Assembly Standing Committee on Arts, Entertainment, Sports, and Tourism

Good morning everybody. I want to thank you all for being here today. I want to start off this hearing first by expressing my sincere gratitude to everybody here at KPBS and San Diego State University for hosting us here this morning. My name is Chris Ward.

I'm the State Assemblymember for California 78th Assembly District, including many of our communities here in central San Diego and this campus. And I'm joined by my colleague, Senator Akilah Weber Pierson, who also represents this area and has for some time.

We are really here because of something that's been growing in our community and our concern that we want to make sure we're getting all the right information in one place at the table to decide how California can best position to be able to support something that is a vital institution for our communities and that's our public media partners.

It is a critical moment for public media. Many of the decisions that we're seeing at the federal level are having a direct impact on several locations throughout our state, including this facility here as well.

Earlier this year, my Committee joined with the Joint Committee on the Arts to hold a similar hearing on the impact to artists and museums due to cuts in the national endowments for both the arts and humanities.

And we also held a hearing to examine some of the impacts of the numerous policies and actions which are implemented by the Federal Government that that have a chilling effect on tourism and visitors to our great state.

In the context of this hearing, we are going to refer to, when we refer to public media, we are talking about non profit broadcast organizations that have traditionally been supported through a mix of federal and state funding, membership contributions and other donations.

Since 1967, these organizations have received their federal funding through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, or CPB, with the goal of serving children, rural communities and areas underserved by commercial media and the content created for public radio and television programming.

Using grants and direct funding through CPB is meant to inform, educate and provide arts and cultural opportunities to the areas and locations in which they serve. The President, after years of alleging bias by public media organizations, requested that Congress rescind funding that had already been allocated to CPB for the next two years.

The of the rest, the rescission Bill was unfortunately signed into law in July. And funding to cpb, which was allocated to local stations, including affiliates of the Public Broadcasting Service or PBS and the National Public Radio or NPR, ended around the beginning of October last month.

So I'm eager to hear from our panelists representing various public media organizations located throughout our state and even across the nation about what we can expect as far as impacts to content production and emergency service notifications, education and local outreach to communities.

I look forward to hearing from all of our panelists about what is being done by various groups to support local stations where the loss of CPB funding will be felt the hardest. There are many rural and underserved communities in California that rely on public media.

As we quickly approach the reconvening of the state Legislature in 2026, I hope to identify fresh ideas and new ways of being able to provide meaningful support. I'm grateful for your expertise and for the perspectives that you will add to these conversations. And we're going to have our panelists testify.

At the conclusion of each panel, we'll open the discussion to Committee Members that are present. And at the conclusion of all of our panels, we'll have time for public comment, which we are hoping will include additional public media related organizations and entities that can provide their own unique perspectives.

At this time, I'd like to turn it to other Members of the Committee that have been able to make it, and there might be more on the way, but I'm going to start with my colleague and Senator. Senator Akilah Weber Pierson.

Well, good morning, everyone. Good morning. Okay, making sure we're all awake out there, I want to first start by thanking Assembly Member Chris Ward for inviting me to take part in this very, very important discussion.

I stated, I am Senator Dr. Aila Weber Pearson, proud to represent Senate District 39, which does include this area that we are in right now. Public media is not just entertainment. It is an essential public service that educates, informs, and connects Californians all across the state.

It is one of the few truly accessible sources of educational content, local news and cultural programming that reaches every household, regardless of income or geography. Local public stations like KPBS highlight not only San Diego's diversity, but also California's, showcasing stories, artists, and voices that are often left out of commercial media.

You know, when I grew up, my parents, especially my father, were very strict about what my brother and I could watch. And so I grew up in a household where I could only watch kpbs. I grew up watching Sesame Street Square One, Mister Rogers Neighborhood, and Reading Rainbow.

And that was all that I could watch until the Cosby show came out. And, you know, that was so very important. It created a very solid education for me and my brother. And for many children, especially those in low income or rural areas, public broadcasting is their only access to consistent, free, high quality education programming.

When I had my boys, the first thing I let Them watch was Sesame Street and I noticed how things had changed. Count Dracula now had some dances that he didn't have when I was younger.

But it was that same basic foundation of ensuring that it doesn't matter who you are, where you live, what kind of resources you, you have. You can learn your ABCs, your 12 30s, basic addition and multiplication. These are things that you get through programming on kpbs.

Public media also supports California's creative economy by providing platforms for local filmmakers, musician and storytellers. It drives local job creation within production broadcasting and within the arts sector. And so the loss of federal or state funding not only jeopardizes educational program, but local journalism and community centered storytelling.

They provide fair, unbiased and accurate information to the public at a time when so many outlets lean one direction or another. Investing in public media strengthens civic engagement and helps combat misinformation by providing trust fact based information. And this is not a cost.

It is investment in our children, it is an investment in our democracy and it is an investment in the future of California. And we must do all that we can to ensure that public media continues to serve every community, especially those that depend on it most.

So I am very grateful for this forum, very grateful for you inviting me to join and very much looking forward to the information that we will learn today. Thank you.

Thank you Senator. And then I know we have a couple of local elected officials here as well, and I'm grateful for their interest in this. I wanted to welcome up here, although we have public comment towards the end, in the interest of time, I wanted to welcome up San Diego City Council President Joe LaCava.

If you have any kind of opening thoughts, feel free to come up here and maybe use this microphone. That's all right.

Well, thank you Assemblymember Ward, for your leadership every day and for hosting this informational Committee meeting and as well as Senator Weber Pierson, if I remember to get that right. I. I'm here because I wanted to indicate the support for public media.

Public media is where I go to to get my news, whether it's radio or TV or online. Because I know that it is going to be objective and informative, calm and really tell the story that we all need to be informed about what is happening here locally, in the city or across the country.

And I also realize that that is only possible if they have the funding to be able to do the work. News generated by investigative reporters is what really is the heart of public media.

And if we don't have the funding to deliver to the stations like KPBS and others, they're not going to be able to do their job and it's going to put a strain and it's going to cut off the flow of kind of information that we need in this democracy.

I'll also add, since the Senator mentioned it, I'm a little bit on the older side, so I missed it. But my sister grew up with Sesame street and all the other educational programs and I know it made a big difference in her early development.

I'm very proud to say that now my granddaughter watches those programs and is getting the same benefit for that. So in any way that we can do this to help promote public media and the importance it plays in our lives, in our dialogue, in our democracy, we're here to help.

And I'm glad to see a lot of the council offices from the City of San Diego are here as well to learn and know more. Thank you very much Chair.

Thank you, Council President. And I'd also like to welcome up from the City of La Mesa, Council Member Patricia Dillard. If you have any opening thoughts or your own, a few seconds, you wanted to offer your comments on public media.

I heard a few seconds. Thank you so much. Assembly Chris Ward for doing this inform. I'll just say that for us in La Mesa, education is a focus especially for our children. It's very important for people to get a good foundation, a positive foundation. And it is sad that these cuts are affecting us in this way.

We're also affected by the arts. La Mesa cares about the arts. It is a good mental health interaction when people can come out and be together and learn more about the arts. And we need to have something for our children as well.

And so I am in great support of this in so many ways and I'm just thankful to be able to be to come here and hear what the suggestions are and how we can protect ourselves and do more with less. So thank you again.

Thank you, Council Member Dillard. With that, we're going to move on to our first panelist. We have a very full agenda here today, a lot of different perspectives and and elements of information to be able to share. So I'd like to welcome our first three panelists.

On panel one, we have Jennifer Farrow, who is the President and CEO of KCRW in Los Angeles, Andy Durazo, who's the President and CEO of PBS Southern California, and Matt Pierce, the Director of policy for Rebuild Local News. We'll kick it off with Ms. Ferrow and look forward to your presentation.

I'm going to pass my time or whatever you guys say to Andy Durazo to let him kick it off. Great. Thanks so much.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Senator. Thank you Committee Members that may be tuning in. I think these remarks we heard at the start really provide a very great grounding about our mission, the impact and the role that we played.

So I thought in my opening brief remarks I kind of lay the groundwork talking about public television and I'll turn it over to Jennifer, who can fill in the stories around public radio in California. So. So I'm, as you note, CEO of PBS SoCal. In all, we serve over 22 million Californians, Southern Californians across a broad region.

I'm also the President of California Public Television, which is the Association of the 11 PBS stations that serve Californians, reaching over 85% of the Californians across the state. Everything is four far north, all the way up to Eureka and Redding, all the way down here to San Diego and kpbs.

So that's the context in which I'll frame the remarks.

I want to talk obviously about the role federal funding had and now the impact that loss of federal funding is starting to have as we work through the impacts, those impacts both are in station operations, obviously how we serve Californians, the impact on our role in education, our role in public safety, a role in providing local community services, and of course, given this Committee that really special role we play in arts and culture across the state.

So just to start as was framed, the federal funding has always been advance appropriated. It played a critical role when it was started in 1967. It really played the role of seed funding.

We got advance appropriations because the 15% of our total funding was given with the guarantee and we would go and raise the additional 85% in public television. Public television series and documentaries are often multi year projects. Big capital projects like broadcast Transmissions are often multi year projects.

So that advance funding was really important and we went with the rescission from a glide path of 2 plus years to basically 11 weeks. So in public television, just to start a national picture, we had over 100 documentaries and series that were not fully funded but partially funded. And so immediately we're into rescue mode.

Which one of those can be completed? How do we find funding? How do we carry it forward? There are three to take early education. There are three children series, two of them based in Los Angeles that we have been partnering with that did not have yet the funding that was promised to them and that was pulled back.

We've been working with them. We have one series, new Series with Al Roker, just about the impact of weather to understand the overall climate and the world we live in. Nicely. We've just gotten that over the line for one season. Typically those are commissioned for two. So we've lost funding for that.

We're working through that with the other two series are in the process of trying to get completion. And I emphasize the anecdote to say this is Southern California impact. This is impact on content. This is impact on the kinds of children series we can provide to young kids.

Overall, what we're dealing with across the system is a loss of $600 million annually. You can imagine the spread for that. So to take that into California examples. So let me start. We have a range of impacts. 70% of the funding to CPB went out to local stations.

The very small stations are open and operating in local communities, often where there is no other commercial media players that federal funding allows. What we've always done, which is to provide what the commercial media market cannot provide. Either it doesn't make sense sense or it doesn't have the public service dimensions to it.

It doesn't cover the kinds of stories we think are important to our community or provide informative educational materials. So with that, we're having to build this other model without that trusted federal partner. So two stations to highlight in Eureka and Reading. Over 40% of their budget was coming from the Federal Government.

