When a typhoon hit Alaska, public radio station KYUK was on the air, broadcasting critical information about conditions, evacuations, and search and rescue operations. An estimated 1,600 people were displaced, and many were saved in the biggest airlift operation in state history.

“The work that we do in terms of public safety communication literally does save lives,” said Sage Smiley, KYUK’s news director. 

KYUK is small, scrappy, and bilingual. It broadcasts in English and Yugtun, the language of an Indigenous population that lives in villages along two massive rivers. The station airs NPR content, but also high school basketball games, local call-in talk shows, and even a show hosted by the volunteer search and rescue team, answering listeners’ questions about ice conditions and safety. The station is a lifeline for this unique region.

KYUK covers an area the size of the state of Oregon, but after Congress passed the Rescissions Act over the summer, it lost 70 percent of its operating budget. Republicans have targeted public media since its inception in the late 1960s. But this is the first time they have successfully ended the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, wiping out more than $1 billion in funding for public media. 

This week on Reveal, we take listeners inside KYUK as it grapples with this new reality. Host Al Letson sits down with Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski to discuss how the cuts are affecting her state. And we take a trip to WQED in Pittsburgh for a look back at how Fred Rogers, the host of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, defended public television throughout its decadeslong struggle to survive Washington politics.

Dig Deeper

Listen: KYUK

Listen: Trump’s “Pincer Attack” on Journalism Is Working. But There’s Hope. (More To The Story)

Read: What we know about recovery, a month after ex-Typhoon Halong (KYUK)

Read: PBS Funding Cuts: A Blow to Children Who Need It Most (Mother Jones)

Read: Why the Right Is to Blame for Distrust in the Media (Mother Jones) 

Read: WQED’s future is on the line—but we’re not giving up (WQED)

Read: History of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (Corporation for Public Broadcasting)

Watch: Public Media: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO via YouTube)

Learn more: Fred Rogers Institute

Learn more: Fred Rogers Productions

Learn more: Heinz History Center

Credits

Reporters and producers: Anayansi Diaz-Cortes and Michael I Schiller | Editor: Cynthia Rodriguez | Reporting and producing support: KYUK newsroom, Kara McGuirk-Allison, and Josh Sanburn | Production manager: Zulema Cobb | Fact checker: Anna Rogers | Digital producer: Artis Curiskis | Original score and sound design: Jim Briggs and Fernando Arruda | Legal review: Victoria Baranetsky | Episode executive producer: Brett Myers | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Host: Al Letson | Special thanks: Steven Rascón, Fred Rogers Productions, Fred Rogers Institute, Heinz History Center, and WQED

Support for Reveal is provided by listeners like you, and the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Park Foundation, The Schmidt Family Foundation, and the Hellman Foundation.

Transcript

Reveal transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for Reveal’s radio stories is the audio.

