve our community. And when that funding is in peril, that really impedes our ability to do that. You know, recently there's been some academic research about the strength of democracies across the world and how that correlates to the way they fund their public media. And unsurprising to folks who are paying attention, there is a strong correlation between the health of a country's democracy and how how well funded their public media systems are. And we know that's because public media helps people understand the democratic process, encourages participation in the democratic process. It lessens the rates of extreme views. It's so important to a free democracy.