Without that, we do not see a path right now. So those stations continue to operate. Eureka provides broadcast service to the north coast. It's an area that's very rural, has low cable subscription, it has low broadband access. Senator Mcguire has been a very forceful advocate about trying to get broadband access to it.

But reflective of that lack of of access to media in a given week, over 50% of the people living in the Eureka footprint of that station will watch the station in a given week. That's the highest level of local station use in the country. We're trying very hard to find a model to keep that open.

One of the things we'll hear is the time that we have to deliver. We are one of two stations working with the Boston station to be piloting a way to reduce broadcast operating costs for more than 30 minutes, 30%.

This is the kind of solution we need to develop, scale and extend to the more than 40 or 50 stations across the country that are facing similar kinds of situations. So we would extend this certainly to our California stations. It's something that will be of use to us.

This is about building the new operating model that we can that we can afford versus the model that we've had with stable federal funding. So that's broadcast operations. Just to talk a little bit from the audience perspective. People tune into us for news and information. They tune into us for arts and culture.

I'll linger a little bit on arts and culture because I talk a lot about arts and culture. Within Southern California, with contraction of local newspapers, there has been significant reduction coverage by the LA Times in the Orange County Register and the Ring newspapers that serve that area. In many cases, there are no longer arts critics.

So when I talk to heads of local arts organizations, their major problem they say, we have wonderful exhibits, we have wonderful performances in our venues. Our problem is letting people know about it so we can get people there. So we've. Public media has stepped into that role.

We're now ranked one of the top three sources in Southern California for arts and culture information. We work with partners to elevate their work. We work with partner organizations to provide free access when we can provide content or recordings of performances, like with the Hollywood Bowl.

So that's a specific example of the unique role I think public media organizations are playing and where they can. Across the state, of course, we have a role in education. We Both serve the K12 education services and we partner with school districts across the state. Public media content is one of the main sources of uses of.

Of media to help with the curriculum into K12. KQED, which is taking cuts now. At this point, they are tracking, in the last 18 to 20 months of having to cut their staff by approximately 100 people. That includes.

Let me back up a few years ago, so probably about 10 years ago, when we thought about serving education across the state, we thought about serving K12 and we thought about. Thought about serving early education, and that's into informal childcare, learning situations, preschool situations, and then TK. So those are the two populations we work with.

KQED and we built kind of a collaborative effort. KQED was focusing on K12. We were focusing on early ed, and we would work obviously in our communities, but share across the state. KQED and this is happening nationally, has had to substantially reduce and eliminate some of our K12 activities and providing content to K12 teachers.

This is such a diametrically opposed role than we were playing in the pandemic. When we built something called at home learning. We got a call from the Superintendent of LA Unified who said, we're going to close the schools. Can public broadcasting help? We built a national model.

We provided content during the day that was available for free in people's homes at a time when they could not get into schools. And we worked with this curriculum providers to provide correlated content to that.

Now we're in the situation where the staffing and the people who ran those operations just are not able to, were not able to hold them in place and continue that service. Early ed continues to be a focus. We found other outside sources so we're being able to do that.

But frankly, when we look at what's happening with PBS Care Kids nationally that provides the free 24/7 kids channel, those great series you talked about, our partnerships with Sesame street, the Next Generation, Fred Rogers show, like Daniel Tiger, those are all we're working through, how much of that we can actually continue. So this is in the works.

It'll take some months to sort through, but there are very significant challenges there. I want to emphasize maybe, I know I've gone a little bit long here, but I just want to emphasize the impacts are dire at the smallest station level, but they're very significant at the large station level.

And so as we think about serving so many Southern Californians, it's the loss in our local content teams, it's our loss in our local partnership teams. We try to work with our local community partners really to help elevate and attract and create ways that people can get into their venues, connect with them and understand their use.

A good example is on Friday night coming up, we have a partnership with the Autry Museum in Southern California where we will be showing a preview of Ken Burns American Revolution ahead of its national broadcast. So that's a great partnership.

They get new people coming into their venue, they have a great turnout and then they get a chance to elevate and get attention to what we're doing. I, I think a really important role that media can play with locally ground in person based organizations.

The last thing that I want to talk a little bit about, which is something that doesn't get a lot of attention, but we do have. Public television has a important role in public safety.

About 810 years ago, nationally, they determined that the publicly funded and operated television broadcast system would be an important purveyor of emergency information and alerting. So this is carried out across the country. It provides hurricane alerts in the hurricane zones.

You may have seen some of the coverage our local stations were providing during the floods in North Carolina. In California, we partnered with the California Office of Emergency Services.

We built out, piloted and built out an earthquake early warning system that has got the, you can imagine the shortest time frame required to get a sensor alert that an earthquake is coming and get it out to receivers. So we can now deliver an alert in less than two seconds.

That's been proven technology, it's been funded and rolled out across the state. What that enables, that we've been talking and seeking support for, is we can turn that with a small investment into any kind of alert. Wildfire alerts, flooding alerts, mudslides, you know, any other kind of alerts.

It also provides capacity that can be helpful with emergency communications. So we've had some interest in discussion with the Olympic Committee, just thinking about the potential emergency communications that have to happen during that incredible, you know, period.

And that is something that is, we think is of great value and importance, particularly in the many challenges that California has just in terms of getting alerts. Because wildfires will burn up the cell towers, heavy users congestion will congest the network. Ours is designed for first responders.

California OES has deployed this into their control centers and we are experimenting, deploying it into fire stations, hospitals and other first responder kind of networks that need those kind of alerts. That I think is a very important role.

And as we look at stations like Eureka and Reading, where they may not be able to stay on the air, we will lose the ability to broadcast those kind of alerts into that community.

So I've covered a bunch of topics in a light way, but I wanted to at least frame that up so you have some topics that you could follow up with additional questions.

Hi, I'm Jennifer Farrow. I'm the CEO of kcrw. We're a public radio station in Los Angeles. And as Andy said, he scoped out kind of the television space. We're all independently owned and operated. Deanna Mackey, who you'll hear about later, she runs a joint licensee here at kpbs, which is both radio and television.

But at kcrw we're just radio. And so I'll just paint a picture of kind of all of what we do. You'll hear some themes.

But I do appreciate your remarks at the beginning of this because I think that in this time of stress and a time when these funds have been taken and we're looking at these existential times that we're in, we realized that public media is part of the critical civic infrastructure of our communities. It's critical.

We've figured out a way to fund ourselves and to make partnerships and to be a part, a critical part of civic life in our communities.

And so at KCRW, we broadcast a mixture of local news, national, international news and and eclectic music to over 500,000 people each week on the broadcast channel, plus hundreds of thousands through our streams, through our app and website. We have daily, many, many, many thousands of daily users.

We're known for probably across the country for breaking musical artists and bands and giving popular acts their first wide radio play and platform in the country. And we are definitely involved in part of the critical creative economy of Los Angeles, which is a big driver of culture across the country.

We host at least 17 live events every summer that are free, all ages gatherings that partner with cultural institutions. And like Andy referenced, we often bring people into cultural institutions that museums, et cetera, that they had never been in before.

And we also inspire people to cross neighborhoods, so cross traffic, which is a big deal in Los Angeles, another thing. And we also host like over 40 free movie screenings a year, again bringing people together. We have seven unique email newsletters from local arts, news, music, et cetera that reach over 250,000 people each week.

And one of the things that I will say going back to our legacy media operations is that that radio does have the ability to respond quickly. And so when the Palisades fire and the Eaton fires in January of this year erupted, we could actually see this happening through our windows of the station.

And our sister over at Pasadena LA isp, they also did the same. And we were able to respond quickly with information for those affected by the fire, but also for everyone who wanted to help.

We were able to use social media, online resources that we, that we had available for people that we could change rapidly and of course our broadcast signals. And then along with other public broadcasters like LAist, PBS, SoCal and our friends at Calmatters, we published a daily and then weekly newsletter that reached over a million people.

It continues to this day. And it was all around fire resources. And you know, the fires for some of us may feel like something, something that happened a long time ago, but there's 200,000 people that were affected, over 6,000 structures that were destroyed, and there are communities just still in complete crisis.

And we are addressing those folks and those needs. But our organization is supported by over 50,000 members, plus businesses and foundations that contribute to support our work each year. And so the federal funding that we received was 5% of our budget, so 1.3 million.

And the direct results of the loss of those funds which did really were felt on October 1st. That was the first time we didn't receive the funds that we expected. So we just laid off 11% of KCRW. Employees.

And we are also exploring selling a number of radio towers in small towns and cities in Southern California because the cost of the operation is just too high for our core business. So not something I'm proud of, not something I ever wanted to say.

But we have to make choices in this time of finding out what's the most sustainable way to go. One of the things I do think though is really important for us to consider is that, you know, we are television and radio stations, but we're not. We're much more than that. We are community hubs in our communities.

We organize residences and businesses after national disasters, but also just we organize them anyway. We get people to talk to each other and see each other face to face and share stories of local concern, use music and culture to bridge people who may have differing political viewpoints.

It's a place where we can get out of the really caustic national debates that we see, that we see eroding our civic infrastructure and we have a place to actually address that. And because we've been around for a long time and we do have varied sources of support, we are here for the long haul.

But I do think the other thing that is really important for us to remember, and I think people have referenced it already, is the trust that communities have in us. At a time when all of you have witnessed institutions losing trust, people losing trust in institutions. They have trust in public radio and public television.

And so we like to think of it like public libraries, public parks and public broadcasting. So these are highly trusted resources that people believe are here to serve them.

And so I think that, you know, whatever we can do with your help and thought to continue and to not erode this critical source that took so long for us to build up. It's in all of our interest, in our community's interest to do so, I think. So I just talked about the impact for us.

You mentioned KQED, which did, you know, reduce its staff by 15%. There's a station in Mendocino area, KZYX, they were forced to lay off their news Director after losing 25% of their operating budget. And that was around $174,000. But it's fewer.

It will mean fewer in depth stories, fewer local stories, fewer interviews with, you know, their members of their electeds who are really given the opportunity to reach their communities and talk without being cut up into a million pieces.

And radio Bailinguay, who's he was here right today, can talk about the grants that they were expecting to kind of upgrade their infrastructure, their critical infrastructure that hasn't been updated since the 80s, that also has disappeared. So these are things that, you know, we have an opportunity right now to decide together how to creatively protect and restore.

And I just want to thank you for your time and I look forward to any questions.

Thank you. Broadcaster at play here. I was a newspaper writer, so not so good at that. My name is Matt Pierce. I am the Director of Policy for Rebuild Local News. We're a nonprofit, nonpartisan coalition that works on public policies to strengthen community news and information.

