Welcome to the Aaron Harber Show.

My special guest, the president and CEO of PBS.

Paula Kerger , in part two of our special two part series.

Paula, again, thanks for joining me.

Wonderful to be with you.

You know, we just started to talk about funding, and I really want to hear about the story.

I think, you know, why those of us in television and certainly in public broadcasting were very focused on, on what happened with, with defunding, What actually happened when when PBS was defunded?

So and this is the heartbreaker of it, both the House vote and the Senate vote were so very close.

In both cases, we thought that we had the votes to retain our funding and it just slipped away.

The Senate in particular, the vote was in the middle of the night, and I was up talking to a bunch of people back and forth as we were trying to monitor what was going on, and it seemed like we had the votes.

And then they took a long recess and they came back and moved forward and and we lost.

And so, you know, sort of where do you go from there?

The money, as we were talking about in the first episode, largely goes to our stations, and it goes to them in the form of community service grants.

And a lot of stations use that to pay basic expenses for, you know, their power bills, which public stations are not insignificant because they're running broadcast operations, but it's their overall operations money for for many of our stations.

And if you remember, back in the 80s when Newt Gingrich had had proposed 90s, I guess, the contract with America, his idea was a three year glide path to zero.

And this was basically three months.

We were defunded in July.

Stations.

This was money that had already been appropriated for 26 and 27.

So we were counting on the money.

The money was already there and then suddenly it was gone.

So they basically had three months from when they would have expected their first check.

And many of our stations, you know, had ways that they had some resources and so forth.

But some of our stations live very close to... The edge.

Yeah.

And and so for them, we were deeply concerned that this was really a potentially an existential moment.

And we've already talked about the fact that not all stations receive the same amount of percentage of their budget comes from federal money.

For a lot of stations, it's 6 , 7, 8%.

That's a lot to lose.

But if you're a station is relying on 25, 30, 35, at its most extreme, 52% of your funding from the federal government, it disappears overnight.

And you're in a small rural town with not a lot of of philanthropic capacity.

You're in a heap of trouble, and particularly if you have three months to figure that out.

So I began working with a small group of people who had been anticipating that this was a possibility, that an organization that worked with a lot of radio stations, actually, that helped them put funding together for groups that were attempting to buy radio licenses.

And so they knew a lot about the economy of of radio and television.

And they had the infrastructure, and they had begun doing some modeling earlier in the year and had identified a number of stations that would be quite vulnerable if the federal money went away.

And within a period of just a couple of months, we raised what is, in essence, a bridge fund to give to those stations that if you were received more than 25% of your funding from the federal government, you'd be eligible to apply.

And that made a bunch of stations solvent.

And so it was just enough.

The the hope is to to fund them for two years so that it gives them a little bit of a runway so they can figure out a longer term sustainability plan.

Some stations are talking about coming together and emerging, some are talking about other kinds of collaborations.

And we did lose a few stations particularly.

We lost a few stations that were part of universities and the university decided this.

This was just a bridge too far.

What happened to those stations?

Fortunately, the the these were communities that had other public broadcasters adjacent.

And so our biggest concern I mean, obviously you don't want to lose any stations, but our bigger concern was to make sure that the public was served.

And so we were able to close those gaps.

But there's an evolving story at Penn State, where the university has decided that they don't want to be in the media business anymore.

And actually, our station in Philadelphia is acquiring that station, and they'll come together and and serve the community.

So it's it's a story that is still being written, but there's some really great stories along side of it.

So when it came to the immediate crisis, one of the things that fascinated me is it seemed a lot of communities rose up to support stations.

I'd like I'd like your thoughts about that, but also that seem to me to be a very temporary impact.

Can it be transformed into a permanent one?

Yeah.

So I think people are always confused about how we're funded, you know, and we used to run a spot all the time for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

And so I think people thought, oh, well, they're government funded or they perhaps think that we got money if they were watching us through cable, through cable companies, which is commercial companies do get money from cable.

We do not.

They thought that if we were on a streaming platform, they're paying or so forth.

Even though we always run a spot which runs more than any other, as this program is made possible because of viewers like you, they got what viewers like you means is like, oh, that's me.

And so in the first nine months, we had a million new members.

A lot of them became sustaining members, which means that they didn't just write a check, but they agreed that they were going to give every month going forward.

And I really thought, like in the first months, I was not surprised that people were stepping up and the money was coming in.

And stations, which were, you know, really, you know, very, very concerned about how they were going to put their resources together, just reporting that they were just hearing from lots of people.

Little kids were sending money from their piggy banks, all this stuff.

I thought it was going to be similar to and there was a natural disaster.

You know, if you hear about a community that's been impacted by a tornado or a flood or something, people write checks and usually before the flood waters even recede, people move on to something else.

