S4E24: Desert Communities Need Public Broadcasting Now

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT

0:00:00 - (Chris Clarke): 90 miles from the desert Protection Podcast is made possible by listeners just like you. If you want to help us out, you can go to 90 miles from needles.com donate or text needles to 53555.

0:00:25 - (Joe Geoffrey): Think the deserts are barren wastelands? Think again.

0:00:35 - (Joe Geoffrey): It's time for 90 miles from needles the Desert Protection Podcast.

0:00:45 - (Chris Clarke): Thank you Joe and welcome to 90 Miles from Needles the Desert Protection Podcast. I'm your host Chris Clarke and this is the 99th episode of this podcast which we launched officially on January 1, 2022. The next episode is going to be our hundredth and you are invited to take part in the recording of that episode. We're going to be doing it on Zoom. The sound quality might not be as good as we are used to, but I think we'll be able to manage and get a good clean recording out of it.

0:01:14 - (Chris Clarke): This episode will consist of a public reading. Writers that have said yes so far are Morgan Sjogren, Ruth Nolan Rue, Ben Martinez and Louise Mathias. We may have a couple other people sign on. We're also going to be talking to some activists from Tucson about the giant data center that the progressive end of Tucson society has been fighting, a big Amazon Web Services devoted server farm called Project Blue, which threatens to use as much electricity and water as a significant portion of the residents of Tucson.

0:01:50 - (Chris Clarke): And we're likely to have some news on that topic when we record the episode. Because the recording date is August 7, 7pm Mark your calendars and the Tucson City Council meets and has the opportunity to vote on the project on the previous day, August 6th, we may have some good news. There is a solid block of opposition to the project among City Council people. Whether or not they are enough to kill the project remains to be seen.

0:02:15 - (Chris Clarke): Anyway, I will have a link in the show notes to updates on Project Blue as well as to the writings of our writerly guests. You can join this episode taping by going to 90milesfromneedles.com/100 that will be in the show notes for this episode. It's 7:00pm August 7th. It should probably try to get there by 6:55 just in case there are problems. August 7th Thursday Pacific Time and also 7 in Arizona given that they do not observe Daylight Savings time.

0:02:51 - (Chris Clarke): Really really hope to see you. This should be fun. And in this episode I want to talk about media. This is going to be a little bit shorter of an episode than usual. Things have been happening in my life putting together this public meeting next week and dealing with a few personal crises and veterinary crises. I'm not going to put as much time into editing and doing multiple takes and things like that for this episode. I hope you'll forgive me.

0:03:16 - (Chris Clarke): We had a generous donation from Lisa Schyck in Joshua Tree. Thank you, Lisa. I hope I got your last name right. Please let me know if I didn't. And she provided that donation to honor Steve Brown, a local journalist and raconteur host of Southwest Stories, just on behalf of both 90 miles from Needles and Steve Brown. Lisa, thank you so much. We are getting closer to our trip to Tucson in El Paso. If you haven't heard about this before, on September 27th we're going to be bringing the podcast to the El Paso Zoo to help celebrate the 21st annual Chihuahuan Desert Fiesta.

0:03:55 - (Chris Clarke): The events at the El Paso Zoo and Botanical Gardens, 4001 East Paisano Drive in El Paso from 10:30am to 3pm on Sept. 27. If you're in the area or a reasonable drive away, come on by and say hello. Really looking forward to meeting some folks from El Paso, possibly re-meeting some people that I've known online for a little bit and with any luck we'll get some episodes out of this. If not, it's always just good to talk to people who are living in different parts of the desert.

0:04:24 - (Chris Clarke): It's been an interesting few years with the pandemic coming in and upending our entire society and then of course, recent politics also upending society and making some people really reluctant to go out in public. Anyway, that's a rabbit hole that I'm not going to go down. If you want to help us cover the cost of getting to El Paso, you can go to https://90milesfromneedles.com/elpaso and that will take you to our Chihuahuan Desert Travel Fund donation page.

0:04:51 - (Chris Clarke): We're close to where we want to be. We are probably $325 away from our goal. Need a few folks to help us out and put us over the top to get to El Paso. And I've mentioned before, we are also extremely interested in putting together an event in Tucson. We're working on that. We have a wonderful board member in Tucson, Audrey Sherry, who is making some inquiries. Stay tuned for info on a Tucson event. We'll have that to you as soon as we have it ourselves.