Al Letson:From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Revealed. I’m Al Letson. Julia Jimmie lives on the western edge of Alaska where indigenous villages dot the banks of two massive rivers.  
Julia Jimmie:I’m from Tuntutuliak. If you go by boat, it’s two hours away, but if we take a plane, it’s 20 minutes.  
Al Letson:20 minutes from Bethel, the biggest town in this remote part of Alaska, Julia is Yup’ik.  
Julia Jimmie:By listening to me speak, you can tell English isn’t my first language.  
Al Letson:Yugtun is Julia’s first language. It’s the first language of many people that live in the region, and Julia is a familiar voice on the radio, even though she never expected to be.  
Julia Jimmie:One morning, my sister called me, she said, “Angela Denning is going to call you. Do you know who she is?” I said, “Yeah, she’s the English news director at KYUK.”  
Al Letson:Now, this is a small town where a lot of people know each other.  
Julia Jimmie:She said, “She’s going to ask you to do the Yup’ik News Today,” and I said, “I’m not going to go on the radio.”  
Al Letson:The radio station, KYUK is a media staple in these parts, especially when there’s a weather emergency. And Angela, the news director, wanted Julia to translate the news.  
Julia Jimmie:I told her, “I have my baby with me. I don’t have a babysitter, and that’s why I’m jobless. And only if I can bring him in with me.” And she said, “Sure, bring him.” So that’s how I started. I brought my one-year-old at the time, sitting on my lap, translating recording Yup’ik News.  
 [foreign language 00:01:59].  
Al Letson:KYUK is a small, scrappy, bilingual station. It’s an NPR affiliate that airs the big national stories of the day.  
Leila Fadel:This is Morning Edition from NPR News. I’m Leila Fadel.  
Al Letson:But also it’s a hyper-local station.  
Speaker 4:Good morning, Bethel and the YK Delta. You’re tuned into KYUK 640 [inaudible 00:02:19]-  
Al Letson:Where people live and die by the weather.  
Speaker 4:Scattered rain showers mixing with snow after 10:00 PM…  
Al Letson:The station has its own local talk show.  
Speaker 5:This is Coffee at KYUK. Come in and have a cup.  
Al Letson:Native drums fill music breaks.  
Speaker 14:Here is this week’s Yup’ik word of the week.  
Speaker 15:[foreign language 00:02:40].  
Al Letson:And the search and rescue team often does the station ID.  
Norman Jaffet:Hi, this is Norman Jaffet from Bethel Search and Rescue. If you get lost or your snow machine or car breaks down, stay calm and don’t panic. You’re listening to KYUK 640 AM in Bethel, Alaska.  
Al Letson:It costs around $1.8 million to run KYUK each year. 70% of that money came from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. CPB is a nonprofit that distributes government funds to public media stations across the US, and it’s been under threat from Republicans for decades. President Trump has been targeting CPB since the first time he took office.  
President Trump:We don’t need it and it’s a waste of money.  
Al Letson:And this summer in a partisan vote, Congress clawed back over a billion dollars of federal funding that had already been approved for CPB.  
Speaker 16:After more than six decades, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting will be shutting down operations.  
Al Letson:The news hit the KYUK staff extremely hard.  
Sage Smiley:The emotional weight of trying to continue to do your job and do a public service when that’s being actively fought against and deprioritized, it’s emotionally tiring.  
Al Letson:Through conversations with the KYUK news team, our first story today will take you inside the station, as the staff tries to make sense of the moment.  
Samantha Watson:It just feels like if anyone were to come here and see it and understand it, they wouldn’t be making these choices  
Al Letson:And grapples with how to keep what’s essential on the air.  
Evan Erickson:The level of responsibility that I feel coming on is massive.  
Al Letson:KYUK news director, Sage Smiley, is going to take it from here and help us understand the role that this one public radio station plays in this often overlooked part of the country, a place defined by stark beauty.  
Sage Smiley:The sky in Bethel is bigger than anywhere else I’ve ever been. It exists between the Kuskokwim River and the Yukon River, and so it’s filled with lakes and tributaries and is very open and full of tundra. And then you talk to people who live in the villages and they say, “Oh no. Bethel’s so crowded.” And you realize that when you go out to a village that it really is just such wide open space. There’s water and a little bit of land and sky.  
 Bethel is about 400 miles west of Anchorage and there’s no road connecting us, so the only way to get in and out of Bethel is by plane. Most of the population here is indigenous. The vast majority of people are Yup’ik. There are also some Chup’ik communities and then upriver, we also have Athabaskan communities. And as indigenous people, the people of this region maintain a very strong cultural and spiritual connection to the land and to the process of subsistence.  
Julia Jimmie:We make a living by hunting and fishing. We pick berries, we gather wild greens and roots.  
Sage Smiley:This is Julia again.  
Julia Jimmie:In some of our villages, the Yup’ik language is still our first language.  
Sage Smiley:The Yup’ik language is integral to everything that we do. We were created as an indigenous station.  
Julia Jimmie:The whole newscast, Monday through Friday, is translated. All the weather alerts are translated.  
Iris:[foreign language 00:06:22].  
Julia Jimmie:So that’s my daughter. She works here. Iris. When she’s making announcements on the radio, she introduces herself with her Yup’ik name, [inaudible 00:06:38]. I’m proud that she can speak Yup’ik. I think it’s because she works here that we have a special bond and she does a good job.  
Sage Smiley:At KYUK, there’s this built-in community. There are people who have worked at the station for decades and so many people in town have worked in some capacity or other at KYUK. Maybe they hosted the Yup’ik language news in high school or they were a basketball announcer or they worked in the newsroom. And there’s a camaraderie to working in such a rural place. We’re all coworkers, but we’re also really good friends.  
Samantha Watson:My name is Samantha Watson. I’m a news reporter here at KYUK. It has been my first full-time job as a reporter. I think it was my first week on the job. I was sitting at my desk and I was looking for a broom. I couldn’t find a broom, but I could find a chainsaw. There was just a chainsaw sitting on a desk. I was like, “All right, that kind of makes sense.” I’m a general assignment reporter and get to report everything from return of the salmon community stories to breaking news, communities out of power, out of water, on a daily basis.  
Evan Erickson:My name is Evan Erickson. I’m a reporter at KYUK since May 2023. I work with news director Sage Smiley, and my co-reporter Samantha Watson here in Bethel. This hub community, it serves dozens of villages that otherwise would be not clued into what’s happening and what the levers of power are doing here in Bethel, far from where they live.  
Sage Smiley:The Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta is a region of extremes. Temperatures in summer can get into the 80s, and then in the winter with the wind chill, it’ll be down into the negative 50s or 60s. Headphone cables or XLR cables, when it’s that cold, they can just snap in half.  
Evan Erickson:If you haven’t been out to the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, you haven’t really gotten the full picture of what Alaska really is.  
Sage Smiley:I think a lot of places shut down a bit for the winter, and it’s almost the opposite in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, because the winter is when we can establish the ice road. The Kuskokwim is like a highway when it freezes. We plow an entire highway. There are road signs and everything, but obviously it’s ice so it can shift and change as the weather shifts and changes. As snow accumulates and weighs down the road or there’s a brief thaw or whatever, people all over the region keep watch and report on what they’re seeing, and they call into our show, called Riverwatch.  
Speaker 11:Have our first caller, Alan from Aniak. Good afternoon.  
Alan:Hey, good afternoon. Now, right across Aniak on the end of the runway, it’s been an open hole. It never froze. It’s still wide open.  
Sage Smiley:Our hosts are search and rescue volunteers, and before going on the air, they’ll often fly over the river and look at the holes so they can give people the most updated information about where it is and isn’t safe on the river ice.  
Speaker 11:They have gotten noticeably smaller, but they’re still long ways from being frozen over, all the open holes that we saw today. Long ways. And I guess one of the highlights of this morning’s flight, flying just at the right time of the day, right after sunrise, the moose. Holy cow, from Bethel on up.  
Speaker 19:Yeah, they’re coming down because of the snow.  
Speaker 11:Yeah, herds.  
Sage Smiley:The work that we do in terms of public safety communication literally does save lives. When someone does go through the river ice, we’re in constant communication with the search and rescue teams. But also there’s so much more here than the dynamic physical environment or the unique dangers of travel. The cornerstone of what we do is preserve and amplify the voices of this region, the generations and generations of indigenous communities and their culture and tradition.  
 There are so many stories that are meaningful. One is the premier sled dog race of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, which is the Kuskokwim 300. That’s a 300-mile sled dog race from Bethel up upriver to Aniak and back. We spend 18 to 20 hours a day in the station doing live coverage, trail reports, live interviews with finishers.  
 Do you want to answer some questions? They’re shy today.  
 KYUK won an award in the best humor category for our dog interviews, which involved a lot of snuffling into the microphone and was well received by everyone.  
 Are you a good dog? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. You’re a good dog.  
 I think when we first started to hear real rumbles of potential rescission of previously committed funds for public media, I think I maybe felt too much hope. But as it got closer to the July 18th deadline, it started to feel less and less safe.  
Samantha Watson:Towards the end of the day, we had just kind of all crowded around one screen. There was some senator who was wearing a hot dog shirt because it was also national hot dog day. Public media is about to be slaughtered. Someone’s wearing a hot dog shirt, and I think it was one of those things where it’s painful to talk about seriously what is actually happening, so we’re just going to talk about the outfit choices in the room. The three of us sitting around the computer and just kind of watching it unfold.  