I live in LA and I once donated my Prius to KCRW for one of the car donation programs. It was missing the catalytic converter though. So I'll just give some fast background for why our public broadcasters are so essential in California and why the federal defunding hurts our community's access to quality local news.

Background is that the commercial market no longer supports the production of local news at the scale we enjoyed at the 20th century. And even a lot of what we were producing then didn't serve everybody in 2025.

More and more consumers are using social media to access their news and information at the same time that they're reporting that what they see on social media feels very partisan. They don't know what to trust. This is getting worse with the advent of AI.

Meanwhile, most of the journalists who are trying their hand at the creator economy, at this place where consumers are going toward, most of them are not making money when they're trying to produce news on these platforms and certainly not a sustainable scale. What you would see from traditional local news outlets.

So that's why you're not seeing new commercial media scaling up on platforms like TikTok and YouTube, even though you go on those apps and it feels like there's just an endless amount of content. So what we call legacy media. Like.

Public media, still major source of the news and information that you see, even if indirectly, even if it's getting aggregated or commented upon, is still powering a lot of what we call new media.

So if we want better access to quality local news and information across all sorts of communities and platforms, geographically through medium, it'll require public support for the folks who are actually producing that high quality information.

So unfortunately, even before the federal defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the US by far trailed advanced democracies around the world on how little we spent in public dollars to support public media.

So of those federal funds that were just cut, of course millions of those dollars went to our large anchor broadcasters in our major cities in the Bay Area and Southern California. Those are critical news sources in California. I'm an alumni of the Los Angeles Times, which has shrunk by more than 50% over the last couple of years.

A lot of it's news and original journalism is behind paywalls you need to be a subscriber often to get those information. Our public broadcasters provide their quality content to everyone for free. And that is a key, essential part of how they contribute to our local news ecosystem.

Even when there are commercial outlets available in places like la, there still is a distinction in what our public media and nonprofit media are providing for the public. And Las KPCC in Pasadena, KQED in San Francisco, KCRW Santa Monica, KPBS here in San Diego are ranked among our highest web traffic news sources in public media nationally.

So these are major linchpins of the California news ecosystem at the state level. But as already been discussed, a critical feature of the federal funding is that they supported many broadcasts in rural areas or underserved communities that were a larger percentage of their budgets were more reliant on those federal funds.

And the component of public funding and the geographic dispersal that it allows for is really important. There was a new survey that just or a new report that came out from Northwestern University about the State of Local News that talked about the philanthropic dollars that support a lot of our new kind of nonprofit news ecosystem.

And that report found that 98% of large private philanthropic dollars from grants for all types of nonprofit media were concentrated in large urban areas.

And so when you look at the map of where CPB grants are going in California, you don't see that kind of concentration in the same way in terms of which communities geographically are getting supported by outside support. And so also because of public broadcasters, analog broadcasting capabilities have been mentioned.

They reach a lot of areas that we might call news deserts that don't have existing local commercial media outlets or are otherwise underserved by information. This becomes critical in the natural disasters that we all are having to live through.

So the federal cuts are especially difficult because California itself ranks among the 10 worst states in the US in terms of journalists. Local journalists employed per 100,000 residents. And this is according to a report that we put together with Muckrack this year.

So California has about 6.1 local journalists per 100,000 people, while the national average is 8.8 local journalists per 100,000 people. So places like San Bernardino, Riverside, Fresno, Contra Costa are among the worst performers by that particular statistic, making public broadcasters especially important information infrastructure for news in those underserved areas.

And so this is all in a context where publicly supported media has grown in importance since California has lost more than 40% of its newspapers since 2005. And I think nationally, three quarters of newspaper journalists have lost their jobs in that Same period too.

There's only about 2,400 full time journalists left producing local news in California across all sorts of outlets, according to our estimates. So in recent years, California has taken some early tentative steps to provide more support for community media, but for all types.

The state added $15 million this year for publicly funded journalists placed in local newsroom through the California Local News Fellowship at UC Berkeley. State also allocated $10 million this year to a new civic media Fund to be created in California. Go biz. We still don't know what the contours of that program are going to be.

AB 1511, enacted last year, directs state agencies to boost ad spending on community and ethnic media. This support has been directed across all community news types, but not specifically public broadcasting. From I can tell California is not among the 36 US states that provide some sort of direct appropriation specifically for public broadcasting.

So all told, there's a lot more work to be done to provide support to ensure the public still has access to quality news and information. Which is why hearings like this are a good first start to put the issue in front of everybody. So news is just one segment of the broader essential services that public media provides.

But. But it's very important and I'm just grateful that we're having this conversation.

Great. Well, thank you to all of our panelists.

I wanted to start off, Mr. Durazo, just to get clarification you talked about one of the things you're seeing in the aggregate right now is potentially trying to look at a 30% working on costs and possibly having to reduce 30% of costs in operations for if I heard that correctly, what does that translate into?

Are you looking at time off of the air? Obviously staffing we heard is something that many of the individual outlets are having to make very difficult decisions on right now. But what are some of the. What's the menu of considerations that would equate to that outcome of reducing 30% of costs?

Yeah. As you can imagine, in trying to close a gap, we're looking at two things. One is how can we grow revenues and community support and sustain that annually. And the other is look at our major operating cost areas, particularly for the smallest stations.

Their biggest operating cost really is continuing to broadcast and do operating functions like master control, which is basically managing the schedule, getting the content in and getting out. There are proven solutions that have been developed on the commercial side that need to be adapted to our side that can significantly reduce local costs.

In large part by centralizing this. You're using technologies like cloud based content management Assembly of Channel streams at a central location that then are delivered by fiber into the beginning of the broadcast chain.

So that particular effort to reduce those costs, which is the largest one that they need to address to keep open, will help bring their total operating cost back more to the level that they can afford to remain open. That's what that particular effort is. There are other efforts going into the other cost areas.

So there are costs to run membership programs, there are costs to do financial operations and those kinds of things. So there's a lot of discussion right now how we can develop shared service models.

There is a very interesting effort coming together across the State of Texas, which is centralizing a bunch of their operations to help reduce their costs.

So we're in this very rapid sprint to try to move to a lower cost structure to get us to more affordability so we can sustain as much of our content and public services that have impact in our communities and our audiences.

Thank you. And then on the revenue side, I noticed in some of the background material that we are seeing, fortunately, a slight uptick in philanthropy and Members who are, they understand the times that we're in right now and they're stepping up a little bit more. It's not always sustainable.

Historically, that is a bump, but, you know, might sort of level off and you're back to the ongoing situation that you're in right now. What are, are there any other kind of creative partnerships you're thinking of either with corporations or when we're thinking with other public entities?

You mentioned OES right now serves a critical link and a critical role educational institutions. Right now there's. I think you'd overviewed a little bit of like, you know, sort of that historical relationship there. Not that I want to take any resources that would be another conversation in competition with other public funding.

But are there ways that we can have two birds and one stone opportunities to make sure that other areas of state support can appropriately intersect with your mission?

I guess, yeah, I'll start. And then Jennifer may have some perspectives as well as well on models there. So for our approach, you mentioned some of our traditional partners, other arts organizations, educational organizations, those kind of things. But putting in the broad federal funding context, those organizations are all seeing cuts as well. So they have fewer resources.

They're dealing with their own financial crises. So what would be traditional partners we can go to say, how can we do things together? They're working through some really tough cuts. So some of those traditional avenues and partnerships are not there. Corporations have been mixed. I was at PBS nationally Before coming to Southern California.

And one of my areas was the corporate partnerships. Corporations have shifted how they do their philanthropy more to mission aligned. And in a lot of cases there's been a step back in supporting public media. You know, we had strong support 2030 years ago. It's not nearly the way it was right there on the corporate side.

There's also different criteria how we think about it. You will see some headlines about the national foundations and there's a group of national foundations that have stepped up with some one time funding to create a bridge Fund. This is giving the opportunity for some stations to get enough time.

Now this is not near enough to help solve our problem. It will. So we're going through the process of having some specific case by case support to help the station continue stay open. But the big question back to like saving costs and what's the new operating model? What are they bridging to?

Because it's one time money they need to go from our current operations to a future operation that's sustainable but also has a local dimension to it and local services and partnership dimensions to it. So we're in the process of trying to build that new model.

Yeah. And I'll just say just, just on the giving side, thank you for noticing that. We call that rage giving. So we know that that will go away at some point. Maybe not the rage, but the giving we do expect to die down.

I think that you know, in terms of revenue partners, the best strategies for us is going to be shared services type models.

And one thing that we didn't mention was that KQED is kind of a hub, building a hub for journalism across the state which I think can really help to support a lot of back end services and allow more content in more places to get out. So that's another thing.

And again, what we're really looking for and what we know we need is some Runway to get to those places. Because we've been thinking about this anyway, we've been acting on it. This kind of pulling the plug on federal funding sort of just, you know, made us have to act really quickly.

But I think that's going to be our best strategy is figuring out how to operate in a way that is more like, you know, it acknowledges the financial reality that we find ourselves in.

And I'll of course plug the public policy piece as a necessary component of that. Something that's happening in the broader world of local journalism is that news outlets that aren't public broadcasters are also becoming increasingly dependent on philanthropy.

And I think people don't enjoy talking about it this way, but there's a lot of competition for those philanthropic dollars for all sorts of different types of media, which has its own kind of strain on the system.

And then of course there are the elements of which news outlets and entities can afford to have development officers to build those sorts of relationships. Who can make the best argument for building more sustainable giving programs and not just one time grants. That's a big challenge.

I will plug among the many policy things that we could talk about. I just, something popped in my head here, which is that government agencies, they do a lot of advertising, sponsorships, et cetera.

Those are public dollars that have often already been allocated and they may not being spent, they may not be currently spent on community public media.

And so we usually encourage local news outlets of all types to explore policies to try to build more collaborations between existing agencies and how they're trying to reach the public and partnering with local, local news organizations that already have those relationships and connections without adding further strains to public budgets, depending on how the policy is constructed.

Thank you so much for your, for your presentation. I just really have one question. When this went through at the time there was a lot of outcry about the impact to communities, especially rural or those specifically in red states, and the potential that at some point the funding may be restored.

A lot has happened since then and now a lot of focus is in the healthcare space. So I haven't heard as much about that. Are there still conversations about constituents in certain areas putting pressure on their elected to restore some of this funding that was cut this time?

I'll start with some initial comments and my colleagues can fill in. So I would say first, I think one of the big surprises in this being passed and cut, which is we always have served everybody, we have not been a partisan organization.

Our goal in our news is to provide unbiased coverage, to provide coverage and range of views that everyone can use so they have facts and a range of views to help them make up the own mind. And that's been reflected in the broad bipartisan support in our polling.

