You may have heard rumors about Trump’s May 1 executive order “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media.” You may even have heard short blurbs about it on the air as you listen to your favorite KUNM radio programs. Trump’s order says no media outlet has a constitutional right to taxpayer money, and the government gets to determine which activities to subsidize. In a nutshell, the order is telling the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and its Board of Directors to stop funding National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) because they air “biased and partisan” news coverage. It isn’t exactly ironic that the president wants to defund the stations who bring us unfiltered underground music and alternative news, and it doesn’t seem to be stations such as KUNM and KNME that are the ones guilty of censorship.
“As you know, there’s plenty of news in a song,” KUNM General Manager Richard Towne says. “So, that’s why I say the intent is to destroy all of that.”
The executive order says, “Unlike in 1967, when the CPB was established, today the media landscape is filled with abundant, diverse and innovative news options. Government funding of news media in this environment is not only outdated and unnecessary but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence.”
New Mexico’s Ears
Towne says there haven’t been official funding cuts for KUNM just yet, but for the federal fiscal year starting October 1, there’s no funding allocated for the Corporation For Public Broadcast from the House, and the Senate hasn’t started working yet. Even worse, he says the White House is also trying to backpedal, taking back money already appropriated by Congress.
“That money is in the U.S. Treasury, but CPB can’t get to it until October. So, it’s in the bank, but now they’re trying to claw it back in a procedure called a rescission request from the White House,” he says.
You might be wondering whether there’s any weight behind this executive order. To give us a scale, Towne says this year, KUNM is looking at a potential loss of over half a million dollars: $270,000 this October — or about 12% of their annual budget — and an additional $270,000 in October 2026. It’s even worse for public television provider NMPBS. Towne says they could lose as much as 1.7 million this year and the same amount in 2026.
Anyone who’s listened to its programming knows NPR doesn’t back down when it comes to reporting about alleged injustice, and it’s certainly not afraid to put world leaders on blast — including the U.S. president. On May 27, NPR filed a lawsuit against Trump seeking to have the courts rule that the executive order does not have legal standing.
“We are represented by a group of Colorado stations listed as plaintiffs with NPR,” Towne says. “NPR’s strategy was not to have every affiliated station like KUNM involved in the lawsuit, but to represent member stations by selecting three from Colorado that represent a diverse set of stations. So our role is to file an amicus brief or ‘friend of the court’ brief. Once a lawsuit is accepted by the court, they also accept other petitions, and this would be a petition from NPR member stations in support of the NPR position. It’s a friendly filing saying, ‘We the undersigned stations support the effort to overturn the executive order.’”
According to Towne, UNM stands behind its station, and KUNM’s next piece of work is to draft the amicus brief for review by University Council and Leadership. If approved, KUNM can move forward and participate in signing the amicus. He says the station’s FCC licenses are held by UNM regents, and they require a full review before moving forward with the signing. Towne says KUNM met with NPR government relations last Wednesday (June 4) to map out a strategy and have a collective conversation about what to do.
Towne says he absolutely believes this is censorship and an attack on diversity. Although it’s not specific to DEI, he says it is specific to viewpoint discrimination, and the executive order is plastered with “bias, bias, bias.”
“The executive order is an attempt to destroy public broadcasting,” Towne says. “And so they are judging the journalistic efforts of public radio stations and NPR and PBS, which is viewpoint discrimination. It’s also an attack on the First Amendment. [Trump] has gone after other commercial or for-profit media. This one is aimed specifically at non-commercial public stations, both radio and TV.”
Towne says he recognizes there are many sectors across New Mexico being impacted by the order, including KNME, and his specific area of focus is preserving and saving public broadcasting across the board.
“We are taking a statewide approach on this,” he says. “Once you get out to Gallup there are a couple of Native stations that are funded by CPB. The percent of their budget is more like 50%. [KUNM] has access to donors and business support that might help us survive the cut. When you get to 50% out in Gallup, you don’t have that donor base, you don’t have the business support base, and you’re heavily reliant on CPB annual funding. If it goes away, so do they.”