 I think when it finally came, it just felt like there was this quiet of this thing that we kind of couldn’t believe what happened had happened. It was just sitting with this now giant question mark of what happens to us after that.  
Sage Smiley:It felt kind of like shell shock a little bit. A station like KYUK fulfills a singular function within the media system of the United States. Nobody else is broadcasting Yup’ik language news on a daily basis or even covering the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta in any sort of a reliable way. And to think of the potential loss for the communities of this region, it’s horrifying to think of all that going away.  
Samantha Watson:It is just so bizarre because we look at ourselves and we’re like, were we doing something wrong this whole time? Were we doing a bad job? Why are we losing 70% of our funding? Why are we being decimated?  
Sage Smiley:In some ways, I think it was a bit of a blur to continue to do work after Congress passed this Rescission Act. I’m glad that we recorded some of our news meetings in those days surrounding rescission.  
 The agenda of this week’s news meeting is whatever feelings you’re feeling about the rescission of public broadcasting funds. I think I wrote it on… Wait, I’ll pull up the agenda. What did I write on? [inaudible 00:14:38].  
Evan Erickson:If it comes down to it and we’re furloughed or whatever, is there anything that bars us from volunteering hours because we want to tie up little pieces and leave things right?  
Sage Smiley:Well, yeah. I mean, think on your work should be paid basis, I would discourage that, but I think this is a small and mighty newsroom that really, really believes in the mission.  
 We’re still parsing our way through what the next few months look like. KYUK is going to be fundamentally changed at the end of the year, and it’s a daily conversation and a daily recalibration of how we do the most good we can with the time that we still have here. I think many journalists are used to working on a deadline but not a final one. At this point, money is so tight and it’s looking like we may only be able to keep one reporter after the end of the year.  
Evan Erickson:It sounds like there may be just enough funding to keep me on as a solo newsroom, and the level of responsibility that I feel coming on is massive. There’s a sense out here with the remoteness and with the number of communities that we try in earnest to cover, there’s a sense that anything can happen at any moment.  
Speaker X:You can see the high winds already moving in from Unalaska pushing all the way up. We have [inaudible 00:16:15]-  
Sage Smiley:Around the first week of October, we had a pretty significant storm glance off the YK Delta, and in talking to the National Weather Service at that time, they started to raise a flag, but they didn’t know really where it was going to hit.  
Speaker X:… winds. That’s also why we have so much flooding because these winds are hitting almost perpendicular to the-  
Sage Smiley:And within the final 36 hours before the storm hit, it took a really sharp turn and really hit the northern part of the Kuskokwim Delta coast head-on.  
Speaker X:I’ve lived here all my life. I’ve never seen anything like this.  
Sage Smiley:Communities in this region know bad weather. They expect flooding. They expect high winds on the coast. It’s just a factor of life living on the Bering Sea, but every community member we’ve spoken to said they’ve never seen a storm like this storm. And it flipped a house all the way over onto its roof.  
Speaker 20:I just went into prayer mode because it was so scary. It was pitch black outside.  
Speaker 21:This took people into peril where folks were swimming, floating, trying to find debris to hold onto, in the cover of darkness, at nighttime.  
Sage Smiley:Flood levels were exceeded. Dozens and dozens of houses floated off their foundations, crashed into each other, were taken out to sea.  
Speaker X:It’s wiped out. The weaker houses, older houses are just gone. They’re demolished or just gone. The stronger houses, newer houses, they floated, they could have floated forever away into the ocean, but they hit the cliff edges and that’s where they are now.  
Sage Smiley:The state of Alaska says that this is the biggest airlift operation in state history. And it involved the Coast Guard, the National Guard, the state troopers, private aircraft, military aircraft. We’ve spoken to so many people who basically didn’t know if they were going to make it through the night, found themselves in their homes floating away.  
Speaker X:I’m tilting now. I’m starting to tilt.  
Samantha Watson:Oh, my gosh. What will happen if you tilt all the way? That’s really scary.  
Speaker X:I think I’m on a creek, so that’s why I’m tilting.  
Sage Smiley:Yeah. I think in some of these hardest hit communities, part of what’s so devastating to people is understanding that their community may never look the same, that they may never be able to return to what was. And how do you process that when you also had to leave with only the clothes you were wearing, didn’t even get to grab your ID and don’t know where you’re going to be.  
 There are 27 public media stations in Alaska, and I think a huge part of the way that we’ve been able to respond is because we’ve been able to lean on colleagues on the radio network that exists within Alaska. Because of the storm, because of the reporting that we’ve been doing, we’ve received tens of thousands of dollars in donations from all over the country over the last week, and I think Sam’s position is going to be able to stay for one more year.  
 That doesn’t solve the problem. That doesn’t address the fact that long-term, public media has been defunded. We’ve lost the stability. KYUK and its newsroom may never look the same. Yes, it impacts me personally, but frankly, there are other jobs, I will find another job. I am not wrecked by rescission, but what is wrecked is this media legacy on the YK Delta, is the ability of this region to be properly covered by journalism. And so it’s personally devastating, but not because it’s my job, but because I care so much about this beautiful, incredible, unique region of the United States that doesn’t have a backup.  
Al Letson:The Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta continues to recover from the typhoon. The storm displaced an estimated 1,600 people. The majority of them remain in temporary housing. As for KYUK, the station plans to lay off about 40% of its staff. Samantha, Evan and Julia will keep their jobs at least through next year, and Sage is moving to Aspen, Colorado for new job. Coming up, I talk with Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski, who went against her party in the partisan fight over public media.  
Senator Lisa Mu…:It was awful and it was… Some of the words that were used were really offensive to me.  
Al Letson:That’s ahead. You’re listening to Reveal.  
Al Letson:From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal, I’m Al Letson.  
 In July of 2025, as the U.S. Senate gathered to vote on a bill that would end funding for public media, Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski got a text message about conditions off the southwest coast of Alaska: a major earthquake had struck the area the day before, and now there were tsunami warnings, directing people to tune into public radio station KUCB for more information. And as the Senate prepared to vote, Murkowski made one final plea to preserve federal funding for public media.  
Senator Lisa Mu…:And I said to my colleagues, as we speak, people are listening to their public radio stations to determine whether or not they need to move to higher ground.  
Al Letson:It didn’t work. Two years of funding that had already been appropriated was clawed back. Murkowski, along with Susan Collins of Maine, were the only Senate Republicans to oppose the bill. I sat down with Senator Murkowski to ask her why she went against her party on this and what the future looks like for public radio in Alaska.  
 Senator Murkowski, thank you so much for joining us.  
Senator Lisa Mu…:Thank you, Al. Good to be on.  
Al Letson:So why did you vote to keep funding for public media?  
Senator Lisa Mu…:Well, for me, this is kind of an easy question. I have long been a supporter of public broadcasting. I see the value in real time in my state. We have so many communities that are not connected by road. Over 80% of our communities are not. So you have families that are kind of cut off. And one of the things that I’ve learned is that people connect by listening to the public radio. They get the birthday greetings. They get the updates about what is happening in neighbor communities. They get the emergency warning about a tsunami that might be coming their way, about the ice that may be breaking up upriver and potentially causing flooding in your area.  
 People rely on public media perhaps differently in Alaska than they do in other parts of the country. Internet is still wickedly expensive in many parts of the state. So for me, the value has never been questioned. There’s been a lot of debate about political bias within NPR. If you don’t like some of the programming, we can address some of that, but don’t undercut the value that comes to communities, particularly to rural communities of our public broadcasting system.  
Al Letson:Yeah, I’ve spent some time in Alaska. Beautiful state, good people, but definitely a very different way of life from the way people in the Lower 48 live. And that extends into public media. Like in Alaska, it feels like public media is a lifeline.  
Senator Lisa Mu…:I think that that’s really an apt description. We just had a very significant and damaging typhoon. And as I was talking to many of the people who were evacuated from their communities in the aftermath of that typhoon, so many were saying that they were getting their updates about what was coming from their public radio stations, from KYUK.  
Al Letson:So you’ve been a senator for Alaska since 2002, correct?  
Senator Lisa Mu…:Yep, long time.  
Al Letson:And I have been in public media since about 2007, and I would say, as long as I’ve been in public media, that there’s always been this partisan fight. Why has it always been such a partisan fight, especially given what we just talked about, how it is a lifeline to rural communities?  
