If, like other Hampton Roads commuters, you instinctively turn the radio dial while battling morning traffic to find news or comfort in the oh-so-familiar voice of Steve Inskeep on “Morning Edition,” fear not.
Your local NPR station is not in danger of going dark, and neither are Hampton Roads’ PBS stations, despite a recent executive order aimed at restricting federal funding of National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service.
WHRO Public Media, which operates the NPR and PBS affiliated stations in the region, said the May 1 executive order has not affected its daily operations. Operating a total of five radio stations and five TV stations, WHRO is a large nonprofit media company, and unlike many smaller public media companies throughout the country, it relies on federal funding for only about 9% of its annual budget.
Bert Schmidt, CEO of WHRO Public Media, sat down for an interview with The Virginian-Pilot. He explained the financial structure of public media and the health of WHRO in the wake of recent funding threats.
The first step to understanding its impact on WHRO and other similar companies, Schmidt said, is to know public media has always been a private-public partnership. There are more than 1,500 independent stations affiliated with NPR and PBS across the country. They each receive some amount of federal funding through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but he said this is rarely their only source of money.
The May 1 executive order mandated all federal agencies to “terminate any direct or indirect funding to NPR and PBS.”
The president and CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Patricia Harrison, posted an online May 2 response saying the CPB is not a federal agency subject to the president’s authority: “Congress directly authorized and funded CPB to be a private nonprofit corporation wholly independent of the federal government.”
And although the legality of the executive order is expected to be argued in court, the order at face value prevents local stations from using taxpayer money to support NPR and PBS.
Historically, the stations could choose to spend their federal funds however they saw fit: either on their PBS and NPR content bills or ancillary needs like staff salaries or infrastructure costs.
While smaller stations may find it hard to afford the costs of NPR or PBS content without using federal money, it would not be a problem for larger companies like WHRO. WHRO has never spent its federal funds on PBS or NPR content, Schmidt said, because it hasn’t had to. Out of its roughly $19 million 2025 budget, only about $1.9 million is from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
WHRO is owned by 21 Virginia school districts and receives about $3 per student enrolled in the districts, or roughly $750,000, every year in state funds. Other revenue comes from the creation and selling of entertainment programming, news and educational content, renting space on its broadcast towers to telecommunication companies and memberships.
The executive order poses the greatest concern to public media companies serving communities much smaller than Hampton Roads, Schmidt said, because the smaller the community, the fewer people there will be to donate to public media. Public media companies without wide donor support and that are no longer able to use federal funds on NPR or PBS content could be in for a hard time, he said. Their closures could mean more news deserts.
“Regardless of your political party, the local station in a lot of these rural communities — communities that tend to be pretty red politically — it’s the only source of local information many folks have,” Schmidt said, adding fortunately his company is safe for now.
But it could take a hit in the future.
WHRO has already been allotted federal funding for the next two years, estimated to be within a close range to its current annual funding. But national media, including The New York Times and NPR, reported in April that the White House is expected to ask Congress to rescind more than a billion dollars of funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
WHRO uses federal funding to further its mission as a nonprofit, and its loss would likely shrink the company’s growth and parts of the company’s coverage area, Schmidt said.
Following a Tuesday board meeting, WHRO board chair Yvonne Allmond spoke to concerns surrounding future federal funding.
“The current feeling is that we are in a wait-and-see mode,” Allmond said. “Anything could happen at any time. So we are on guard.”
Colin Warren-Hicks, 919-818-8139, [email protected]