But they didn't in our case, they just kept giving month after month after month.

And I thought something has actually profoundly changed here.

And look, I'm not assuming that everything is just going to continue if we continue in the way that we have.

You know, I think this this for me, gives us an opportunity to really think about the relationship that we build with those that have become our partners, because that's what people are.

They own these stations.

We've already talked about the fact that our stations are community assets.

They're owned by the communities that they serve.

And so really making sure that we're developing that relationship with those communities is really important.

We need to be talking to them all, all the time about what we're doing, what we aspire to do.

We need to spend time understanding what those communities need.

Some of our our stations.

Rocky mountain PBS does this beautifully.

They really understand what the people in Denver want from their public media service.

And I think that as more and more stations are learning from each other, what is working, how do we really build those relationships will be well positioned for the future.

I'm also hopeful that we'll be able to persuade the federal government at some point to come back and help us pay for some of the things that are harder for us to pay for, like infrastructure costs and so forth.

So hopefully we can develop again that public private partnership.

You know, I always believed that our relationship with the federal government was one of the most successful public private partnerships ever.

I mean, for really what amounts to less than the cost of a cup of coffee, we provided a whole year of programing for each family in a community.

So a couple of questions along that line.

One is that it seems that public broadcasting has fought the this funding battle.

I mean, you referenced Newt Gingrich.

So I mean, we're going back 40, 50 years.

Well, 40 years.

It seems that every time public broadcasting has had this challenge, it's prevailed.

The degree of difficulty every funding year has varied.

The when in 2025 it public broadcasting didn't prevail.

I think a lot of people were surprised and my sense was there are a lot of people and I'm not saying you who I think in my perspective were overconfident, that they just assumed, well, we've we've won the battle one way or another, every year, year after year after year.

So we're going to win.

We're going to win it this year.

Do you think there was some substantial overconfidence?

No.

I think people knew this was going to be a harder year, and it was very difficult for us.

Once the ball started rolling, it was very difficult for us to sort of break through.

People that had been supporters of us in the past, I think were finding it hard to vote differently.

And, you know, it's interesting we had a circumstance in the state of Arkansas.

So after the defunding, the station decided that it could no longer afford to be part of PBS and was going to drop out.

We found out about it at the in December of 25, and I contacted the commission.

The commission is formed by the governor and asked if it's a state license I've described that were organized a little different, you know, sort of station by station.

If we could come to the commission and just talk to them about it because it's it's we're not just distributor of the programing.

I mean, all the infrastructure around it was also would they would have lost.

And I just wanted to make sure that they really understood it.

But the big thing that I was very concerned about is that it did not appear that the public was actually in this discussion.

And so we went to the commission hearing.

Their next commission hearing was in March.

100 people from the community showed up.

They had found out about this commission happening.

They read in the paper that they were considering or they decided to leave PBS.

And I, I did testify, I usually am pretty comfortable in speaking in groups and so forth.

It was very hard for me to speak to the commission following the testimony from the community.

So 100 people showed up, 20 spoke, and it ranged from senior citizens.

Woman came on in Walker, some with canes, that talked about how important Arkansas PBS had been to them.

The last speaker was a man who looked to me like he was in his early 30s, who was really angry because he's homeschooling his girls, and he uses PBS programing as a significant piece of their education experience.

And it was really emotional listening to how important this was to every person.

We persuaded the commission to give us a chance or give the community a chance to respond.

Within three months, they raised all the money for their PBS dues for the next three years.

And to me, I think people had not realized how important their philanthropy was, and they had not realized that that this was theirs to both keep or lose.

And so we were able to turn that around.

But I think it's, you know, so I think part of it in, you know, in the battle, it just, you know, it's like we're an old friend.

We've always been in people's homes, you know, it's just and think about where your TVs are there in the kitchen or they're in the family room or your bedroom.

It's like we're we're present all the time.

We're part of people's lives.

And for that, suddenly for people to realize that that suddenly may go away just really inspired people to to understand that they need to be a part of it.

And I think moving forward in the communication to legislators, I think more people need to be involved and saying, wait, this is important to me and this is what I would like.

It's, you know, one of the things when I look at this whole funding challenge is, you know, I have a sense sometimes there's a parallel with what's happened to scientific research that that that scientists are hard at work.

They're not out there making the case for science.

The public doesn't really know what they're doing.

And my sense is that a vacuum occurred that was easily filled with misinformation.

And my sense is, to a certain extent, public broadcasting has had the same experience that we're out there.

We're doing all this great work in all these communities where, I mean... it should be evident, right?

It should be evident.

Right.

You have to tell your story.

And I think that's definitely the case with with science.

And I think that, you know, also, I think in terms of scientific research and this is something that we're very engaged in both in the work we do in schools.

But in our broadcast work, we do a lot of programing on not just natural history but on science.