Senator Lisa Mu…:I, too, am mystified about that. It may just be that there are those who say, “Look, we don’t need to have government support for something like radio or TV. There’s lots of private entities that come in, and they’re very successful, so why do we need to have that government assistance?” Those are absolutely legitimate debates to have. But again, when you think about some of the things that public media is able to offer that you don’t necessarily see through other outlets, it is the emergency warning systems. It is things like early childhood education that comes with things like Sesame Street and so many of the other great children’s programming that we have seen over the years. It comes with a more community service perspective. Maybe you can say it’s more of a fiscal or budgetary constraint, and Republicans are trying to say, less government is better, less spending is better.  
 But in recent years, it really does seem that what we’ve seen, and particularly in this last fight over this recession, it was awful and it was… Some of the words that were used were really offensive to me when they were calling these programs as radical and woke and run by radical leftists. Again, I’m listening to people at KUCB in Unalaska who are trying to get the word out about a tsunami warning. And I’m thinking to myself, there is nobody in False Pass or Sand Point or Kodiak who is thinking that this is about some radical leftist agenda. This is about my lifeline, as you have pointed out.  
 So I get really frustrated about the partisan overtones or undertones, whatever word choice you want to ascribe to it here. When we were working through that rescissions package, it was Mike Rounds from the state of South Dakota, again, very, very red state, very rural state, who said, “Hey, we have got to make sure that our tribal stations are not impacted, and in order for me to back off my opposition to this, we need to see some help.” So he was able to facilitate a path forward for one-time funding for the tribal stations. About half of Alaska’s stations are going to see benefit from that. But again, it’s a one-year funding bandaid to get these stations through this next year. It’s not a long-term solution.  
Al Letson:In this country, political debate has become about enemies. How do we get back to a place where we’re able to talk and have debates about things of this importance without coming at each other with knives all the time?  
Senator Lisa Mu…:It’s a great question, Al. I don’t know that there’s an easy answer for it. But we’re becoming a country where people seem to be more comfortable if they’re around people who think and act like them, people who don’t necessarily challenge their thoughts. In parts of the country, people are looking around and saying, “Well, I’m real totally conservative, but it seems like the schools around me, the neighborhoods around me, my local government, everything is becoming more liberal.” And instead of engaging and offering a different perspective so that we can help educate one another, I say, “I’m leaving. I’m going to go to a place where I’m going to be more comfortable, because I’m going to be around people that all kind of think like me.”  
Al Letson:Think, look, talk everything like me.  
Senator Lisa Mu…:Look, talk. And that’s not the best of America. I can guarantee you, when we are able to embrace the extraordinary diversity of who America is, not only in what we look like, but how we think and how we embrace the opportunity for free speech. And yes, sometimes it is uncomfortable, but every now and again, if I allow my mind to be open to that, I might maybe have just learned something.  
Al Letson:Do you think there’s a world where CPB can come back with maybe a more focused mandate that’s specifically helping rural stations and something a little bit more narrow that could pass through a very divided Congress?  
Senator Lisa Mu…:I do think so. Again, that’s part of what is being explored right now. There are so many good things that we would seek to continue, but I think we recognize that in the short term, we have to keep everybody alive. We have established a community-driven fund to help Alaska public media. At this point in time, it’s been a little over… well, about three and a half million dollars has been raised. That’s going to be helpful. We are relying on the generosity and the good grace of private donors. It shows the level of commitment that the public has, the loyalty and the support. I think that that gives us incentive to try to work on this longer-term fix that, again, to your point, maybe more narrow in focus, but still provide what most are seeking.  
Al Letson:Do you feel comfortable that given where we are, the infrastructure is there when the next disaster hits?  
Senator Lisa Mu…:For right now? The answer to that is yes, because most of the stations that I have talked with are telling me that they’ve got enough reserves to get them through the end of the year. Some are able to extend it just a little bit longer. With the tribal funding that has been committed to, that’s going to help, again, half of those stations. But we’re already seeing stations with layoffs, and that means that you have even fewer people to deliver what these small stations have been doing within their communities. So it’s really hard, because one of the great things that we get from these small stations is the local content.  
 When instead of three people, you only have two people, now you’re not able to go out and get that local context. So to fill it, you have to go get the national stuff, which is maybe not what the community necessarily wants, but it’s also to the point of those who have opposition to the broadcasting that comes out of NPR that they think is biased or unfair or what have you. That hasn’t necessarily gone away. You’ve just lessened your opportunity to be more responsive to the local communities.  
Al Letson:Yeah, it’s a serious loss. Public media brought me to Alaska, and I still remember interviewing a native artist who basically does her art from the bones of elks. She told me, and she’s a little lady, I think, at that time, in her 60s, every year she’d go up in the summertime, I guess, and kill a elk, and she’d drag it home. I have no idea how she’d drag it home. She’d eat the meat all winter long and make her art with the bones. I would never experience that in the Lower 48. It’s such a unique and beautiful place, but I worry that cutting funding means that we never get those stories in the Lower 48. And it leads to us not understanding each other. It creates more division in the sense of like, there’s less empathy created because you don’t know how these people live their lives and they don’t know how you live your lives.  
Senator Lisa Mu…:Well, and that’s why I’m very grateful for the reporting that was done about Typhoon Halong and the impact on communities like Kipnuk and like Kwigillingok. Again, places that most people in this country will never, ever, ever go to. But for those who call these places home, and have for hundreds-plus years, the lifestyle that they live is very different. It’s very complex. So to be able to share what that means to people on the outside is vitally important. We are all one big America, and the more we understand one another, the better.  
Al Letson:Yeah. Senator Murkowski, it was an absolute pleasure to talk to you today. Thank you so much.  
Senator Lisa Mu…:Come back to Alaska.  
Al Letson:I will.  
Senator Lisa Mu…:Okay. All right. Take care, all. Thank you.  
Al Letson:That was Senator Lisa Murkowski from Alaska.  
 Up next, we’re going inside the trenches of the decades-long fight over public television.  
Big Bird:It’s me, Big Bird.  
Speaker 4:Big, yellow, a menace to our economy.  
Al Letson:You’re listening to Reveal.  
Al Letson:From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. Let’s go back to 1961. Television is blowing up. 90% of Americans have TV sets in their homes. People are hooked, especially kids. The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission at the time is a guy named Newton Minow and he’s concerned. So at an annual meeting of the national broadcasters, he gives a fiery speech and challenges them to watch their own stations for a day.  
Newton Minow:Without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you, keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.  
Al Letson:Minow thinks bad TV is bad for people, especially children.  
Newton Minow:Is there no room for a children’s news show explaining something to them about the world at their level of understanding?  
Al Letson:He says, “Sure, TV can entertain, but let it teach something too.”  
Newton Minow:As you may have gathered, I would like to see television improved, but how is this to be brought about? By voluntary action, by the broadcasters themselves, by direct government intervention or how?  
Al Letson:The “how” came seven years later when Congress created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting or CPB. It was the start of an era that would lead to decades of award-winning children’s television, shows like Sesame Street, the Electric Company, Reading Rainbow, and of course, Mister Roger’s Neighborhood.  
Fred Rogers:It’s a beautiful day in this neighborhood, a beautiful day for a neighborhood. You be mine.  
Al Letson:Fred Rogers, the man in the cardigan sweater, was launched into national stardom with the birth of public television and he became its most famous defender. Through his story, we’re going to look back at public media’s decades-long struggle to hold onto federal funding and survive Washington politics. Michael Schiller takes him from here in the Steel city.  
Fred Rogers:Won’t you Please, won’t you please, please won’t you be my neighbor. Hi.  
Michael Schille…:I was Mr. Rogers’ real-life neighbor. I grew up in Pittsburgh in the 1970s near where he lived with his wife and kids. Back then, the city was a lot different than his show’s neighborhood of make-believe. Pittsburgh, in the 70s, was more like Eddie Murphy’s Saturday Night Live spoof.  
Eddie Murphy:This is how you answer the door in my neighborhood. What is it?  
Michael Schille…:The real city was struggling with crime, polluted air and segregation. Mr. Rogers neighborhood of Make-Believe was not. It was a place for kids to process the harsh realities life and the emotions that come with it.  
Fred Rogers:Did you ever know any grownups who got married and then later they got a divorce?  
Michael Schille…:Fred helped me make sense of my own parents’ divorce,  
Fred Rogers:And those children cried and cried. You know why? Well, one reason was that they thought it was all their fault, but of course it wasn’t their fault.  
Michael Schille…:I loved his show.  
Jason Jedlinski:Walk Up Our Miniature Staircase.  
Michael Schille…:I’m walking into WQED, the place where the Mr. Rogers show was filmed.  
Jason Jedlinski:We moved into this building in 1970.  
Michael Schille…:WQED president and CEO Jason Jadlinski gives me a tour of the station. It feels and smells like a classic seventies public TV station in here, musty, but in a good way layered with history.  
Jason Jedlinski:I’ll take you up to the studio if you want to take a picture with the tree or the castle.  
