Susan Goldberg, president of Boston public broadcaster GBH, feels like a poster child for nonprofit leaders dealing with federal funding cuts related to the Trump administration’s executive orders.
In early June, Goldberg announced a layoff of 6 percent of her staff, 45 people, in part because the broadcaster expects its federal support could be zeroed out. The job cuts aren’t the first. Last month, loss of funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the congressionally chartered nonprofit from which GBH gets about 8 percent of its revenue, prompted Goldberg to streamline offerings from its WORLD Channel, which resulted in the termination of 9 jobs.
Long accustomed to defending against Republican appropriators in Congress, public broadcasters have faced an even more intense series of attacks under the Trump administration, said Goldberg, a veteran newspaper and media executive.
“There’s a lot coming at public media from all sides,” she said, before launching into a list of administration actions targeting public radio and television across the country.
The Trump administration canceled Department of Education Ready to Learn grants that support “Molly of Denali” and “Work it Out Wombats,” two popular children’s shows that GBH produces. The Federal Communications Commission is investigating whether corporate sponsorships, which are a crucial resource for the broadcaster, amount to advertising, in violation of federal regulations governing public stations.
An executive order signed by Trump in May said public broadcasters did not present “a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens” and instructed the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to minimize or eliminate support of NPR and PBS. And as the Republican-controlled Congress seeks to reduce support for public media stations across the country, the administration is pressing to claw back previously enacted funding. Lawsuits filed by public broadcasting nonprofits challenging the order are pending.
Shortly before GBH’s layoffs were announced, Goldberg spoke with the Chronicle about her plans to weather the storm. Her remarks have been edited for brevity and clarity.
How would you characterize what is going right now in terms of public media’s relationship to the government? Is this an existential crisis?
A loss of federal funding of public media would threaten all of our programming in one way or another because it’s all linked together. Eight percent of our budget comes directly from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but the impact is much greater than that. We also receive money from PBS to create five big national shows: “Frontline,” “American Experience,” “Nova,” “Antiques Roadshow,” and “Masterpiece.” PBS gets that money from dues from stations all around the country. The stations are able to pay those dues because they get money from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. So everything is tied together.
If the Corporation for Public Broadcasting money goes away, whether it’s clawed back or it’s just zeroed out of the budget, then stations won’t be able to pay the dues to PBS. PBS then won’t then be able to give us the money that we use to create programming. And that would be a big, big impact on everything that we do.
What advice do you have for nonprofit leaders in a revenue-constrained environment?
We need to be strategic — you can use a hard time to just retreat. But I think you might have to retrench a little bit and try to get to a better time and make some of those hard choices. But unless you’re willing to make difficult decisions, it will be hard to get into that better day.
How have different funders responded?
We really haven’t seen a big change from foundations or large institutional donors. Where we have seen a change — and for the better — is from individuals, individuals who have heard about the threats to public funding. While we haven’t created a campaign specifically around it, we have tried to educate people about what is going on and have put out a lot of notes and information to donors. Our pledge drives are doing incredibly well.
How do you navigate as a nonprofit leader that’s being accused of bias against the administration? How do you defend yourself without coming across in a way that you’ll be accused of more bias?
It’s important to try to traffic in the facts and correct the record where we can. I’m a journalist. I understand that news organizations make mistakes, and I think what we need to do — whether that’s a fact-based mistake or a story-framing mistake — we should own those mistakes and we should correct them.
But I do believe that people trust the information that they get from WGBH. And in fact, we have done surveys of our viewership of our five biggest programs. About a third of the people who watch our big national television programs identify themselves as being liberal or left-leaning. About a third say they’re independent or somewhere in the middle, and about a third of those viewers identify themselves as conservatives. So I think the public also rejects this broad-brush accusation of bias.
When you make decisions to cut programming or staff, what considerations do you take into account as you focus long term?
We haven’t really had to cancel any of our programming with a few exceptions. There’s a healthy pipeline of children’s content that’s already been created, but the cuts very much imperil the future creation of children’s educational programming. Half of the kids in the country don’t go to Pre-K. This is a way to give these kids a leg up for free.
If we have other hard choices, we would look at the mission, the actual value of that work, and of course, we would look at audience size and our costs.
To what extent do you think political polarization in the U.S. is real, and to what extent does media exacerbate differences?
It certainly feels like we’re in a very divided time as a nation. But there’s an awful lot of people who just want to go about their business, get along, and to be reasonable. And I feel like sometimes we don’t tell those stories enough. We’re telling stories at the extremes, but not enough of the stories in the center.
Are foundation grants changing in terms of how they’re structured or what you can use them for?
Rather than seeking money just to support specific shows, we are now looking at categories of support. We’re trying to create some broader areas that we think will appeal to this next generation of donors, who might not be as familiar with specific, legacy programs. They may not know those wonderful brands, but they really care about news and journalism, science and the environment, kids and education, voices and equity, and climate and the environment. Those separate funds support topics that we believe a next generation of donor might really care about whether or not they know about NOVA specifically.
What can nonprofit leaders do to survive and thrive in uncertain times?
It’s important to share as much as I can with everyone in the organization and even under really difficult circumstances — to try to level with people about the challenges, how we’re trying to solve them. I try to provide a path forward, and that means not stopping everything. It means continuing to invent, continuing to be creative. You don’t want to stop that forward motion. Some things you might have to do more slowly, some things you may have to stop, but we do need to keep marching into the future as best as you can.
