Where Public Media Relies on Federal Funding Most

If the $1.1 billion cuts in funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CBP) materialize, the results will be felt by public radio and television stations across the country, with rural areas particularly feeling the brunt.

Cuts to the CPB would particularly affect rural parts of the United States. According to the CPB official website, CPB grants represented 17 percent of an average rural public station’s revenue, versus 9 percent for non-rural public stations in FY2023. Moreover, almost half of all rural grantees relied on CPB for at least 25 percent of their revenue while 33 rural stations – many of which were on Native American reservations – relied on CPB funding for at least 50 percent of their revenue that year. CPB adds that rural public stations already face additional challenges such as finding it harder to raise money from individual donors than urban stations do, as well as experiencing higher broadcasting and engineering costs due to the low population densities of their audiences and the fact that they must often operate multiple transmitters to reach remote areas.

A new analysis published on Current.org of the 2023 fiscal data of 467 public media stations across the United States shows that some states are also more reliant on federal funding than others, with West Virginia, Alaska, New Mexico and Montana standing out for their comparatively high average reliance on federal funding among their public broadcasters, standing at 32-37 percent. The analysis further found that although public TV stations tended to be more dependent on federal funding than public radio stations, the five stations most dependent on federal funding as a share of their FY2023 revenue in the U.S. were all radio stations, each with a reliance on federal funding of 80 percent or above. It is important to note here that the data shown in this infographic is based on the average dependency of public media stations on any federal funding source, not just the CPB.