Michael Schille…:Oh, you know I do. Of course, you know I do. The influence of Mr. Rogers show never left me, but I’ve never been inside the station until today. The famous studio, a WQED with the great picture of Fred Rogers. This is so fun. Look at this. Can I just take a peek at the stage?  
Jason Jedlinski:Of course.  
Michael Schille…:The stage is empty this afternoon except for some ladders and stacked chairs.  
Jason Jedlinski:There are people who think it should be a museum, and I’m actually very proud of the fact that it’s still actively used and frequently used to experiment and create art.  
Michael Schille…:WQED opened in April, 1954 as the first community sponsored educational television station in America.  
Speaker 7:WQED exists for the sole purpose of offering education, not education that is . . .  
Michael Schille…:They even had a show that reached thousands of steelworkers who were able to earn the equivalent of a GED by watching classes from home.  
Jason Jedlinski:And that notion of the high school of the air, that’s what it was called in 1954, really stemmed out of community leaders saying, how do we take this new medium that is coming into people’s living rooms and use it to achieve something other than a laugh or to sell a carton of cigarettes?  
Michael Schille…:This is the incubator where Fred Rogers show emerges. He draws on philosophies about early childhood education to craft thoughtful episodes that become popular on WQED and once the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is formed, the show’s able to go national. The year is 1968.  
Emily Ruby:It’s this year of major turmoil starting off the Tet Offensive.  
Michael Schille…:Emily Ruby is a curator at the Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh where the show’s original sets and props live.  
Emily Ruby:You have all of this kind of racial unrest and then you have the assassination of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy.  
Michael Schille…:In the days after the assassination of RFK Mr. Rogers airs this show where his puppet Daniel Tiger asks,  
Daniel Tiger:What does assassination mean?  
Michael Schille…:It was groundbreaking tv.  
Speaker 10:Well, it means somebody getting killed in a sort of surprise way.  
Michael Schille…:Now you might think show sponsors might say, Fred, what are you doing? But the opposite happens. Emily reads a note from Sears and Roebuck, a big funder at the time.  
Emily Ruby:We have been gratified by the spontaneous public reaction to a television personality who in a time of violence speaks quietly about coping with violence.  
Michael Schille…:It’s a hit. People all over the country are tuning in, but less than a year later, the show and CPB are already facing a crisis. Richard Nixon has just become president. The Vietnam War is raging and he wants to cut CPB’s $20 million budget in half. So Fred Rogers goes to Congress to testify.  
Senator John Pa…:All right, Rogers, you got the floor.  
Michael Schille…:Senator John Pastore, a Democrat was the subcommittee chair. He had never heard of Fred’s show and was known to be socially conservative.  
Fred Rogers:Senator Pastore, this is a philosophical statement and would take about 10 minutes to read, so I’ll not do that.  
Michael Schille…:Fred is young, he’s handsome. He’s dressed in this black suit and he sits up in his chair and speaks directly to lawmakers. He tells him his show costs the equivalent of what it costs to make two minutes of cartoons,  
Fred Rogers:Two minutes of animated. What I sometimes say, “bombardment.”  
Michael Schille…:To Fred, the cartoons of the day. Like Looney Tunes are filled with needless violence.  
Fred Rogers:We don’t have to bop somebody over the head to make him make drama on the screen. We deal with such things as getting a haircut or the feelings about brothers and sisters and the kind of anger that arises in simple family situations.  
Michael Schille…:As Pastore listens, you can see his demeanor starting to change,  
Fred Rogers:And I feel that if we in public television can only make it clear that feelings are mentionable and manageable, we will have done a great service for mental health.  
Michael Schille…:By this point, Pastore has kind of melted.  
Senator John Pa…:I’m supposed to be a pretty tough guy and this is the first time I’ve had goosebumps for the last two days.  
Fred Rogers:Well, I’m grateful not only for your goosebumps, but for your interest in our kind of communication.  
Michael Schille…:Fred ends his remarks with lyrics to a song about anger.  
Fred Rogers:What do you do with the mad that you feel when you feel so mad you could bite when the whole wide world seems oh so wrong and nothing you do seems very right.  
Michael Schille…:The whole testimony is only six minutes. He’s so calm and by the end of it, Pastoria is obviously moved.  
Senator John Pa…:I think it’s wonderful. I think it’s wonderful. Looks like you just earned the $20 million.  
Michael Schille…:In the years after that meeting. Nixon became more and more antagonistic towards the news shows on PBS. He wanted his critics off the air. That didn’t happen, and Congress eventually decides to fund CPB two years in advance to protect it from political headwinds, but it doesn’t take long for that to get challenged too. In the eighties, president Ronald Reagan tried to claw back half of CPB’s budget. It was an early attempt at rescission.  
President Ronal…:No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size, so government’s programs once launched, never disappear.  
Michael Schille…:Congress compromises by cutting CPB’s budget by 20% in the 1990s. When Newt Gingrich becomes speaker of the house, one of his first moves is to try to eliminate CPB funding completely.  
Newt Gingrich:Why is there this small elite group at the Corporation public Broadcasting the gets to spend money they didn’t earn?  
Emily Ruby:Newt Gingrich said something about it being an elitist form of television.  
Michael Schille…:That’s historian Emily Ruby again  
Emily Ruby:And again. Fred’s reiterating that this is something that’s reaching all kids of all income levels. It’s the opposite of elitist.  
Michael Schille…:Gingrich fails. The irony is Fred was a registered Republican and he never wavered from his support for public television. He passed away in 2003 and in the two decades since Republican lawmakers made several more attempts to wipe out CPB. Mitt Romney pledged to cut it during his 2012 presidential run calling out Big Bird at a debate. Barack Obama’s campaign loved it.  
Big Bird:It’s me, Big bird.  
Speaker 17:Big yellow, a menace to our economy. Mitt Romney knows it’s not Wall Street you have to worry about. It’s Sesame Street. I’m going to stop the subsidy to . . .  
Michael Schille…:PBS Mid Romney this time around. Fred Rogers wasn’t there to save public media.  
Julian Wyllie:I could not have foreseen how much damage this would do as quickly as it’s done.  
Michael Schille…:Julian Wiley is a reporter for Current magazine. His beat is public television.  
Julian Wyllie:Hundreds of people laid off at different stations that we know of millions in cuts in programming. It’s just hard to find an adjective for how bad this is.  
Michael Schille…:Each station will feel the cuts differently. At WQED, the station that gave us Mr. Rogers neighborhood, they had to lay off a third of their staff.  
Julian Wyllie:CBB. It just got caught up in the culture war basically. In a way, public media was kind of just a bystander for the bigger problems in politics, I guess.  
Michael Schille…:Public media used to be considered so wholesome that people made fun of it, and yet somehow this year in the halls of Congress, it was portrayed as salacious and deviant at a hearing on public media. In March, Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene accused PBS of liberal bias and then she took it further. There was a larger than life photo print of a drag queen behind her that she pointed to and said,  
Marjorie Taylor…:As a mother, if I had walked in my living room or one of my children’s bedrooms and seen this child predator and this monster targeting my children, I would become unglued.  
Michael Schille…:The person in the photo she was talking about was part of a literacy program where drag queens read books to kids. Greene’s remarks were so far afield from Fred’s message of universal love and acceptance. I feel like the world needs the spirit of Mr. Rogers now more than ever, and I’m wondering if there are any of his ideas or teachings that you think are worth reflecting on in this moment.  
Emily Ruby:Oh, so many.  
Michael Schille…:Emily Ruby. Again,  
Speaker 10:I don’t want to speak for him, but I do feel like he would be really disturbed by what was happening and the thing that he would always do that I love. Anytime he would speak publicly, many, many times when he would speak publicly, he would say at the end, think about the person that loved you into being.  
Fred Rogers:All of us have special ones who have loved us into being.  
Michael Schille…:This is Fred Rogers accepting a lifetime achievement award at the Emmys.  
Fred Rogers:Would you just take along with me 10 seconds to think of the people who have helped you become who you are, those who have cared about you and wanted what was best for you in life. 10 seconds of silence. I’ll watch the time.  
Michael Schille…:The camera scans the room. The audience is in tears. This man knew how to help people tap into their better selves, how to help them choose kindness over hatred. And yes, how to be good neighbors.  
Fred Rogers:Won’t you please won’t you. Please. Please won’t you be my neighbor. You have a good weekend. Glad to see you.  
Al Letson:Our lead producer for this week’s show is Michael I. Schiller with help from Anianci Diaz-Cortez. Cynthia Rodriguez edits the show thanks to the staff of KYUK. Also, thanks to Kara McGurk-Allison and Josh Sanborn from Reveals More to the Story for their contributions to this week’s show. Otto Rogers is our fact checker. Victoria Baranetsky is our general counsel. Our production manager is the Great Zulema Cobb score and sound designed by the dynamic duo, Jay Breezy Mr. Jim Briggs and Fernando Ma-Man-Yo Aruta. Taki Telenidis is our deputy executive producer. Our executive producer is Brett Myers. Our theme music is by Comorado Lightning support for reveals provided by the Riva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Park Foundation, the Schmidt Family Foundation, and the Hellman Foundation support for reveals provided by you, our listeners. We are a co-production of the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. I’m Al Letson, and remember, there is always more to the story.  
Fred Rogers:It’s a beautiful day in this neighborhood, a beautiful day for a neighbor. Would you be mine? Could you be mine? It’s a neighborly day in this beauty. Would a neighborly day for a beauty.  