You know, a noticeable majority of even Trump supporters supported public television and felt that funding public funding for public television and radio was not sufficient, that should even be higher. So there was that broad public support and that's always been there as we've gone through various stages of funding challenges over the years.

And in this case that was not really a factor ultimately in the decision to move forward. So to your question about the service in those rural areas, rural areas have a particular voter profile. And the stations serving those are largely public media organizations because they're the only ones that can stay open.

Commercial media has really centralized those operations, run them from afar, and may have repeaters or ways to take in programming that is made, you know, hundreds or thousands of miles away. So that's why the particular loss of public funding is felt in those areas.

So it's been, frankly, you know, a bit of a confusing kind of environment for this, which is a decision that impacts so many, a decision that is valued by so many across the whole political spectrum.

And now we're going through these consequences that are playing out in the communities, because at the time, there was lots of statements saying, no, this won't have that kind of impact.

But obviously, when you're taking out that amount of funding, particularly focused in serving stations who do not have alternative funding sources to stay open, this is starting to play out.

And to answer your question about whether there's anything being restored, I think, I mean, we can look at abortion rights and see, you know, that we've. How long that's been and what the kind of, you know, polls show the American public feels about that access to healthcare for women. And that hasn't moved anywhere.

We know that the, you know, they dismantled the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which was the structure that delivered these funds and advocated for these. These funds. And that is now gone. So the idea of it being restored is really remote.

I think what's interesting to note too, in terms of the support for public broadcasting across the country, was in the House where this began. We were. I think there was a moment where we were just like four votes shy of actually defeating this measure, and it was four Democrats who weren't there to vote.

So what that says is not only what were those four Democrats doing? I think no one thought it would make it. Not make it out of the House as a precision measure, but it showed the enormous kind of lobbying, grassroots lobbying, that people across America did to save this funding for public broadcasting. And so it's a shame.

I don't think that it's likely that there's any way to bring this back.

I would add one final piece of color to this, which is that some of. One of the really troubling aspects of being an advocate in this space is that when you look at some of the public polling, Members of the General public often say they're unaware that there's a funding crisis in local news.

And the numbers I'm thinking about preceded the federal rescission. But. And I'll just speak for myself as a journalist.

One of the things that's kind of ironic is that we're in the business of raising awareness, but sometimes we are not aggressive advocates for ourselves publicly because we don't want to appear like we're, you know, getting involved in activism or being biased in some way.

And so, you know, hence why I think hearings like this are really important and your interest in this issue is really important. And it's also just a continued argument for public policy. The federal picture, there's of plenty been a lot of conversation about all sorts of different programs and market reforms that could support local news.

But in my work, I'm finding that over the last five years, most of the action is happening at the state level.

Great, thank you. We have a number of other panelists as well that want to hear, too. I just had one quick question, though. I wanted to pitch that back to you, Mr. Pierce. You mentioned Go Biz and the work that we had done to be able to fund some the.

Of some of the programming that is yet to be. I think the parameters are still being worked out. What can we take back to Sacramento to help to tool that in the right direction that optimizes impact based on what we know today?

Well, specifically the Go Biz program. Statutorily that's been placed in the hand of Dee Dee Myers, who runs that program. And so I think there's probably going to be a long period of consultation, consultation and conversations with the agency over the next year.

I know that many local news organizations in California, in lack of having guidelines over how that program should be structured, are going to be, you know, approaching that agency directly with their own ideas. We have our own thoughts on that approach.

I think our main feeling is that, and this is true for all sorts of media support when we're talking about public subsidies or anything like that, is to try to simultaneously insulate it from any potential, potential political pressure. And I mean, CPB being an example, the Federal Administration had pulled the funding, dismantled that program.

But I think what you did not see is the federal Administration, you know, going into newsrooms and dictating coverage because the program and its wisdom many decades ago had been set up to try to avoid that kind of possibility.

And so in situations like the program at GoBiz or, you know, any other possible public subsidies or similar reforms we could discuss, a lot of us will be advocating that the funding is consistent, that there are clear rules that avoids the potential for political favoritism or something that could chill press Independence in some way, which is always a risk.

And that just calls for wisdom in program design.

That public broadcasters are not involved with that at all. We were deliberately cut out of that. So I just, I think that's important to note for the legislators that, that broadcasters are not included. So that's, that's us.

One thing we definitely don't want to do, this is urgent and allow, you know, the bureaucracy and the, you know, rule. While it's important to be diligent, you know, we don't want to have so much time that we're not getting the relief or the support out there in a timely fashion when the need is now.

So thank you for your testimony here today. Really appreciate that, and we're happy to follow up with you if there's any individual questions. And with that, we're going to shift our focus now to content, production and labor perspectives.

I'd like to welcome up to the presentation table Jack Spear, who is a broadcaster with NPR and a SAG AFTRA Member, and Nathan Dappin, who, who is a filmmaker and co founder of Day's Edge Productions. Appreciate your participation in the hearing here today. I'm indifferent on who wants to go first, but otherwise I'll defer to Jack.

And again, thank you for your participation.

Good morning, Chairman Ward, honorable Members of the Committee, friends of public media, thank you for being here today. My name is Jack Spear.

I want to thank you for allowing me to testify this morning about the effects of the 1.1 billion with AB dollar rescission which has rocked the public media world, has affected all of my colleagues in this room, has affected the leadership of public media and has affected the audience for public media.

I've spent the last 27 years working at NPR. I just retired July 1st. I'm currently an adjunct instructor at Johns Hopkins. I teach business communications and ethics. And I can say almost without question that very few people will be able to enjoy the career in public media that I enjoyed.

27 years in one institution covering the news as a correspondent, as a reporter, gave me a unique feel for the people of this country. What they need, what they want to hear, what interests them, what motivates them. I also serve on the national board of SAG AFTRA. I have been a union Member since 1988.

And you've listened to the testimony this morning from my colleagues about the damage in financial terms that this rescission has done. But what I actually want to talk to you about today is not just the loss of revenue. I want to talk a little bit about the Loss of news coverage.

I don't think people appreciate what is happening to journalism in this country and what has happened to local news coverage specifically. I began my career in 1982, and the fact that I made it to retirement in journalism is nothing short of amazing.

And there are some sobering statistics, and I'm going to run down a few of them for you this morning. Since the early 2000s, the number of working journalists in the US has fallen by more than 675%. During that same period of time, the country's lost roughly a third of local and regional newspapers.

According to the annual State of Local News study Produced by Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, 213 counties in the United States are so called news deserts. So you ask me what's a news desert? That means they have no local coverage whatsoever. 1500 counties in the US have limited coverage.

So public media, specifically NPR and PBS, with our signals, collectively reaches 90% of US counties, including more than 80% of those areas that I just described as news deserts.

So when you think about the importance of PBS and NPR, think about the fact that there are people who only get their news from either NPR, PBS, or the Internet. And that's been the argument I've heard over and over. zero, well, we have the Internet. We don't need all these local news organizations and coverage.

But let's talk a little bit about that, too. The growth of AI, the growth of large corporate conglomerate media, the growth of some of these other kinds of, let's say, less rigorous journalistic institutions, means the quality of that coverage can be questioned. I think AI and Sora 2, frankly, are frightening.

I think they're frightening for the entertainment part of our business. I think they're frightening from the journalistic part of our business. I don't think it's becoming increasingly hard for people even who are experts to tell the difference on some of these things. And I think that's where PBS and NPR really stand out. We've worked extensively.

The Union SAG AFTRA has worked extensively with local stations. NPR has worked extensively with local stations. We've created and Jennifer could probably speak to this, too, we've created partnerships with local media across the country. NPR has, working with local journalists to kind of up their coverage game. And I think it's really important.

I've seen younger public media Members come in through SAG aftra. I've seen the effect it's had on jobs. I can run down a quick list of stations here in your part of the world.

KQED In San Francisco, KCT TV, PBS, SoCal, NPR, my colleagues Culver City, KCRW in Santa Monica, Las, KPCC, Pasadena Marketplace, Los Angeles and KPBS San Diego. Hundreds of jobs represented in Southern California because of public media and those jobs represent are being threatened. Make no mistake, you heard from the people who run those stations what that means.

So those are just some of the things that I wanted to talk to you about today at this hearing. I thank you for inviting me. I think the work that the California representatives are doing, the Assemblyman is doing, all of you guys are doing is extremely important, more important than ever.

And I am heartened to hear that there's work going on at the state level here in California to deal with some of this. So I hope we can continue to promote strong local journalism. I thank you for inviting me this morning to talk to you. I look forward to any questions you might have about public media.

And thanks for giving me the opportunity to testify.

Thank you, Mr. Spear.

Morning guys. Thanks so much for having me here. My name is Nate dapan and about 15 years ago I finished my PhD in biology and I did something unusual for a scientist. I picked up a camera and I started making films.

And today I'm the owner of Day's Edge Productions, which is a San Diego based production company that specializes in documentaries about science, nature and society. And over the years, my company has grown into a national leader in this space of producing science documentaries.

We produce films that have won hundreds of awards and they've been viewed by tens of millions of people across the country. In my recent role at the company, I am the Director and the co creator of the PBS primetime science series Human Footprint, which is now in its second season.

The show explores how humans transform the planet planet and what those transformations say about who we are as a species. And I do believe that it's science television at its best. I think it's entertaining, it's thought provoking, it's deeply researched, and it's rooted in science and society.

The series has reached more than 13 million homes across its platforms and it's been nominated for a national Emmy. And last year my company also produced a film called San Diego, America's Wild Wildest City for PBS Nature. It was the first nationally broadcast blue chip natural history documentary that focused exclusively on San Diego's astonishing biodiversity.

And the film was just after that adapted into an IMAX format that now screens daily at the national at the San Diego Natural History Museum, where it continues to teach students and families about the region's wildlife and ecosystem systems for the next decade and hopefully beyond. All this was made possible by public funding, by public media funding.

So that's funding that now no longer exists. And these are just a few of our projects. Cuts like these are, as you guys have heard, rippling through the country, affecting really valuable programs, but also the people behind them.

As somebody who runs a small production company that's deeply tied to public media, we produce a lot of content for commercial networks as well. But many of our films are with Pbs. We've really seen firsthand how devastating these cuts have been. Until recently, our team included myself, my business partner and about 10 full time employees.

So these are filmmakers, editors, storytellers, journalists, alongside dozens of contractors here in California and across the country. And these, you know, these are all people who are very committed. They chose these jobs because they're committed to the mission of using documentaries to build and inform public.