And I think there just as a gap, people don't understand the scientific method.

They don't understand that what you believe today may in fact prove not to be true.

Once we learn more and that science is evolving, that it is not a, you know, it's not flip flopping.

No, it is not flip flopping.

You want a different answer if you now have new data, that's it.

But our educational system has clearly failed to educate our population how science works and also what science enables and how it's present in our lives.

So when I was a kid, it was very exciting to me when they would roll in the TV set for rocket launches, you know, it was just it was great.

And what was that about?

It was about doing the improbable.

It's just everything that is around exploration.

It's about hope, it's about possibility.

But it's also what that science learning enabled.

And I you know, I've been really struck by what's happened around the Artemis, you know, project where it felt like when I was a kid again and, you know, people stopped and watched as that mission went around the moon.

And what that represented, both in terms of our knowledge and our understanding, but also what it enables.

I mean, people, you know, I think understand that that that little device that sits in your pocket is possible because of the space program and what was developed.

In fact, everybody and the main one of the main focus or points or benefits is everybody was watching.

Well, regardless whether you're a Democrat or Republican, conservative or whatever.

So when I talk about that vacuum or void, my sense is in 2025, the president filled that vacuum.

And and, you know, one of the comments he made in, in a press release they sent out essentially was taxpayers fund to spread the radical woke propaganda disguised as news, as that's what PBS or that's what public broadcasting does.

And that struck me as interesting in terms of certainly the political attraction to the comment, but that he was casting public broadcasting as news, when, in fact, if you look at the vast majority of what public broadcasting does, a relatively small percentage is actually... So two comments on that.

10% of our programing is news.

So that's principally News Hour and it's it's Frontline.

You know those are the two you know most significant franchises.

But but if you.

So most of what we do is not a big piece of what we do is all for kids.

Right.

And so but if you look at our news and you look at the audiences, we spend a lot of time focused on making sure that what we're delivering meets the public's need.

And, you know, the NewsHour is not the place you go for breaking news.

It is not the it is not constructed as a, as a show that sensationalist that has people screaming at each other.

The whole idea behind it is we're going to give you the facts.

We're going to give you the facts in more details in our broadcast, different than again others.

And then you make up your own mind.

And if you look at the audience of the NewsHour, it roughly breaks down into thirds.

A third identify themselves as being conservative, a third identify themselves as being more liberal, and a third identified themselves as as independents.

And so it is in fact reflective.

And I'm on the receiving end of communications from people that see something and, you know, and theyll write to us.

And it is as often I'm getting letters from people that are more progressive as I am from conservatives.

We also have something, at PBS, that most media organizations don't have any more, which is an ombudsman.

Most people don't even know what that word means.

This is a public editor.

This is a journalist whose job is if the public says, you know, I saw this on the NewsHour and this doesn't look right, or I saw this on this show and this doesn't look right, he goes and looks into it.

And you know what?

We don't always get it right.

And if we make a mistake, we correct the record.

And that's how you should.

You know, we're all human, but this is how you should operate.

But that's a great example.

I mean, what you cited is a great example of a statistic that the vast majority of the country doesn't know that, hey, our viewership of the NewsHour is basically reflective of the whole country.

And that's a that's a stunning that was a statistic I was not aware of.

What, you know, someone like the president will say is, well, due to the Media Center review of presidential convention coverage, you know, x percent.

I think 88% of the Democratic presidential convention coverage by PBS was positive.

72% of Republican presidential convention was negative.

Now, being involved in data analysis myself, I would like to look a little behind the numbers.

But the concept I probably would not be able to overcome the concept that it would appear objectively, that the reporting on one side was more positive than the other.

That would not shock me.

So how do we how do we do a better job of telling our story?

Yeah, I mean, it's it's a really good question.

I think that from my perspective, it's best, you know, look, I'm doing your show.

I mean, I mean, so I am, you know, and I'm doing your show for a lot of reasons.

I think you're a great interviewer.

And the opportunity to sit and talk with you is, is is fantastic.

And and President Trump says I'm great too.

So so you know that's.. Yeah.

So here I am.

But but I think that it's not just me and it's not just PBS.

It is again I've described we're a federated system of all these different stations, and we need to be focused as much on telling the story of who we are and what we aspire to be.

But again, whenever someone says to me, you know, I think that show is liberal.

It's like, okay, I'm really interested in it because I care about this.

This is something that we want to get right.

If we're if we're missing this somehow, if the perception that you have is that we're not getting the story right, then we want to we want to really drill into that and fix it.

So.

So can you talk to me?

What have you seen?

And oftentimes people can't answer.

So I don't know how we get beyond that other than just to continue to drill down and make sure that we're bringing a diversity of voices forward.

Look, I get the phone calls is like, how could you have had so-and-so on the air?