Michael I Schiller has worked for the Center for Investigative Reporting since 2013 as a multimedia reporter, producer, and creative director. His work spans radio, animation, visual design, and documentary film. The Dead Unknown, a video series he directed about the crisis of America’s unidentified dead, earned a national News and Documentary Emmy Award, national Edward R. Murrow Award, and national Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award. His animated documentary short film The Box, about youth solitary confinement, was honored with a video journalism award from the Society of Professional Journalists’ Northern California chapter, a San Francisco International Film Festival Golden Gate Award, and a New Orleans Film Festival special jury prize, and it was nominated for a national News and Documentary Emmy for new approaches.

Anayansi Diaz-Cortes is a senior reporter and producer for Reveal. She most notably spearheaded After Ayotzinapa, a gripping investigative series that examines the mysterious disappearance of 43 Mexican college students in 2014. The project earned her an Investigative Reporters and Editors Award and was named among the New York Times’ Best Podcasts of 2022.

With a commitment to shedding light on critical issues, Anayansi’s storytelling spans a wide spectrum, from exposing wage theft and the dangers of predatory online gaming to unraveling the complexities of the criminal justice system in Mississippi and the challenges of navigating high school life amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Her distinctive approach combines emotional depth with first-person narratives, captivating audiences while unearthing consequential truths.