And in August, because of these cuts, we had to let go all of our 10 full time employees. And it's been very heartbreaking to see all these talented, dedicated people lose their livelihood at a time when I think that we need their work the most.

In many cases, instead of producing science content that educates and uplifts, many of them are now being forced to work on commercial jobs that may not serve the public or at worst undermine it. And you know, we've talked a lot about the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but it's not just that.

We're also seeing huge losses at the National Science Foundation, especially with their ASL program which has long supported public figure facing science content like PBS's long standing strands, Nature, Nova, as well as countless national specials and local specials and much of the work that we do at Dayzege Productions.

And you know, I think these cuts, they weren't accidental. They were intentional efforts to shrink the public funding ecosystem. And I do want to be clear that this isn't just happening to Dazedge Productions. As you guys have heard. Nearly everyone I know in this field is facing the same struggles.

I think the whole ecosystem of filmmakers, storytellers, journalists who are working to create meaningful non commercial science content, they're all being hit really hard. And I think it feels, at least to us, like the rug's being pulled out from one of the very few storytelling spaces that's designed not for profit, but for public good.

I believe that NPR and Pbs, they're not just another channel. I think it's one of the last places on television where you can find rigorous fact checked in depth programming that exists solely to serve the public. The fact that so many PBS's programs are not commercially viable, it's not a bug. I think that's the whole point.

While commercial networks are chasing ratings and advertising dollars, often cutting costs towards sensational and reality based content. And I know this because I've worked on these people programs, PBS has remained focused on education, curiosity and civic literacy. Back in 1989, over 95 US newspapers had dedicated weekly science sections. Today that number is closer to 15.

And most of that remaining coverage has shifted from science journalists, science journalists, to political reporters who frame a lot of the science contents through partisan lenses. And we've seen the same shift on television. Discovery Channel once gave us Planet Earth, Mythbusters, Curiosity and Breakthrough, which were all incredible programs.

And today they've got programs like you've been warned, which is a show described as the best self appointed scientists whose homegrown experiments and inventions have gone viral, or ghost adventures which explores haunted places through through pseudoscience or expedition unknown hunt for extraterrestrials. These aren't just harmless substitutes for what they used to have. These have been studied.

And most research shows that this kind of content misinforms and disinforms the public. And I think PBS really stands apart because it didn't need to join that race to the bottom. It didn't commute, it wasn't competing for those same kinds of commercial dollars.

And it really just depended on stable public funding from cpb, NSF, and other similar funding sources. And that's what makes its programming possible, which is why it's so crucial to protect my production company. We really specialize in science and technology stories. And I think we live in this world that's increasingly shaped by science and technology.

It's in our pockets, it shapes our health, it's embedded in our food, our clothing, our transportation and economy. And it deeply impacts our environment. And yet every day people understand less and less about how any of it works or about how it affects any of their lives.

And I think that gap between our dependence on science and technology and our understanding of it is dangerous. I think it's a threat to our democracy because an uninformed public can't make smart choices.

Not about AI or vaccines or climate, or about policies that determine what's in our food or medicine, or our children's schools or our voting booths. And I think that's really why PBS and NPR matter.

I think those places provide one of the last remaining platforms for reliable, honest, non commercial, rigorously fact check check programming that is devoid of conflicts of interest. It's not trying to sell you something.

If we want voters who are equipped to engage with the world's most pressing challenges, from climate change to digital privacy to biotechnology or AI, I think we need public media to keep doing what it does best. And I know that what our team at Day's Edge Productions and so many of our colleagues across the nation care about.

We're passionate about trying to tell these stories that inform the public about what's happening with society and with science and technology and how those things intersect.

And I worry about a world where the only thing that we see on television is designed to sell us something, to distract us from issues that actually matter or actively manipulate us into believing things that aren't true or behaving in ways that don't serve the public interest. And I really want that to happen.

And that's why supporting PBS is really important right now.

Great. Thank you both for your presentations. Mr. Speer, I wonder if you could elaborate a little more about typical day of trying to put together a newscast and maybe the range of professions and skilled labor and others that are out there that need to come together to get that story.

Absolutely. I think that's a very important point. By the way, it's not just a one person endeavor. When I produced a daily newscast, I sat around a table, kind of a round table with deafs, basically. I had a producer, I had an editor, I had someone who was helping with the tape and reports coming in.

So we would have four or five people sitting around to do that hourly newscast every day. And those are four or five jobs, distinct jobs. My job there was another anchor who was out here, Dwayne Brown, who co anchored and was out in California anchoring out of Culver City.

We had a producer, we had an editor, we had two people who were helping at each end. We had engineers. It's a huge operation. It seems like you just would sit in front of a mic, right? One person sits in front of a mic. Absolutely not.

It is a collaborative and cooperative endeavor and it takes a lot of people to do it and it takes correspondence all over the country to do it.

And I didn't mention this a whole lot in my testimony, but one of the things that younger journalists in some of the markets that we talked about and some of the smaller stations we spoke about learn their journalism, working with us, we give them a platform.

There are, there are station member station reporters all over the country who were in my hourly newscast and who cooperated with us and who learned how to do some of the things they do on the air every day by working through public media outlets that are extremely threatened, especially the smaller ones.

I heard some numbers, I don't know which number. I heard 40% of the budget. That's not unusual. There are Member stations all over the country where 40% of their budgets came from the CPB. I began my career in Erie, Pennsylvania. That's a small market station combination, just like here, television and radio.

I think their budget, I think about 40% of their budget came from the CPB. So those stations are being forced or will be forced because as Jennifer mentioned, October was the first time the money didn't start to come in. Right. But the money's not going to come in after that.

So you're on the front end of the tsunami that I talked about, not the back end, not even the middle. So yes, it's a definitely, I would say an existential threat to journalism.

And, you know, with a loss of some of those team Members, how do you compensate for that to make sure that the story is done, that the work product gets out there?

And you know, I'm thinking too, my own experience and I've seen this shift over the last decade engaging with local media here where there's no longer a cameraman or camera person. Right. That, you know, your infield reporter is having to do multiple jobs now and piece things together.

What are you seeing as far as your colleagues try to accommodate, I guess, for some of these labor challenges?

Well, I mean, trying to accommodate for it is a problem. One man bands and television have been a huge problem here in California. They've been a huge problem from a safety aspect. We've had camera people whose equipment's been stolen in Oakland.

We've had people who've been hit by cars because they're standing there doing their stand up and they're not paying attention to what's going on around them in terms of you ask about how do we make up for it. I don't know that we can make up for it.

I mean, if you're going to have, you're going to have lower quality journalism. Absolutely. Less fact checking, less intensive research, less on the ground reporting, which, by the way, is hugely important. You need people on the ground to tell you. I mean, I was a correspondent for 10 years.

I learned more from traveling the country and talking to people and being on the ground with them about their communities. And you would come up and you would get stories that you never would have gotten otherwise. So it's going to have a huge effect. I don't know that you can compensate for it. I really don't.

True. A lot of our effort this year in the Legislature, a big piece of effort, was to work on our film and tax credit production.

And I wanted to know, is that something that, you know, we had some emphasis there to make sure that the next version beginning soon, would reach more areas out of the LA market, would reach independent producers.

Is that something that if you were following that as well, you can see as an enhancement, I guess, to work on the funding or to work on your financials that you would need to. To keep productions alive?

I think the Feldman tax credits are very important. I mean, as you know, California is not the only state that tries to compete. I live in Maryland. Maryland has tried to compete in that arena a little bit. So, yeah, I think it's very important.

I mean, I think every little bit helps, there's no question about it. But I don't think it's going to make up for the loss of what's happened with CPB or NSF or any of the other platforms. Not by a long shot. Not by a long shot, Yeah.

Well, again, I want to thank both of you for taking your time. Really want to thank Mr. Dappin. When you said you were a biology major, my ears perked up as a fellow scientist, and I think your presentation really just helped us remember that when we're talking about public broadcasting. It's not just local news or national news.

It's actually also educating people and in a time where science and technology is just growing at such a rapid pace, and we are utilizing it so much more now than ever, the fact that we are ignorant in many ways of the technology that we're using is actually very scary, and our children are ignorant of that is extremely scary.

So, I thank you for everything that you're doing. And you know, Mr. Spear, it was interesting when you were talking about the state of journalism here in the United States, which then trickles down to the amount and the quality of the news that we, as residents of the United States, are getting, it reminded me, I listen to someone every morning on the radio, and she actually gets her news from international sources because of the lack of credibility in terms of the journalism that we have here.

And so, I have one question for you. You've been in this career for a very long time.

So much has changed, and so much is continuing to change. As a Professor, what do you tell the future generation that you are currently teaching?

I think I tell them to be good storytellers. And my colleague aptly demonstrated, I think, why that is so important and why PBS and NPR give a platform for that kind of storytelling. You can have all the technology in the world, but if you can't tell the story, it doesn't matter.

And I tell my students every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. That's the arc of the story, right? The overreaching narrative. And that's what I tell them.

And I tell them that you need to get to that story to be a good journalist, but you also need the resources, the time, the ability to do that. And commercial media, in many cases—and I've worked for commercial media as well, so I can talk to that—commercial media, in many cases, the Internet, in many cases, streaming media, in many cases, reels in many cases that everyone watches every day aren't really doing that.

And PBS and NPR give people a platform to do that. So, that's what I tell my students. I tell my students that you need to be good storytellers.

You need to be able to do that before you can do anything else.

Have you seen a decrease in the number of students entering a journalism career?

Absolutely. And I will say, I do not teach journalism. I mentioned I teach business, communications, and ethics. Yes. Fewer students are entering the career of journalism every day and there are fewer outlets for them to practice journalism. They have opportunities I did not have. I mean, I'm analog, right?

I'm pre, technically pre-internet when I began my career, but I don't think that the outlets that many of them have, and somebody mentioned the startups that people are doing, a lot of the streaming media startups and other things people are doing, podcasts people are doing, starting on their own.

These things are not getting much traction and making much money in many cases. So, you need an institution around you to produce quality journalism. You need other people involved. I said there were five or six involved in my hourly newscasts every day. You need to have that infrastructure to provide, I think, quality journalism.

You mentioned foreign journalism and foreign media outlets. I think the BBC just got in trouble, didn't they, this week? So, I don't know. You know, you tell me.

I don't know what we are doing in the country in terms of producing quality journalism anymore, but I don't think we're moving in the right direction, if that's what you want.

Thank you.

One final question. I wanted to be a little, I guess, bold. Mr. Spear, what's your advice to broadcasters that—again, I see this as an existential threat for the future of the profession and everything being so specifically targeted right now with such an urgent and immediate impact on the quality of productions that we're having.