0:05:18 - (Chris Clarke): That prologue completed, I want to talk about media today. As you likely know, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting had 100% of its funding cut by the Trump administration recently. CPB has been a longtime supporter and funder of public media throughout the country, especially PBS and NPR stations and other networks like PRX. CPB was established about 58 years ago in 1967 and has been the main conduit through which federal funding goes to public media.

0:05:50 - (Chris Clarke): More than 1500 local public media stations get or got community service grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. CPP also does some funding of research into education techniques for younger kids. They provide funding for local and regional news as well as national news for communities throughout the country. And they also play a really important role in the country's emergency alert system, which recent events will have refreshed our memories as to why that is important.

0:06:23 - (Chris Clarke): The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is the largest single source of public radio and television funding, as well as for radio and television's online and mobile offerings. More than 70% of the corporation for Public Broadcasting's annual payments went to local stations. CPB doesn't produce programs, doesn't distribute them, doesn't have editorial input into what stations air or broadcast, except in the case of extremely controversial material. There's a recent article published on August 1, very recent.

0:06:55 - (Chris Clarke): It was this morning as I speak, published on the website of Marfa Public Radio by Lindsay Hauk, the operations coordinator at Marfa Public Radio. She sums up the approach of a lot of the local stations. She writes, lately there's been a lot of how are things going at the radio station? People ask this question with tentative concern. I think there's a couple of questions underneath that question. Questions like what's it like to be defunded? Or are you going to go off the air?

0:07:22 - (Chris Clarke): The answer to the second question is easy. No, the answer to the first question is a little bit more complicated. It's disappointing and surreal, of course, to lose 30% of our budget at once. It's a curveball which we anticipated but hoped would not actually come to pass. And as many of you know, the rescission of funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting or CPB doesn't actually accomplish the White House's goal of eliminating NPR.

0:07:47 - (Chris Clarke): Instead, it hurts stations like ours and the communities that we serve. That's the end of the quote. Now Marfa Public Radio, along with KTEP in El Paso, another NPR station, both of those are responsible for covering pretty much all of West Texas. Marfa has repeaters down in the Big Bend area and in Presidio and then up towards Odessa and places like that. Marfa Public Radio is losing a third of its budget.

0:08:12 - (Chris Clarke): KTEP is losing 20% of its budget. Those are big cuts. Imagine making a cut of 30% in your own household budget. What you'd have to go through. There are a few stations that are in much more dire straits as a result of cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the resulting announcement from CPB that they are going to close their doors. There is a website called adoptastation.org which is put together by a public media activist, and it provides a really easy way to find whether your favorite local station has gotten a significant cut.

0:08:49 - (Chris Clarke): They all have gotten significant cuts, but some are bigger than others and secondly, the size of those cuts relative to the rest of their budget. The data is incomplete, but you can get a pretty good sense of what's facing public media in the wake of these cuts as a result of the Trump administration's hostility to any media outlet that doesn't just slavishly follow along with whatever malignant fantasy the administration is spreading at the moment.

0:09:14 - (Chris Clarke): There are a lot of places where the total cuts in revenue are not quite so big, as in West Texas, for instance, KAET in Phoenix, Arizona PBS station, they are facing a 9% cut in their revenue. And that's not fun or easy. It's not necessarily a death blow to the station. We're likely to see some folks laid off who can't afford to get laid off. That sucks. Also in Arizona, in Flagstaff, KNAU, the radio station facing a 10% funding cut.

0:09:45 - (Chris Clarke): KUAT in Tucson, a TV station on an 11% cut KUAZ radio station, 6% cut. The reason that these cuts are in the low double digits or the single digits for these stations is because they are lucky enough to be in places where they have a solid base of supporters, both in the general public and in the philanthropic community. So they have diversified sources of funding. These cuts are not fun, they are not productive, they are harmful.

0:10:17 - (Chris Clarke): But they are not a death blow, necessarily for stations like that. But sticking with Arizona for a second, there are stations that are in a lot more trouble. And what an amazing coincidence that they happen to be serving communities of color, including tribes. KUYI in Kykotsmovi, which is up on the Hopi reservation. They're losing 64% of their budget as a result of these cuts. KGHR in Tuba City, north of Flagstaff, which has served the Navajo reservation and neighboring folks since 1989, is facing a 49% cut.

0:10:52 - (Chris Clarke): Kohn In Covered Wells, Arizona, it's on the Tohono Autumn Res, that's a 26% cut. Up in the San Luis Valley, KRZA which serves Alamosa, Colorado and Taos, New Mexico, is facing a 56% cut. Now at KRZA they just had a crisis where major equipment issues forced the station to go into low power broadcasting for a week. They were still online, but they weren't reaching nearly as many people. They've gotten back up. They've fixed their transmitter. They're back to normal now. But this is the kind of thing that happens to stations a lot and it's largely unpredictable.