You know, they're just, you know, they're parroting the president.

It's like, no, we want to make sure that we're bringing lots of voices to you, and we believe that you're smart enough, that you're going to look at all this and make your own decision.

Yeah, I get the same comments.

I'm sure you do.

But so one of the things that that you can do is that you can tell people and you can make more of the case that, hey, we have an ombudsman.

We here are examples.

When people came in with the concerns, this is how we dealt with them.

The public doesn't know.

It's kind of like in journalism in general, journalists, especially the pressure they're under today, the number of stories there has to do its nonstop.

What the public doesn't see and what the public needs to simply learn more about is what what's behind that, you know?

What kind of standards do you have?

In fact, checking the fact that your stories are edited or whatever.

I mean, just showing people, informing people on an ongoing basis the kind of effort that's made, whether it be at PBS as an organization or individual stations, I don't even mean just in news, I mean in terms of of accuracy.

And so that leads me to, you know, this may be one way, but it'd be really interested in your sense of how do we what can we do?

What can you do to rebuild trust in public broadcasting?

Well, our trust, you know, look, we we do our own survey and we look at YouGov surveys.

The trust in PBS is actually very high and highest of media organizations, of all media organizations, highest of of, you know, a lot of public institutions.

And trust is something that is fundamental to us because we we exist because people trust that we're doing the right work, that we're giving them information that they can use, that they can rely upon.

And when you think about it, what is the most precious thing in most people's lives?

Their children, they trust us with their children.

And so I think that the trust piece is, is something that people are not going to give us money if they don't trust us.

People are not going to tune in if they don't trust us.

So, you know, it's it takes a lifetime to build.

You know, you just make one mistake.

You can lose it all.

And so we try to be really vigilant around this whole issue of, of of trust.

So one of the I think one of the fascinating changes certainly in the media environment is the the variety of sources that people from which people get news, whether it be a PBS or an ABC or whatever.

A blog they're read or whatever they're seeing on whatever TikTok influencer.

And so I think one of the extraordinary advantages that that you have, it is, is, is the commitment to when you look at the accuracy of so many sources today, and influencers may be, at the extreme, the accuracy of information people often are getting is not only terribly poor, but PBS standards And if people understand those standards, put you at the pinnacle.

And and because of what is below, gives you this incredible opportunity to be seen more as the reliable resource in a world where it's so difficult to determine, you know.. Who to trust.

Exactly and the accuracy of what you're seeing.

I mean, that's why, you know, I will often tell people that the most valuable thing we have is our brand.

And I think in this environment, when people are trying to figure out who do you trust, being able to, you know, have our brand associated with our content is just unbelievably powerful.

Okay.

We only have a couple of minutes left.

Some quick questions.

First of all, what I'd be really interested in your sense of what PBS can do to address the Partizan divide.

I mean, we we have I mean, it's it's so extreme today and because of the algorithmic challenges, it's not going to go away.

So we we actually launched a series last year bringing back the old Fred Friendly Seminars with something called Deadlock.

And in that we bring together people of wildly different backgrounds and, you know, they it's scenarios and they all play different roles.

And to me, it is the best example of people coming together.

You can't come with your talking points.

You have to come and you are put into a story and you have to react to it and talk about it together.

And I think modeling those kinds of programs where you get people that are able to, in a civil way, debate and talk about the dilemmas that we face now, it's a little thing, but I think it's one example of something that can be done that can begin to chip away of that divide.

Okay.

I mentioned the the range of sources today that there are so many different platforms in ways people can consume news.

How do you leverage PBS to address those challenges?

So, you know, look, the broadcast is important.

Our programing is all available and digital.

But, you know, we have to meet people where they are and being able to bring our programing to and bring our content to social media, some of it in different forms.

News H our has done it very well Frontline has done it extremely well.

With that in mind, what do you see as the future of public broadcasting?

Well, I'm a I'm bullish on the future of public broadcasting.

I think if you look at our history and the many times that people have written us off when cable started, oh, they're gone.

When when people began to move to digital platforms.

Oh they're gone now.

The money.

Oh they're gone.

And each time we have, we have redefined ourselves.

We just won the Webby Award for Best Media Company.

This is twice we've won it, and we were named one of the most iconic digital brands in history of the internet.

You know, so we've been there quietly working and reinventing ourselves and trying to bring us into people's lives in whatever way they're consuming media.

So I think that we're going to continue to evolve and we'll get through this period, and I think we'll be will be much better for it.

I love your optimism.

Thank you, Paula, thanks so much.

Thanks, Aaron.

Pleasure to be with you.

That was Paula Kerger, the president and CEO of PBS.

And this was part two of our special two part series.

Make sure you watch part one.

I'm Aaron Harber.

Thanks for watching.