It’s not just news, but KUNM’s music programs that are being affected, and the music issue gets very complicated. According to Towne, KUNM has a music licensing agreement with publishing houses including ASCAP and BMI for their broadcasts, and they report their playlists to those organizations to determine the percent of royalties due to their artists. It’s all managed centrally by a music industry-formed group called Sound Exchange.
“The Corporation for Public Broadcasting negotiates rights licensing on behalf of all public radio stations,” he says. “And so CPB pays the annual contract, but rather than having 250 public radio stations creating agreements with Sound Exchange, it’s just one to one: Sound Exchange to CPB. Where it gets real sticky is if CPB is put out of business by the White House, we lose music licenses. NPR has filed suit, and PBS has filed a similar suit on behalf of their organization and affiliated stations, but you don’t think about Free Form. Suddenly, we can’t play it.”
New Mexico’s Eyes
Franz Joachim is the general manager of New Mexico PBS, serving Albuquerque, Santa Fe, central and northern New Mexico and the Navajo Nation. He says that losing federal funding can have huge consequences for public TV stations KNME and NMPBS as well.
“There’s been threats, but it’s all in play, and it’s very serious,” he says. “We get about 18% of our operating budget from federal funding. And it is an essential component to the public television and public radio system. People say the station can raise funds, and that’s true, and we do. About 50% of our operating budget comes from individual donations and another 10 to 15% comes from corporate donations. But the federal dollars are what really can keep the system operating.”
Franz says that federal money is used to connect stations to PBS and to NPR, and that network is what makes them strong. He says PBS is operated and run by public television stations, and like Franz, most of the sitting members on the PBS board are general managers of individual stations, creating a very different grassroots dynamic than in the commercial world. There are some independent operators that are locally owned in Albuquerque, but in terms of network affiliated stations, NMPBS is the last locally owned network. Franz says in many communities, public television and radio stations are the only locally owned entities, and federal dollars are what keeps some of those smaller and more rural stations alive.
According to Franz, there are currently no official plans for NMPBS to file its own lawsuit or sign an amicus brief, but a government relations partnership organization called America’s Public Television Stations is discussing the possibility of filing an amicus brief on behalf of stations like PBS in the future. Although NMPBS isn’t jumping into the courtroom just yet, Franz says they will be heavily impacted by the outcome of the NPR lawsuit.
Federal funding goes a long way at NMPBS. Franz says satellite and fiber interconnections — the way the station receives its programming from PBS — will be affected, and KNME is one of the largest providers of public television programming to public television stations in the country. He says this loss of funding affects interconnectivity between the stations and PBS’s ability to acquire programming and pay the subscription fees. But it really impacts every system as much as it impacts this individual station. Although the programming is clearly what NMPBS is known for, Franz says we often forget how important public television and public radio are in the emergency alerting system.
“Even if you’re not watching PBS or listening to NPR, those messages are getting to your cell phone via our broadcast airways,” he says. “When you’ve got tornadoes appearing and becoming common in eastern New Mexico, and flash floods and wildfires, I mean, is this the time that we really want to be messing around with public safety? We’ve been saying repeatedly the value of public media is that we send out information that saves lives and changes lives, and that is fundamentally the case: We save lives, we change lives and why shouldn’t you fund that?”
New Mexico’s Future
Both Towne and Franz say there are ways the community can help, it’s pretty easy, and extremely impactful. According to Towne, on the Democratic side, there’s full support for public radio, but not enough votes to fight the executive order. On the Republican side, there are a handful of persuadable supporters of public broadcasting. There’s a section on the kunm.org home page to learn more about the CPB, but the place that is doing the heavy lifting nationally is protectmypublicmedia.org, a private nonprofit group that advocates for public broadcasting. Franz wants to be clear, this is not a fundraising effort, but an effort to solicit supporters to contact Congress and voice their concerns, and it’s very targeted.
“That effort has already been the genesis behind 1.6 million emails to congressional and Senate offices in the last couple of months, and it doesn’t hurt for them to hear it again,” he says. “They need to be able to walk into committee hearings and into the halls of Congress and say, ‘My constituents are outraged that you are planning on cutting something that is a key part of public safety and the public education of rural communities in New Mexico, and you’re going to take that away from them. My constituents are angry, and they’re talking to your constituents.’ This is the kind of activity that has an amazing impact.”