0:11:30 - (Chris Clarke): Equipment's always breaking or in need of repair or replacement. These Corporation for Public Broadcasting Funds are not just, you know, paying for the tote bags. I could do without the tote bags, to be honest. I have a lot of tote bags. 90 Miles from Needles is not likely to have tote bags for you anytime soon. That said, a 56% cut is not something that you can approach just by cutting your budget and offering less in the way of programming and shorter hours on your call in line. If you don't have the money to put things back together when your transmitter goes offline, you're out of business.

0:12:09 - (Chris Clarke): Also in New Mexico, and this is a truly frightening cut. KSHI in Zuni Pueblo, New Mexico, which serves the Zuni community and other folks in the neighborhood, has a 96% loss of funding that it's facing as a result of the cuts to CPB. And that's going to put KSHI in an extremely perilous position. I really can't put it better than did Senator Martin Heinrich, who in response to cuts to the New Mexico stations in particular issued a statement on his vote that said Republicans have slashed the only lifeline rural communities and tribes rely on during life-or-death emergencies like wildfires and flash floods.

0:12:51 - (Chris Clarke): Republican cuts to local public radio and TV stations are reckless, dangerous and put New Mexicans directly in harm's way. All of this to bankroll massive tax giveaways for Trump's billionaire donors. You know, just think about the flooding in the Tularosa Basin and the mountains around it in Ruidoso after the wildfire there last year. It's just think of the flooding on the Guadalupe river in Texas.

0:13:16 - (Chris Clarke): If you don't have some way to get the word out to everybody in the neighborhood, not everybody has a smartphone that can get a reverse 911 call. Most people have access to a radio. Let's move on to Colorado. KAFM in Grand Junction losing 23% of its budget. KSUT Four Corners radio based in Colorado is getting a 19% cut. KOTO in Telluride a 25% cut. KSJD in Cortez a 33% cut. Vegas PBS, going to Nevada,

0:13:51 - (Chris Clarke): Vegas PBS is a well-supported station. Full disclosure, I've done a little bit of freelance writing for them. I like them. And if you look through the adoptastation.org website, you'll see that Vegas PBS is losing 4% of its revenue as a result of these cuts. Now, 4%. If you're looking at cuts like to Marfa Public Radio, 4% might seem like you're getting off easy, but that 4% of Vegas PBS's budget is 3.8 million.

0:14:19 - (Chris Clarke): That is not money that they can recoup by searching through their couches for loose change. How do you recoup 3.8 million out of $100 million budget cuts in service layoffs, planned shows not making it to the light of day. Similarly, Southern California is in pretty good shape, but again, pretty good shape only relative to the tiny rural stations that are facing an existential crisis. Most stations in California radio TV otherwise are facing at least a 5% cut of total funding.

0:14:51 - (Chris Clarke): KCRW, which is the predominant NPR station that we hear in this part of the Mojave, the California Mojave, before you get too close to Vegas, is facing a 6% cut. And speaking of KCRW, I mean, that's a regular listen for me. I especially like listening to Novena Carmel on KCRW. She's got the weekday disc jockey slot playing lots of music, a lot of which I haven't heard before. It's always opening my eyes or ears to new music.

0:15:22 - (Chris Clarke): This is a family tradition for her because her father, who died sadly recently, was Sly Stone of the Family Stone. So she is definitely keeping the family business going. Except that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's cuts will probably affect Novena Carmel's show and other similar shows because CPB negotiated on behalf of all public radio music stations across the country to secure music licensing agreements.

0:15:48 - (Chris Clarke): Who's going to take over that job? I think we have a lot of stations out there that are going to be piling extra work on their staff as a result of these cuts. And they're not going to be able to easily find somebody who can just jump up and say, okay, I'll take over the ASCAP negotiations on behalf of our 50,000 listeners. Is each station going to have to do their own negotiation or are they just going to cut out things like the Tiny Dust concerts?

0:16:13 - (Chris Clarke): Now, I've had my issues with public broadcasting with PBS and npr. As somebody that worked at a PBS station for several years, and you can find my writing still there@pbssocal.org I had big problems in 2016 with how relentlessly NPR's national news department was essentially sane washing Donald Trump. I think when you're so worried about being accused of being liberal, it's easy to bend the truth a little bit. Liberal experts say sky is blue. Conservative opinions difference.