Is there, you know, you try to walk that line, I gotta imagine, to obviously get the information, you know, develop the story and report the news.

And occasionally, we would see the commentary on a 60 minutes story or something, you know, kind of after the fact that it really, really calls out, you know, this very targeted public policy action that we're seeing here and the impact that's going to happen.

And if we have trust in local media, which we do, people recognize their local reporters. Where do you—when do you—cross the line and in what way did those reporters begin to elevate the, without seeming self serving, right?

But the important message out there that like, hey, like we are about to go off the air, you're about to not have me. How do you, how do you raise the flag, I guess? And how do you, how do you advise professionals to talk about that?

Excellent question. I mean, I think in my remarks I mentioned, and maybe I didn't, I may have dropped that part, but I want news from people in the community where I live. I mean, I want to hear from people in the community where I live.

Some of that has been made up by small outlets like Patch and other things that are actually providing some local news, but that's not the kind of local news I'm talking about.

I'm talking about the kind of local news you get from public media, and you get from smaller stations where people are in the community that you know. I mean, when I started in radio, every small town had a radio station, had a news department, and we had to produce public affairs content. We were required to.

And those requirements went out the window a long time ago, but that was sort of when things started to change more and more and more. And I think people in communities who want their communities to be served probably need to help try to find ways to do that. And public media was one way that that was happening.

And it is going to happen, I predict, in the future less and less because of budget cuts. So, how do people solve that problem? Maybe partnerships again. We've done partnerships, newspapers, media, radio outlets, other things. Maybe they can partner in smaller communities again.

Maybe the public can come up with ways of funding or helping to fund, which we already do with PBS and NPR, by the way. A lot of funding comes from people in the communities where those stations are.

But I think there is a role, and the CPB played a huge role in providing funding to help keep those things moving, and that's gone. So, I don't know. It's going to take a lot of invention. And I think state legislatures can work on that.

I think local legislatures, maybe even, you know, I saw the San Diego City councilman is here. Maybe that's—maybe those kind of cooperation or cooperative efforts can help. But I think we need to do it because I think if we lose local coverage, we lose a lot. We lose a lot of ourselves.

Well, thank you both for your testimony here today. We look forward to keeping in touch as things evolve.

And we're going to turn our attention to our final panel today and invite up Deanna Mackey, who's the General Manager for—from—our host for today's hearing, KPBS, Jose Martinez De Solant Saldana, the Co-Executive Director for Radio Bilingue, and Joe Moore, who's the President and General Manager of KVPR in Fresno and Bakersfield.

Thank you for being here. I know, Ms. Mackey, you didn't have to travel too far, but again, we really appreciate your accommodations and we look forward to your presentation.

Thank you. My name is Deanna Mackey. I'm the General Manager of KPBS. Very proud to lead this incredible organization. I want to welcome you all to KPBS and to San Diego State University. I want to thank you, Chairman Ward, as well as Senator Weber Pierson and for all that are joined with us today, our guests as well as my fellow public media sister stations.

Thank you for being here and for being part of this hearing and for anybody who's watching on streaming as well. We are—KBBS is the public media station serving San Diego and Imperial Counties. We hold noncommercial licenses for a radio and a TV station.

The CSU Board of Trustees holds our TV license and San Diego State University holds our radio license and we have been here on this campus since our inception in 1960.

We celebrated our 65th birthday on September 12th of this year. We began as an educational radio station in a closet with donated equipment and today, we are a multi-platform media organization and an NPR and PBS member station. We employ nearly 200 people, including 65 people in our newsroom and 30 SDSU students.

Since our beginnings, we have embraced the public service mission of public broadcasting. In fact, our first KPBS General Manager, John Witherspoon, helped write the Public Broadcasting Act that created CPB, and he was at the signing of the act with President Lyndon Johnson in 1967.

Our mission is to provide stories that make us think, help us dream, and keep us connected. And unlike most nonprofits, KPBS touches people through all out the life cycle of their day. People wake up to our radio station in the morning to hear the news.

Parents and grandparents use KPBS Kids during the day because it is such a trusted resources. People access our social media and podcasting and shows like Midday Edition on radio during the day and then, of course, at night, people are watching our television station and streaming to watch their favorite show.

Every month, 2 million people come to us to watch, listen, and read stories on digital and broadcast platforms, whether that is through traditional broadcast or on Instagram, YouTube streaming, and our website. We are meeting people where they are, and we tell stories that open minds and hearts.

We produce local shows and podcasts that give a sense of place, such as Ken Kramer's About San Diego, which unveils unique San Diego places and people and one of our most recent podcasts, Voices Del Valle, which spotlights powerful coming of age stories created and told by students from Central Union High School in El Centro.

Our arts and culture team uncovers movements and trends that are shaping our region's culture and turns these stories into a weekly newsletter, events calendar, news segments, public art special series, and two podcasts, the Finest and Port of Entry. Our KPBS news team's border coverage has been this community's eyes and ears in the border region.

Our reporting has shed light on the administration's actions on the ground in our region and how state and local agencies have interacted with federal agencies, and our inaugural book festival brought 8,000 people together for the love of books, learning, and literacy. So, now for the difficult part of the story.

Federal funding represented 12% or 4.3 million of KPBS's annual budget. It provided seed funding for our operational expenses and that funding equated to $1.60 per person, per year. While we prepared for this scenario, the loss of funding has negatively impacted KBBS and our plans for the future.

We are fortunate to have reserves to tap into cover the immediate budget loss and that has helped us avert layoffs this fiscal year. However, that is not a long term solution. It is a one year solution. What money is raised by early 2026 will tell us our shortfall for the next fiscal year, which begins in July.

If we do not raise the funds, year two will be different and we may need to have a reorganization as well as put future plans on hold or cancel plans.

The target of the federal funding cut may have been our national partners, NPR and PBS, but the pain is being felt by people and families in cities, towns and rural communities across California and the nation.

And it should not be lost on any of us in this room that we are discussing the dismantling of a system from a place, this place, KPBS, that helped build the very system that Americans have relied on and supported for 65 years.

And it personally saddens me, because I've spent nearly 40 years in this industry, to watch unravel what this station helped build. We are integral to people's lives in the fabric of this region. That will not change.

And we are working very hard to fill our budget gap to ensure we can continue to be the essential service that this community deserves. I thank you for providing me with this opportunity to speak.

Good morning. Buenos Dias. My name is Jose Martinez Saldana. I'm the Co-Executive Director of Radio Bilingue. Thank you for the opportunity to speak and to address the Committee. I'm proud to be here today representing the leading Latino public radio network and Spanish content producer in US public media.

Founded in 1980 by farm workers, activists, artists, and teachers in Fresno, this year is our 45th anniversary of public radio produced by and for Latino and indigenous Mexican communities throughout California and beyond. We should be celebrating.

Instead, our small team has been working round the clock to close the gap left by the loss of federal funds to ensure we are there for our audience as they face tremendous challenges. Radio Bilingue operates a 16-station network here in California, broadcasting in Spanish, English, and Mexican indigenous languages.

Nielsen ratings can't reach all of our listeners to count them because we prioritize people who are farm workers and working immigrant families who want to protect their privacy, especially now. Even still, Nielsen consistently shows we achieve 2 million weekly impressions in California alone. We do this with a small but mighty team of staff and volunteers.

If we can go to the next slide. Our audience—so, here is a deeper look at our audience. I won't read the list, but this is who we exist for. These are the people who come to us on the street and tell us to please keep doing what we are doing.

We reach across generations and also the Latino experience. Our audience is considered hard to reach in times like the Census and the Pandemic, and we help the State of California reach them, not just to be counted, but also to stay healthy. Next slide please. A guiding framework for Radio Bilingue is "La Cultura Cura," our culture heals.

This is embedded in the ways our programs foster a deep sense of belonging and cultural pride. From artist interviews, traditional mariachi music to modern alter Latin sounds, Radio Bilingue celebrates Latino culture in all of its forms.

Many listeners call to share how our music improves their mental health, reminds them of their loved ones, and lifts their spirits in these very challenging times. Next slide. Our listeners trust us because our programs are in their languages and our journalists, producers, and hosts reflect their lived experiences.

Our Spanish Language News Service is the only one of its kind in public radio nationally and was designated by CPB to fill this particular need. Recent evaluations found that 81% of our listeners discussed topics that they heard on the radio with their families and friends, and 83% of them were motivated to take actions. Next slide.

Here are just a few samples of the variety of arts, information, and music programs that we cover. La Hora Mixteca is our bilingual Spanish Mixteca program, which is for a primarily indigenous farmworker community. It features traditional music like Chilenas and promotes cultural celebrations across the state like the Gala Getza that we broadcast nationally just last month.

Alza tu Voz and Rockin' da House are Spanish and English programs by and about young people with music, interviews, and conversations on arts, as well as social issues. Next slide. Radio Bilingue is a longtime trusted partner to many government agencies, county health departments, and community organizations.

We ensure state resources and emergency messaging reach Californians who might otherwise miss out and that are not reached by mainstream and commercial broadcasters. Next slide. So, what is at stake?

For Radio Bilingue, we are losing over $300,000 per year from CPB's Community Service Grant program, as well as 1.1 million in the promised FEMA funds to repair our disaster alert readiness infrastructure. We also are being impacted as our state agencies and nonprofit partners have had their federal dollars also slashed.

This is a serious setback not just for us, but for the rural and low income communities we serve every day. For them, Radio Bilingue is usually the only reliable source in their languages for local news, emergency alerts, educational programming, civic information, and of course, our daily programs celebrating Latino arts and culture.

In closing, I want to thank you again for the opportunity to express how it will take all of us to sustain public media. We invite you all to join us in this critical effort in any and all ways that you can. Gracias.

Good morning, Assemblymember Ward, Senator Dr. Weber Pierson, and our other guest today. My name is Joe Moore. I am the President and General Manager of KVPR, Valley Public Radio in the Central Valley. Let's go to the next slide.

KVPR's mission is expanding your world through voices and sounds that inform and inspire, and we are proud to be the NPR station in the Central Valley. We'll go to the next slide.

KVPR was founded in 1975 as an independent, community-based nonprofit and we serve the residents of seven counties in the Central Valley—Fresno, Kern, Tulare, Kings, Merced, Mariposa, and Madera County. We'll continue on.

KVPR provides a mix of programming which includes local content from our program and podcast, Central Valley Daily, to our local newscasts and in-depth reporting. Twice in the last four years, KVPR has received the national Edward R. Murrow Award for Broadcast Excellence, one of the highest honors in American broadcasting.

KVPR also believes in the power of collaboration to better utilize scarce resources and expand the impact of our work.

