Ken Burns: Public media funding cuts ‘shortsighted’
Ken Burns, a documentary filmmaker and director whose work is often published on PBS, criticized Congress’s elimination of $1.1 billion of federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB).
“I think we’re all in a bit of a state of a shock and also sort of reeling at the shortsightedness of it all,” Burns said to PBS host William Brangham on Friday.
“And what’s so shortsighted about it, I think, is that this affects mostly rural communities or the hardest hit,” he added.
On Thursday, the Republican-controlled House sent the rescissions bill to President Trump’s desk which aims to defund $9 billion in federal funding for USAID and public media. Trump is expected to sign the bill on Friday, along with other legislative wins for the administration.
Burns has had over 40 documentaries air on PBS, which were funded up to 20 percent by the government. However, he says others will suffer even more with projects that were previously financed by up to 75 percent with government dollars.
The impact on small, local news stations will also be felt across the country, he continued.
“And you begin to see the way in which, particularly in those small rural markets, the PBS station is really like the public library. It’s one of those important institutions. It may be the only place where people have access to local news, that the local station is going to the city council meeting,” Burns said.
Local media is already degrading, according to a Rebuild Local News and MuckRack report, which stated that one in three counties in the U.S. don’t have a local journalist. News stations in rural America will be hit the hardest; however, even stations in large cities depend on federal funding.
It was a tight battle in Congress to pass the bill. Multiple Republicans, including Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), voiced opposition against it.
“Some colleagues claim they are targeting ‘radical leftist organizations’ with these cuts, but in Alaska, these are simply organizations dedicated to their communities,” Murkowski posted on the social platform X.
Loyal MAGA Republicans, however, are celebrating this win by calling PBS and NPR biased.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said on July 15, “This is in our view the misuse of taxpayer dollars. They’re biased reporting; they’re not objective. They pretend to be so. And the people don’t need to fund that.”
Burns said he will continue his work despite the changes.
“We will scramble. We will have to make it up. I’m confident that, with the extra work, it will happen,” he said of making up the loss of funding.