0:16:48 - (Chris Clarke): Despite that, the history of public broadcasting in this country is a really inspiring one. There's been a lot of wonderful information put out in PBS and NPR stations. The PBS that first aired the documentary version of Cadillac Desert, Mark Reisner's epic old book, you can still watch that in pieces at YouTube. And yes, the history of public broadcasting in this country has its share of representation by the left.

0:17:17 - (Chris Clarke): I happen to also have a history working with Pacifica Radio. I had a show on KPFA, Christ, 30 years ago at this point, called Terra Verde, which you can still listen to. My friend Maureen Nandini Mitra is hosting it now. KPFA was the first station run by a nonprofit community group, and one of their early personalities on air was Bill Mandela. Bill was a capital C Communist, and he got hauled in front of the House on American Activities Committee.

0:17:46 - (Chris Clarke): And he was at Pacifica while I was at Pacifica. So that was quite a span of tenure on his part. KPFA and the rest of Pacifica is avowedly leftist. That said, the extreme right wing has had for a long time as its priority defunding all of public broadcasting, not just starving out WBAI and KPFA and KPFK. When Nixon was elected in 1968, the administration came into serious conflict with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting over its perceived liberal slant.

0:18:23 - (Chris Clarke): Now, this is one of those cases where the truth has a liberal bias, because we're talking about shows like Washington Week in Review and Bill Moyers. There was a documentary called Banks and the Poor, which exposed how banks discriminate against poor people. And the filmmakers had the temerity to include a long list of names of members of the House and Senate at the time who had ties to the banking industry.

0:18:47 - (Chris Clarke): That earned them a condemnation by Spiro Agnew, which is a mark of honor. Spiro Agnew, even given recent competition, is quite possibly the worst vice president in US History, just in terms of personal appeal. But CPB basically caved to the Nixon administration's demands and removed itself from making programming decisions. It still maintained the right to review programs in special circumstances, as I mentioned before, to make sure they're not excessively biased.

0:19:16 - (Chris Clarke): But that hardly ever happened, and that didn't fix things. The right wing still hates public broadcasting. And about 20 years ago, the drumbeat of conservatives saying public broadcasting puts out liberal propaganda on the public dime got louder and louder. This eventually culminated in this month's news about eliminating all funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, after which CPB announced that they would be closing down.

0:19:44 - (Chris Clarke): What kind of money are we talking about? For fiscal year 2025, it was just under 270 million for direct grants to local public television, another 97 million for television programming grants, 83 million for direct grants to local public radio stations, 39 million for radio programming, 32 million for system support, and 27 million for administration and overhead. It's a total of $548 million, which is less than 1/300th of what will be handed to the Office of Homeland Security to arrest legally arrived gardeners and dishwashers and day laborers and grandmothers and kids with asthma and kids with cancer.

0:20:24 - (Chris Clarke): We could refund the entire Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s budget by making what would be essentially a less than 1% cut in department of Homeland Security's budget. At any rate, $550 million taken away means all of this damage to all of these lifelines for public information. There are legal challenges to all of this making our way through the courts, and we'll see what effect they have. But given that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has announced that it will be shutting down.

0:20:56 - (Chris Clarke): Even if those suits prevail and the court finds that it's illegal for Trump to make executive orders to cut funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, it may be too late to keep those public media outlets from having been damaged beyond repair. So what does all this mean in the context of what we're doing here? I've spent my career in and out of public media, working for nonprofits that have a publishing budget, sometimes hiring myself out to public media organizations, at other times sometimes doing a little bit of each at the same time.

0:21:28 - (Chris Clarke): And so even though I have a problem at times with groups like NPR's Approach to Reporting on the nature of the Trump administration or the reality on the border, I recognize that the news is not always going to be reported in a way that I would do it. And even at my angriest, I never think that NPR should go away. If anything, my work at a PBS station and a Pacifica station back in the day have informed my desire to put this podcast together.

0:21:59 - (Chris Clarke): So this podcast owes quite a bit to public media. It wouldn't exist if I hadn't had a career in public media. And to that end, as a minor school favor gesture of support, if you are involved in a public radio station and you like this podcast and you think it would be appropriate to, with minor editing, to air on your broadcast, let me know, because we can work out a free or close to it kind of licensing deal.

0:22:26 - (Chris Clarke): You know, I'm not making money on this. Not yet anyway. And if what we're putting out here is valuable and you think your listeners will like it, let's talk. We'd love the extra ears. And if we can fill up an expensively empty half-hour- or hour-long slot in your weekly schedule, let us know. More importantly, my least favorite thing about doing this podcast is asking for money to keep it going. That may surprise you, given that I do it almost every episode for several minutes and some of that is out of necessity. We have a 100% crowdfunded operation here.