Cynthia Rodriguez is a senior radio editor for Reveal. She is an award-winning journalist who came to Reveal from New York Public Radio, where she spent nearly two decades covering everything from the city’s dramatic rise in family homelessness to police’s fatal shootings of people with mental illness.

In 2019, Rodriguez was part of Caught, a podcast that documents how the problem of mass incarceration starts with the juvenile justice system. Caught received an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award for outstanding journalism in the public interest. Her other award-winning stories include investigations into the deaths of construction workers during New York City's building boom and the “three-quarter house” industry – a network of independent, privately run buildings that pack vulnerable people into unsanitary, overcrowded buildings in exchange for their welfare funds.

In 2013, Rodriguez was one of 13 journalists to be selected as a Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan, where her study project was on the intersection of poverty and mental health. She is based in New York City but is originally from San Antonio, Texas, and considers both places home.

Kara McGuirk-Allison is a senior radio editor for the Center for Investigative Reporting, where she works on podcast strategy and audio production. In her three decades of audio work, she has produced for a number of NPR news programs, including the award-winning Justice Talking, and was the founding producer of NPR’s Hidden Brain. Before joining CIR, Kara was a podcast producer for Marvel/Disney.

Josh Sanburn is a producer for Reveal. He previously worked as a national correspondent for Time magazine, where he covered policing, criminal justice, and societal and demographic trends across the United States. After Time, he worked as a producer for Gimlet Media, where he helped develop and produce special series for the Wall Street Journal’s daily podcast. He’s also produced documentary series for ABC News and National Geographic and has written features for Vanity Fair. Reach him at jsanburn@revealnews.org or follow him on X @joshsanburn.

