Early this morning, the United States Senate passed the rescissions bill that cuts around $9 billion in aid for foreign assistance programs and for public radio and television funding through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

The bill was revised before it passed, with some funding restored for HIV/AIDS prevention programs, but the cuts to public media stand, and they're poised to have a massive impact on stations like ours all across the country.

I'm joined now by Cassandra Etienne, Associate Director of Membership and Programming at the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University.

She shares her take on the impact these cuts will have on public media outlets and the communities they serve.

Cassandra, so great to have you with us tonight.

You know, we've been talking kind of big picture about what these cuts are, how they're going to impact broadly the CPB, the Center for Public Broadcasting, but on a more local level, can you just help explain the role of public television and radio, public media in general, across the country?

Sure.

I'm glad to be with you this evening.

So when we think about the role of public media, it provides access to high-quality news and information that is free and accessible to viewers and to readers.

And also this public media also provides educational programming.

Public media is also essential in times of emergencies and crises.

So public media plays an important role in the fabric of our communities across the United States, and it is essential to an informed and engaged society that can participate civically.

And obviously we talk about this as NJPBS, who are directly impacted.

We know $1.5 million will be cut from our NJPBS budget alone.

That is significant.

There is no funding that goes directly from the CPB to your organization, but there is a partnership here.

And I want to talk about that and how it serves the public at the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University.

Explain how the partnership allows us to reach more people.

Sure.

As a matter of fact, I'm reminded of an example because of a luncheon that we hosted recently where we gathered the partners of our Spanish translation and news service, Spanish translation news service.

We met with our in-language partners and English language partners, including NJ Spotlight, and we discussed how this service of making news and information available to Spanish-speaking audiences that may not have access to this content otherwise.

And so this partnership with NJ Spotlight helps Spanish in-language publications to translate and then share this information with their audiences.

That's just one example.

We also have a number of other partnerships, including a news content sharing service that we're launching also in partnership with NJ Spotlight.

So we can see how the cuts to public broadcasting will have reverberating impacts in ways that are immediately tangible and that we can kind of surmise, but also in ways that we don't hear about as often.

There have been accusations from Republicans who say that public television, public news has become part of the woke media machine.

Are those accusations fair?

The argument that support for local news for public media is some sort of partisan in some way, I would question that.

We know that public media is not beholden to corporate interests per se or as vulnerable to advertising and other stakeholders as other types of media are.

And so when you have the fact that corporate interest is not always guaranteed, but you had funding that had already been allocated in support of public media being now stripped away, that's something that almost had been taken for granted or someone had been guaranteed, and now that's just being ripped away from public media.

And that's a disservice to the people that depend on it for news and also to the providers who create the content.

We know that there are two senators who did vote against this, two Republican senators, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, but it has now, it does now go back to the House.

We'll be watching to see what happens.

But Cassandra Etienne, I want to thank you so much for joining us and thank you for your insight.

Thank you for having me.

Thank you.

Thank you.

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