KVPR is an active participant in the California Newsroom, which is a collaboration of the NPR stations in the Golden State and also works very closely with the Central Valley Journalism Collaborative, as well as our colleagues at Radio Bilingue, Fresno Land, SJV Water, and many others in the nonprofit news ecosystem in our region.

We'll go to the next slide. KVPR is also more than news. KVPR produces KVPR Classical, a 24/7 classical music service on broadcast and digital platforms.

We broadcast concerts by the Fresno Philharmonic and with our show Young Artists Spotlight, we air performances by the Youth Orchestras of Fresno, the Bakersfield Youth Symphony, Fresno City College, Bakersfield College, CSUB, Fresno State, and many other student groups.

I should also add that KVPR plays an important role in emergency alerting not only for our audience, but for all other broadcasters in our six county region.

I'm the Co-Chair of the Local Emergency Alert Services Committee and KVPR is one of two stations in our region that is the vital link between public agencies and all other broadcast outlets, TV and radio. We receive the alerts from the National Weather Service or other officials and then we relay those alerts.

Other stations have their devices listening to our stream and then that's disseminated out through all other broadcast outlets in our region. So, that's another very important part of what we do. Community Connection. KVPR is deeply rooted in the communities we serve and the Central Valley values what we do and what we bring to our region.

How do we know this? Well, the response to the current crisis is a great example. Go to the next slide. KVPR lost $192,000 in CPB Community Service Grant funding for with the rescission in August. That's about 7% of the station's overall revenue.

KVPR also lost a $34,000 FEMA Next Generation Warning System Grant that would have funded equipment to increase our resiliency during natural disasters like fires, major snowstorms, things like that. Go to the next slide. So, KVPR, knowing that this rescission was a possibility early in the summer we developed a response plan.

It included a plan for additional fundraising, freezing hiring for any vacant full-time positions, a plan for cuts to purchase programs, and as a last resort, a plan for cuts to our local coverage and station operations.

And as a small station with just 13 FTE employees, we all wear a lot of hats, so a reduction in our team would truly be the last resort. So, we immediately implemented the first two steps as soon as rescission passed. We went on air with a special fund tribe just hours after the last vote in Congress.

We implemented new techniques to reach our lapsed donors. We utilized new technology to give us every opportunity to recover and mitigate the impact of this loss. So, the outlook. Our audience responded. We more than recovered the funding that was lost and we did it primarily with small dollar donors.

For the year that ended September 30th, 2025, individual giving to KVPR was up 30% on a year over year basis. We were able to avoid the cuts to programming and local coverage and operations, for now. Our team is really focused on working hard to sustain and renew this support for the future.

We're incredibly grateful for our community's help. We recognize that many stations lost a larger share of their overall funding or have a more challenging path to recovery on the short-term basis. But even with the incredible achievements of our fundraising team, this has been a trying time for our station and longer, big term—long term challenges remain.

This additional giving buys—giving buys us some time, but big spikes in giving are typically followed by a decline in support. We know that as headlines move on and the issue of the end of federal support fades, giving will drop. The question is when? Our biggest concern right now is on the 12-to-18-month horizon.

We anticipate this is the greatest—the point of greatest pressure—on our finances and operations going forward. The next slide please. So, the path ahead. Additional giving alone is not a sustainable strategy to replace the infrastructure—the institutional support of CPB. Cuts at our station and others are still possible.

Public radio is a part, an essential part, of California's civic infrastructure, and while we have been defunded, we are not defeated. Thank you very much for this opportunity.

Great. Thank you all for your presentations. Ms. Mackey, I know one of the things we're really proud about with KPBS is that it is here at San Diego State. How do you see how much of your content is either student driven or some level of engagement or participation into the work that you're doing here?

And how are you seeing that possibly change in the near future as you're having to make any difficult decisions around total content development, the educational opportunities, I guess?

So, at any given time, we have 30 to 40 students that work at KPBS, and they work in every Department. There are 20 hour a week jobs and they're paid and we pay a bit above minimum wage.

And I know a lot about this because I actually started at KPBS as a student in the mid-80s, left the station after that. But I know the impact of being a student here and the real-world experience you have.

So, how the student experience can be impacted is really how any position at KPBS can be impacted. As we look at fiscal '27 and decisions we might have to make if we aren't able to make up the 4.3 million, that could affect how many students we were able to afford to have work in the various departments.

And I know you asked about content specifically, and they do work in different departments, be it news, programming, production, and they get hands-on experience, but they work in every department, marketing and finance. So, it's really a loss of the student experience across the organization. And we are one of the larger nonprofits here in the community, so, being able to serve 30 to 40 students at any given time is significant.

Yeah. And I wonder, for Radio Bilingue, you know, the Administration's attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion support programmatically and across the board, have you seen that intersect with your important mission in reaching the communities that you do, which is necessarily, you know, reaching people and who they are?

Has that exacerbated, I guess, already sort of general challenges that we're having with broadcasting?

Yes, in several different ways. You know, first and foremost, all of the focus areas that we have in terms of informing people about immigration rights, their worker rights, health access, the importance of knowing their civic responsibilities. All those things are being attacked, you know, by the Administration's executive orders.

And so, it has put, I think, a lot of pressure on us, really, to try to figure out how to navigate those waters in a way where we're still able to continue to provide the information that our audience needs to be able to go ahead and first, stay informed, stay healthy, and live as dignified as they possibly can while there is all of these pressures and attacks that are really coming at them.

When raids are happening across the state or across the country in different places, you know, it creates fear and panic.

And so, again, when they tune into our programming, they're hearing experts talk about, again, things that they can take, measures they can take, steps they can take, to be able to go ahead and be safe, to protect themselves, their families, and if they happen to be undocumented, if they're pulled over, apprehended, again, to be able to go ahead and speak about who they are.

You know, the other thing for us, a different dimension is that obviously our other concern is, okay, what happens to us as a broadcaster?

Could we potentially be one of those that gets targeted because we have seen the Administration go after some public media, KQUED, actually, KCBS up in the Bay Area, to attack them because there was a story that they didn't like.

So, that puts on a very different lens into how we have to look at our role as media and content producers and broadcasters.

Because all of a sudden, rather than feeling we're bringing forward the positive stories or factual stories that are telling unbiased—providing unbiased information—all of a sudden, you know, there is that sense that are we also now being targeted?

Thank you for that. Mr. Moore, can you tell us a little more—down here in San Diego, are there issues specific to the Central Valley that make it, you know, a little bit more difficult to operate?

Or one, are there issue areas that you feel like you cover, you know, disproportionately more because they're important to the Central Valley? And two, you know, the local context of how you look at the bucket of solutions, I guess, to be able to keep these stations operating the best you can.

Are there distinctions that make it more challenging in the Central Valley?

Yeah, I think I alluded to it in my comments. We cover a very vast geographic region. You hear us from the top of the grapevine to the southern fringe of the Delta.

So, a vast area, a population of close to two and a half million people that we serve and trying to cover the stories that are important to them. Just recently, we had two major reporting projects that we did and with other partners.

We worked with Inside Climate News on a major series of reports about carbon capture and energy issues in Kern County. Those are published nationally. They aired on our station. Also, some of it was aired nationally on NPR—of great interest to our community.

We also teamed up with Public Health Watch and did a series of two investigative pieces looking at heat illness, specifically with the senior population in the Valley, and also looking at issues with renters and access to air conditioning.

So, these are things that aren't getting covered in other local media outlets in our region, and—or at least not to the extent that we've been able to really devote the type of reporting and coverage that, on a commercial side, they're going to look at that and say, we don't have the resources to do that type of reporting.

So, yes, we try to do that and bring that to our audience. It's what our audience expects. It is a challenging space. We are, like I said, a small shop and cover a region that has a lot of challenges.

But I think that the importance of what we bring our community has only been underscored and we hear that from them. It's not just a donation of $100; it's the comments that we're hearing from listeners saying how important what KVPR brings on the radio every day is to the lives of residents in our valley.

Is there anything that you would use today to tell us that you feel is underrepresented statewide? I appreciate it. I mean, the role that I have right now, how interconnected we are, and the importance of agriculture and Central Valley communities as well to the state's benefit.

But are you seeing, do—things as important as local conversations are, are there things that are not reaching state statewide significance that you'd want to elevate today?

Well, I mean, I think the importance of California's agriculture industry is huge. I think also the incredible work that's happening right now in our region in green technology, renewable energy, is very important and the ongoing efforts at a just transition. Kern's County's economy is largely dominated by the traditional oil and gas industry.

And there are a lot of efforts to look at what does the future for that economy look like going forward. We believe that these are local conversations. They're also statewide conversations. And we work with our partners, KQED, the California Report, the California Newsroom, to elevate those conversations to a larger audience as well.

Great, thank you. Well, all the questions I have for today, but we'll certainly keep in contact as more questions arise, and please see us as a resource as well. And this Committee is a resource as the dynamics change. And we need to continue to have that collaboration with state government. Thank you for your participation.

At this point in time, we do have an opportunity for public comment for any members of the public that are here with us here today for it to take a minute or two if you wanted to inform it.

I do want to mention that everything is being televised and recorded on our Committee's website for other Committee Members to internalize. So, yes, sir. So, we have a comment here—sorry, a microphone here if you want to. Anybody can line up behind this gentleman, and we'll go as long as there are interested members of the public.

Sir, you may begin.

Yeah. Hugo Morales. I'm the Founder and Co-Executive of Radio Bilingue. I took a lot of interest in your question about, you know, what's the maybe different in terms of Radio Bilingue.

And one of the things that we're having to do because of who we are, literally, because of Jose and I being Mexican, we're already targets according to the Supreme Court. It's incredible what's going on.

So, what we have had to do is literally line up four law firms to help us in case we become a target like KCBS for broadcasting, in their case, an immigration raid in southeast San Jose, where Jose went to high school.

This is the kind of reality that we at Radio Bilingue are living in, both as individuals, including our news team, of course—we're all Mexicans. Most of them are immigrants. I'm an indigenous Oaxacano from Oaxaca, Mexico, so former farm worker in Sonoma County...Healdsburg, in fact, from where Senator—distinguished Senate leader—is from.

So, as the broom picker. So anyway, this is the kind of California, America, we're living in. And so, we are having to be of help to our community on health access, for example, to session preparedness. The Pajaro issue, you know, the inundation that happens, of three years ago.

We not only provided—we provided ongoing information hourly on where people could bathe, where they could eat, how to deal with the children going to school. This is the kind of broadcasting that we do in their language, not just English, but in Spanish and Mixteco and Triki. So, I myself am Mixteco.

So, anyway, this is the kind of program we do. The other, in terms of infrastructure, we have a lot of stations that you saw the map, those stations, that equipment, just like PBS, they all have a life span. They need to be replaced.