Zulema Cobb is an operations and audio production associate for the Center for Investigative Reporting. She is originally from Los Angeles County, where she was raised until moving to Oregon. Her interest in the wellbeing of families and children inspired her to pursue family services at the University of Oregon. Her diverse background includes banking, affordable housing, health care, and education, where she helped develop a mentoring program for students. Cobb is passionate about animals and has fostered and rescued numerous dogs and cats. She frequently volunteers at animal shelters and overseas rescue missions. In her spare time, she channels her creative energy into photography, capturing memories for friends and family. Cobb is based in Tennessee, where she lives with her husband, three kids, three dogs, and cat.

Victoria Baranetsky is general counsel at the Center for Investigative Reporting (d/b/a Foundation for National Progress), where she advises the organization on its full range of legal activities, including counseling reporters on newsroom matters (newsgathering, libel, privacy, subpoenas), advising the C-level on business matters, and providing legal support to the board. She has litigated on various issues on behalf of the organization, including arguing before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Prior to CIR, Victoria worked at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Wikimedia Foundation, and the New York Times. She also clerked on the US Second Circuit Court of Appeals. She holds degrees from Columbia University, Columbia Journalism School, Harvard Law School, and Oxford University. She teaches at Berkeley Law School as an adjunct professor and is a fellow at Columbia’s Tow Center. She is barred in California, New York, and New Jersey.

Fernando Arruda is a sound designer, engineer, and composer for Reveal. As a multi-instrumentalist, he contributes to the music, editing, and mixing of the weekly public radio show and podcast. He has held four O-1 visas for individuals with extraordinary abilities. His work has been recognized with Peabody, George Polk, duPont-Columbia, Edward R. Murrow, Gerald Loeb, Third Coast, and Association of Music Producers awards, as well as Emmy and Pulitzer nominations. Prior to joining Reveal, Arruda toured internationally as a DJ and taught music technology at Dubspot and ESRA International Film School. He also worked at Antfood, a creative audio studio for media and TV ads, as well as for clients such as Marvel, MasterClass, and Samsung. His credits also include NPR’s 51 Percent; WNYC’s Bad Feminist Happy Hour and its live broadcast of Orson Welles’ The Hitchhiker; Wondery’s Detective Trapp; and MSNBC’s Why Is This Happening?. Arruda releases experimental music under the alias FJAZZ and has performed with jazz, classical, and pop ensembles such as SFJazz Monday Night Band, Art&Sax quartet, Krychek, Dark Inc., and the New York Arabic Orchestra. He holds a master’s degree in film scoring and composition from NYU Steinhardt. Learn more about his work at FernandoArruda.info.

Jim Briggs III is a senior sound designer, engineer, and composer for Reveal. He joined the Center for Investigative Reporting in 2014. Jim and his team shape the sound of the weekly public radio show and podcast through original music, mixing, and editing. In a career devoted to elevating high-impact journalism, Jim’s work in radio, podcasting, and television has been recognized with Peabody, George Polk, duPont-Columbia, IRE, Gerald Loeb, and Third Coast awards, as well as a News and Documentary Emmy and the Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Sound. He has lent his ears to a range of podcasts and radio programs including Marketplace, Selected Shorts, Death, Sex & Money, The Longest Shortest Time, NPR’s Ask Me Another, Radiolab, Freakonomics Radio, WNYC’s live music performance show Soundcheck, and The 7 and Field Trip from the Washington Post. His film credits include PBS’s American Experience: Walt Whitman, the 2012 Tea Party documentary Town Hall, and The Supreme Court miniseries. Before that, he worked on albums with artists such as R.E.M., Paul Simon, and Kelly Clarkson at NYC’s legendary Hit Factory Recording Studios. Jim is based in western Massachusetts with his family, cats, and just enough musical instruments to do some damage.

Steven Rascón is the production manager for Reveal. He has also produced the KQED podcast On Our Watch: New Folsom, a serial investigation into the death of two whistleblowers inside California’s most dangerous prison. Their reporting has aired on NPR stations such as Capital Public Radio, WHYY, and KCRW. He also helped produce the Peabody-nominated Reveal podcast series Mississippi Goddam. He holds a master’s degree in journalism from UC Berkeley.

Al Letson is the Peabody Award-winning host of Reveal. Born in New Jersey, he moved to Jacksonville, Florida, at age 11 and as a teenager began rapping and producing hip-hop records. By the early 1990s, he had fallen in love with the theater, becoming a local actor and playwright, and soon discovered slam poetry. His day job as a flight attendant allowed him to travel to cities around the country, where he competed in slam poetry contests while sleeping on friends’ couches. In 2000, Letson placed third in the National Poetry Slam and performed on Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry Jam, which led him to write and perform one-man shows and even introduce the 2006 NCAA Final Four on CBS.

In Letson’s travels around the country, he realized that the America he was seeing on the news was far different from the one he was experiencing up close. In 2007, he competed in the Public Radio Talent Quest, where he pitched a show called State of the Re:Union that reflected the conversations he was having throughout the US. The show ran for five seasons and won a Peabody Award in 2014. In 2015, Letson helped create and launch Reveal, the nation’s first weekly investigative radio show, which has won two duPont Awards and three Peabody Awards and been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize twice. He has also hosted the podcast Errthang; written and developed several TV shows with major networks, including AMC+’s Moonhaven and Apple TV+’s Monarch; and is currently writing a comic for DC Comics. (He loves comics.) When he’s not working, Letson’s often looking for an impossibly difficult meal to prepare or challenging anyone to name a better album than Mos Def’s Black on Both Sides.

Artis Curiskis is an assistant producer at the Center for Investigative Reporting. Previously, he was an editorial fellow at Mother Jones. Before that, he produced and reported the Peabody-nominated series The COVID Tracking Project podcast with Reveal and led data reporting efforts with The COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic. He was also an artist-in-residence at UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art and a Thomas J. Watson fellow. You can reach him at acuriskis@revealnews.org.