by Elena Eisenstadt, Pennsylvania Capital-Star
July 17, 2025
*This story has been updated at 6:40 a.m. on Friday, July 18, 2025, with results of the House vote.*
The WITF office in Swatara Township, Dauphin County, outside Harrisburg.
(Photo by Tim Lambert/Pennsylvania Capital-Star)
Viewers and listeners across Pennsylvania are now seeing and hearing new announcements accompanying their favorite public broadcasting programs.
Public media organizations in the commonwealth, like central Pennsylvania’s WITF, place banners on their main web pages reading, “Call your Representative today to help protect the future of local public media,” as they now face an uncertain future.
The U.S. Senate passed a bill Thursday to eliminate $9 billion in foreign aid and federal funding for public broadcasting that it had previously allocated, putting $1.1 billion in jeopardy for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The measure passed the House shortly after midnight Friday.
More than 20 public radio and television stations in the commonwealth will be impacted.
“These funds support vital services — educational programming, local journalism, and public safety — in regions like Central Pennsylvania,” WITF CEO Ron Hetrick told LNP/Lancaster Online (WITF and LNP share a parent company).
President Donald Trump has defended the decision, writing that public broadcasting “spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as ‘news’,” in a statement in May.
Pennsylvania’s two U.S. Senators took different stances. Republican Dave McCormick voted in favor of backing the Trump administration’s efforts to defund public media.
Democrat John Fetterman voted against the bill alongside all of his fellow Democrats.
“Mr. Rogers, a Pittsburgh icon, taught us kindness and empathy. My wife, Gisele, learned English watching PBS, where Big Bird and Elmo have educated generations of American kids. As a father, it’s personal, and I can’t understand why we’re even considering taking away this programming for families across the nation,” he wrote in a statement to reporters.
Accusations of a liberal bias or “woke propaganda” are “sheer and total nonsense,” said Terry O’Reilly, president and chief executive officer of the Pittsburgh Community Broadcasting Corporation. PCPC operates National Public Radio (NPR) member station WESA and independent public radio station WYEP, an indie and classic rock music station.
WESA does get complaints about its coverage from people on the left and right of the political spectrum, and O’Reilly values constructive conversations about the station’s coverage, he explained.
But after decades in journalism, “I can tell you that if you’re not getting complaints from both sides about the fact that you’re not covering them closely enough, you’re probably not working hard enough,” he said.
Federal funding for the hundreds of nonprofit organizations is relatively meager in the U.S. compared to government funding for public media in other democratic countries.
Two percent of NPR’s annual budget and 15% of the Public Broadcasting Service’s (PBS) annual budget come directly from federal grants. The funding amounted to .01% of the total government spending in 2022, which was less than 18 countries across the world, including the U.K. and Canada, according to the economic analysis firm Nordicity.
Despite the small amount of federal funding public media receives in the U.S., this is not the first time it has come under fire, especially from Republican lawmakers, said Victor Pickard, professor of media policy and political economy at the University of Pennsylvania.
Former presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, as well as Trump in his first term, attempted to defund NPR and PBS, but Congress halted their efforts.
The move reflects a historical trend, as well as Trump’s broader media strategy to discourage dissenting views, according to Pickard.
Defunding public media was a “convenient” way for the administration to “weaponize any policy tool at their disposal to try to neutralize the press and rein them in and bully them into submission,” he said.
But Pickard argues the cutting initiative is not driven by public opinion on federal funding for public radio, which remains high among Democrats and Republicans, according to a survey conducted last week by The Harris Poll for NPR.
National support is especially bipartisan when it comes to public radio emergency alerts. Three-quarters of Democrats and Republicans rely on them for public safety news, the report found.
“I don’t think people were clamoring to defund public broadcasting,” Pickard said. “This is much more of an elite-driven agenda.”
Nearly 18% of NPR’s 1,000 member stations would stand to close if the federal government cuts off funding, according to a 2011 internal NPR report obtained by The New York Times.
The individual effects of these cuts would largely depend on the media market, said Matt Jordan, head of the film production and media studies department at Penn State University. Larger areas, like Philadelphia or Pittsburgh, depend less on federal funds for their operating budgets, and also have bigger donor bases than rural stations, he explained.
Federal funding accounts for about 9% of WESA’s total operating budget. WESA’s largest funding source comes from individuals and institutions local to the Pittsburgh area, and O’Reilly believes donors will continue to stand by the station, should the cuts go into effect, he said. The on-air light outside the WITF radio studio. (Tim Lambert/Pennsylvania Capital-Star)
“We don’t have any plan to make specific changes to programming, but we will have to face the fiscal realities of what it takes to operate without those federal funds,” according to O’Reilly.
“For public media to be sucked into the political maelstrom that is Washington these days is unfortunate, particularly because the greatest damage is going to be done in communities where it can be afforded the least,” O’Reilly added.
Representatives from WITF in Harrisburg, WVIA in Pittston and WHYY in Philadelphia did not respond to requests for comment.
Rural stations, who often derive 25% to 50% of their budget funds from federal monies, will be disproportionately hurt by the cuts, Pickard said.
WPSU, for example, will be more heavily affected because 20% of its funding comes from the federal government, Jordan said. Penn State operates the State College-based organization, which also faces a 20% funding cut from the university.
As a result of such financial pressures, the station has already begun layoffs, Jordan said, and local coverage will be spread thin.
“There’ll be one or two people trying to do everything … what we’re losing is people hearing and reading about their own lived experience, and everything becomes much more nationalized,” he said.
When communities lose their community media institutions, they tend to turn more toward national news outlets or Facebook groups, Pickard said. This loss can reach wide-ranging areas of social life, incentivizing disinformation and political polarization, and leaving people vulnerable to local corruption, according to recent studies.
Areas that stand to lose the most funding throughout the state are already underserved by journalism because of growing news deserts caused by private equity firms buying up local newspapers, according to Jordan.
Public media was established because a commercial media system is unlikely to generate “the things that democracy needs but the market is unlikely to provide,” including service to poor communities and programming that doesn’t attract advertisements, Pickard said.
“Most democracies on the planet take this to heart, and that’s why they fund robust public broadcasting systems, because they understand that this market failure will prevent commercial media from ever providing all society’s information and communication needs.”
Elena Eisenstadt is a 2025 Pennsylvania Legislative Correspondents’ Association summer intern.
Pennsylvania Capital-Star is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Pennsylvania Capital-Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Tim Lambert for questions: info@penncapital-star.com.
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