After Roben Farzad read Greg Franklin’s posts in late 2020, he decided to do something unusual.
Farzad had met Franklin the year before, when they sat next to each other on a bench watching their kids’ basketball game at the local JCC. Less than a year later, Farzad was reading Franklin’s account of his wife’s COVID, her seizures, her intubation.
To care for his wife and two kids, Franklin left his job at a real-estate asset-management company, initially under the Family and Medical Leave Act and then for good in August 2020. By the time Farzad got involved, Franklin’s wife was home and stable and Franklin was finally able to consider starting his job search.
Farzad offered to host a live Zoom show to leverage the hive mind of the audience of his radio show, Full Disclosure. After some hesitation—Franklin felt sheepish about asking for help, since in 2020 everybody needed help—he agreed. He told his story, and listeners called in to offer their networks, suggest tactics, request meetings with ideas and leads.
“All these people just showed up—people who felt sad, who felt otherwise hopeless and trapped indoors,” says Farzad. “It just showed me how vital that community thing was.”
Franklin found a new job the following April, one he’s been in ever since. “Having that community reach out was really uplifting,” he says.
To me, his story represents the rawest and most special element of public radio: It’s hyperlocal, invested in the community it serves and keeping that community healthy and informed.
Farzad’s show is distributed by Radio IQ, a public radio station based in Virginia’s Appalachian mountains. After the recent rescission bill, that station has just lost $600,000 in funding that it had been apportioned by Congress. The bill claws back $1.1 billion worth of funds for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) for the next two years, which channels federal funding to NPR—my employer—as well as PBS and our member stations like Radio IQ.
NPR’s structure is a little weird, a little antiquated, mostly vestiges of the CPB’s creation in 1967 when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act into law; NPR was incorporated in February 1970. But NPR produces the news shows Morning Edition and All Things Considered as well as programs like my podcast, Planet Money, and member stations buy the content we make (as well as that of American Public Media—they have Kai Ryssdal, not us!) to broadcast on their airwaves. Only a small percentage of NPR’s budget is directly from the federal government, but a lot more of it—some 30%—comes from those fees for our programs from our approximately 1,000 member stations. And many of those really rely on federal money.
The urgency of Franklin’s search feels very 2020 now, but every crisis brings a new salience to public radio and the crucial (though often unseen) role it plays in our communities. When Hurricane Helene swept through western North Carolina last year, the power went out. Phones didn’t work, the internet was down. But radios still worked. Suddenly Blue Ridge Public Radio was the nexus of information, “one of the only forms of communication that people still had,” the station’s news director, Laura Lee, told Inside Appalachia. “We just started to ‘hold air’ and stay on the radio upwards of 12 hours a day to make sure that people were getting the information that they needed, because the information”—like where people could find water and food, where people could get their oxygen tanks refilled—“was so critical to daily living,” she said.
This matters most acutely in areas without a local newspaper or other outlets updating citizens. Like in Abilene, Texas: “Honestly, we’re a region that is kind of on the verge of turning into a news desert,” KACU’s general manager Heather Claborn told Texas Standard. The paper in their area went from 250 employees to now fewer than five, and local TV news has been similarly whittled down, she said. KACU gets 31% of its operating budget from CPB.
Data from former NPR employee Alex Curley’s newsletter “Semipublic” showed that about 15% of all public media stations are at risk of closing because of these funding cuts. For some stations, he found, the cuts represent almost all of their budget, like for KCUW in Pendleton, Oregon, and KNSA in Unalakleet, Alaska.
Less news at a moment of more deepfakes and misinformation feels like a recipe for disaster. But news desertification may have other more tangible impacts. Taxpayers are slated to save an average of $1.60 per person per year from these cuts, but their costs will increase in other ways: Economic research has found that areas where newspapers closed tend to see higher costs when their local government goes to borrow in the municipal bond market. The researchers concluded that this was due to a lack of watchdogs—that newspapers had been helping hold the government accountable and, without those reporters publicizing and communicating misdeeds, governments were more wasteful and inefficient and maybe even more prone to graft.
But even more basically: Our social ties have been fraying for years. We eat alone more now; we go to church less; we stay home more; we’re alone more. Public radio is one of our precious few remaining places to gather as a community, where a radio host can rally everyone listening in support of a common cause—each other.