So, you know, this is the, this, so we have—are not only producers of the content, but we're also distributors. And so, I just want to make sure that people understand that the value and importance, of course, of PBS and NPR, but public broadcasting is beyond NPR and PBS.

We need to support that, but we also need to have a sense that there's also community radio stations that are beyond. And one of them is Radio Bilingue. So, thank you very much.

Thank you very much.

Hello, I'm Heather Milne Barger with KPBS. However, I'm going to be reading a statement provided by Michael Isip, the President and CEO of KQED, who could not be here today. "My name is Michael Isip, and I am the President and CEO of KQED in San Francisco. One of the largest public media stations in the nation."

"KQED was receiving about $8 million a year from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Losing that support has deeply affected our operations." Excuse me. "This summer we cut 15% of our staff, eliminated 10 open positions, and still face a large deficit that will require further reductions without new revenue."

"Among the cuts was Youth Takeover, an inspiring program that gave hundreds of Bay Area high school students the chance to work with KQED's reporters to produce local stories, building their media literacy and confidence. The station also closed its LA bureau for the California Report, the only daily statewide radio news show."

"We reduced staffing for weekend news coverage and reduced the pool of on call reporters by 75%. And a three-year $1.9 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education awarded to KQED to develop a curriculum teaching high schoolers about the Constitution and civic rights was also eliminated, saying it 'no longer aligned with Administration priorities.' "

"These cuts limit access to trusted local information, silence young voices, and weaken civic education across California. While our communities have stepped up with more financial support since the federal cuts, this generosity is not adequate to replace the cuts and is not sustainable."

"We are working as a California public media station collective to identify resources that will allow us to continue to serve California's communities with the critical services and information that keep our state safe, engaged, and informed. Thank you."

Thank you.

Thank you for this opportunity to speak today. My name is Dr. Thomas Tackey, and I teach audio production at Central Union High School in El Centro. It's a corner of California that's too often left out of the state's cultural considerations.

I serve as the Faculty Advisor and Producer of Voices Del Valle, a student creative podcast produced in partnership with KPBS through their Explore Program. Last year, our students produced 11 full episodes for season one. As I stand here today, we're deep into season two. KPBS didn't just give us a platform.

They gave our students membership—or mentorship—guidance and the belief that their stories mattered. In return, our students offered something that only they could—coming of age stories from a border community that many Californians never truly have seen or understood. Our slogan says it plainly: "Fresh voices. Bold stories made in the Valley."

When our students visited KPBS, these studios right here, many of them—they lit up. Many remembered the children's programming that they grew up with. However, this time they weren't just watching. They became creators. They walked out taller, and over the course of season one, I watched students become stronger speakers, more confident thinkers, and proud representatives of their home.

Their pride spread. Students across the campus celebrated their peers that had made something professional and respected. Business, government—government—and community leaders reached out to say how accurately and beautiful the series represents a region that is often overlooked. I got a problem here. None of this would have happened without public media and KPBS's Explore Program.

Our partner shows—our partnership shows—what is possible when local schools and public media work together. Results are tangible, meaningful, and deeply human. Voices Del Valle is now a model for other schools who are looking to follow. I encourage the Committee to continue supporting public media and lift up young storytellers, especially in the underserved regions like the Imperial Valley.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Good afternoon. My name is Andrew Bowen. I'm a Reporter here at KPBS. I'm also a shop steward of our union and I've got two main points to make. First of all, our union is incredibly grateful to our station's leadership for pledging not to lay anybody off this fiscal year.

Our members agreed to forego a cost of living increase this year in a very difficult inflationary period, knowing that our budget was in very serious, you know, it was under very serious threat.

And I think it's really thanks to years of collaboration between our union and our management that have allowed the station to build the reserves that are now helping us get through this difficult time when so many other public media stations across the country are seeing layoffs.

Our members are concerned about their job security, knowing that July 30th is just a few months away at this point and fear not only layoffs, but also wage stagnation and the gradual degradation of the quality middle class careers that we're fighting so hard to create in this industry.

The second point I want to make is that our union recently held its convention a couple of weeks ago and it passed a resolution in support of public media and in support of new revenue sources from state and local governments that are sustainable and independent from political influence. Those two points are incredibly essential to our members.

We don't want our station leaders to have to go back to Sacramento each year during budget season asking for continuing appropriations. We've seen how vulnerable our federal funding system has been to politics.

And we believe if the state were to step forward with new funding sources, we really have to be intentional and thoughtful about the creation of that program. I believe a ballot measure would provide the strongest and safest, most resilient pathway to sustainable funding for public media.

And really grateful to the Committee, you, Chairman Ward, and our station leadership for being here today. Thank you.

Thank you.

Hello. Thank you, Assemblymember Ward, the Committee, our hosts at KPBS, our panelists, and members of the public for taking this issue so seriously. My story with public media began practically at birth. I watched KCT, Sesame Street, three to one contact. My parents were members and I've watched. I've been a lifelong viewer and listener.

I raised my kids on PBS Kids. When I was on bed rest and pregnant and vulnerable and our county was on fire, I knew whether or not I needed to evacuate, whether or not I can stay in my residence. But that's just the beginning of my story.

I also started at KPBS when I was a student at San Diego State back—I won't give the year because a lady never discloses her age—but I got my foundation here and learned a lot, and now, I tell the stories of our county's most vulnerable students, students who are pregnant and parenting, students who are in our juvenile court and community schools, and I am able to tell those stories because of what I learned here.

The students who went, who started at KPBS have gone on to be Academy Award winning filmmakers and executives at places like Simon and Schuster, and they have gone on to make our community and our world better.

And public media is not just a great place for storytelling and a foundation for excellence but also has launched the careers of really talented and wonderful people. So, thank you. Thank you for your time.

Thank you.

Good afternoon. Assemblyman Ward, thank you very much for allowing this public forum and Ms. Mackey, these great facilities at KPBS. Thank you. My name is Lou Slocum.

I am the National Board Member of Sag AFTRA, representing the San Diego local and I was involved with that resolution the previous speaker spoke to, with regard to supporting both state and local funding for public media. In 1967, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was established by the federal legislature under the Lyndon Johnson Administration.

In 1969, CPB formed the Public Broadcasting Service to interconnect public television stations and distribute programming. In 1970, National Public Radio was founded as a public radio program service. Unlike PBS, NPR produces, as well as distributes, programming.

All of this occurred when I was an undergraduate working at a college radio station where many of us also spent time at CPTV, Connecticut Public Television, that had its studios on my college campus. Today, there are over 350 PBS stations and over 1,000 radio stations that are part of the NPR network.

They serve American neighborhoods from coast to coast, including rural areas where these stations may be the only source for local news, the arts, and vital information during natural disasters. They exist in every local of our union, representing thousands of Sag AFTRA members.

Over the years, PBS has received over 1,000 Emmy awards and more than 60 Peabody awards for broadcast excellence. NPR has won 19 Peabodys. I'm sure many, if not all of you, have experienced a driveway moment when listening to NPR in your car.

You've arrived at your destination but can't turn off the radio because the story you're hearing is so compelling. This is what is unique about public broadcasting. To deliver the facts without partisan political influence, allowing us to process information without filters while mirroring our essential humanity.

With the Federal Government's unwillingness to fund public broadcasting, in spite of its official chartering by Congress over 50 years ago, it is incumbent upon us to urge our state and local governments to seek funding to sustain public stations that truly represent that rare medium that's well done. Thank you.

Hi. Thank you so much for creating space and for bringing all these great speakers together. My name is Christina Shih. I am a San Diego native, a California native. I've worked in the local newspaper for over a decade, starting here in San Diego, and today, I lead a national network of funders called Press Forward.

And we are here to revitalize local news all across our communities. We have about 110 funders from community foundations, private foundations, individual donors, who are all part of thinking about the role that we all play in rebuilding the future of local News. Since fall 2023, our funders have invested more than $400 million in local news.

And this is before the public media rescission. There is no way that philanthropy alone can fill this void, and so, I'm really grateful to all of the speakers and different stakeholders who are here to thinking about what is our collective role in the future of local news.

I had the chance to meet the folks at Radio Bilingue and Joe last—just last month—in the Central Valley. We work with local foundations across the state in Central Valley, Inland Empire in Silicon Valley, and we work with about 40 other local foundation coalitions across the country.

And what I really want to highlight, you know, Joe talks about the essential infrastructure role and collaboration role that these stations play in the editorial production, but they play an essential role in rebuilding the future of local news. They serve as hubs for pipeline training for bringing awareness and advocacy to these issues.

They also help alleviate pressures when the field is doing so much more with less. And they're also at the forefront of helping us as funders understand what solutions are possible, because what we do at the national level has to make sense locally.

And so, I just want to say thank you and ask that this not be the first and only conversation about this work. There is a broad base of us that are all thinking about this work, from my funders to our grantees at Rebuild to other, you know, local leaders.

And we often take a look and see what's possible state by state. We look at what's working in the State of Kansas with advertising, tax credits. We look at what's taking place in New Mexico with fellowship funding.

And we think this is the right time to experiment and see what's possible because I think our communities, especially in California, deserve it. And I think in a place like California, only like California, can we really set the model for what takes place across the country. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. I'm Carrie Biggs Adams. I'm the President of NABET CWA, National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians. Communications Workers of America. My local is based in San Francisco. We have people all over the State of California, and I, too, am a California native. I grew up watching KQED.

I am currently representing and organizing, on a first contract, the employees at Cap Radio in Sacramento. So, I am looking at public broadcasting at a very organic level as I see these funding cuts.

But one of the things that I want to be sure gets into the discussion, especially any legislation that you may come through towards putting money forward for creating more programming, is it can't be used to bust unions. It's got to be that we understand there are labor agreements. We work within those agreements. The unions are here.

We understand the failing model of losing, in KQED's case, $8 million in funding. But at the same time, we have to be sure that these good jobs stay good jobs, we make good content, and we are able to bring it to the public and serve them. Thank you.

Thank you. I want to thank all members of the public for being here today, for your important comments, and for all of our panelists as well, for this. You know, you know, it's sobering, alarming.

It's important that we lay all the information out there and really take a snapshot of, you know, the impacts that we've already been feeling and the hard work that you're doing right now to be able to keep this important industry and this important service alive, and I'm grateful for that.

We'll be sure to share a lot of the content and potential recommendations as well with any of our Committee Members as we head back to the State Capitol in January and begin the legislative year. So, I want to thank KBPS, again, our hosts, and again, those here at SDSU that helped facilitate this hearing here today.

And with that, we are adjourned.