0:23:04 - (Chris Clarke): We have just under 200 people who have supported 90 miles from Needles financially through the last three and a half years. We have a lot of people giving single digit donations. And even those single digit donations add up. If you're giving one every month. Those are our bread and butter, really. And as a result of that structure of relying on crowdfunding to pay the bills here, our existence is not threatened. Some of you will remember that the CalHumanities Grant we were hoping to get for a documentary on the Amargosa river got canned as a result of federal funding cuts to the National Endowment for the Humanities.

0:23:48 - (Chris Clarke): So it's not like we're skating unaffected by the current rampage through the institutions of the government. In fact, that was a really hard day to find that out. But we put out a couple dozen episodes of the podcast since that basically on the same schedule. Look at the difference between stations like those serving largely tribal communities in the Southwest and stations in large cities like Phoenix or Las Vegas or Los Angeles.

0:24:17 - (Chris Clarke): The difference between having a corporation for public broadcasting cuts take away 20 to 96% of your budget and having them take away 4% is public support. And that's why I spend so much time talking about this. You know, we have the hundredth episode celebration coming up, and we're going to be looking forward in that episode. We're looking at things we want to continue to do. Could probably put together an episode on things we would like to do. The 90 miles from Needles Wish List episode. You know, all the different projects we'd like to get involved in, different people we'd like to hire if we had enough money.

0:24:57 - (Chris Clarke): But in this 99th episode, in the context of media outlets getting gutted in some places, the places where people most rely on them that differences you. First off, go check out adoptastation.org you can find your favorite station there. There's links to donate for each of the stations. Or you can look at one of the stations like KSHI in Zuni pueblo getting a 96% cut. Maybe they could keep the place going if they got half of their budget back.

0:25:31 - (Chris Clarke): There are places that really need your help. I have actually been a listener to Kuyi in Kykotsmovi, Arizona for quite some time. That's the one on the Hopi res with a 64% budget cut. But after you do that, the reason I spend so much time asking you in these precious minutes of podcast to go to 9zero miles from needles.com donate and drop a little change on us is that we can't do it without you. And every nonprofit goes through this. Every nonprofit will get new donors and lose old ones. And sometimes if you lose old donors faster than you're getting new ones, that's a crisis.

0:26:12 - (Chris Clarke): And that has happened to us a couple of times. Overall, our pattern has been growth. But that abstract pattern of growth doesn't help much when you're putting some of your own money into the bank account so that a check clears. So if you haven't yet: 90milesfromneedles.com/donate because it was listeners like you that paid for getting to Salt Lake City for a demonstration about water levels in the Great Salt Lake.

0:26:41 - (Chris Clarke): Interviewing Terry Tempest Williams, it's listeners like you who paid for getting to the other end of Utah a year later to sit down in the rain in Blanding with Dine activist Davina Smith to talk about Bears Ears National Monument. It's listeners just like you who made it possible for me to get to Pahrump, Nevada for a demonstration run by Mojave Green, getting that solar put in the right place on rooftops instead of on intact desert habitat.

0:27:13 - (Chris Clarke): There's a lot of the desert to cover. There's a lot we haven't done yet. And in our next hundred episodes, we're going to work to fix that. We're going to get more voices on here, going to cover more issues, more places, going to get involved in some deep dive reporting, really digging into what's happening, breaking stories. And if you're an activist in the Southwest working to preserve desert landscapes, we want to elevate your work. We want to bring your work to new ears.

0:27:46 - (Chris Clarke): And with that, I want to thank you for listening to all 99 episodes so far. Thank you to Joe Jeffrey, our voiceover guy, and Martine Mancha, our podcast artist. Our Nature Sounds recordist Fred Bell will be coming back in the next episode. Our theme song, moody Western is by Brightside Studio. And incidentally, thanks for those of you who reached out. Asked about the pit bull. She is doing okay. She got a more or less clean bill of health for an ancient dog from the vet yesterday.

0:28:20 - (Chris Clarke): Was that yesterday? That was the day before yesterday. The day is blur. Anyway, she's doing as well as a 12 year old dog can do and I appreciate your interest and concern. So August 7th, 7pm Pacific Time 90 miles from needles.com 100join us. Listen to wonderful writers reading from their work. Get the update on Project Blue in Tucson and celebrate with us. Be part of this episode like you've been part of every episode so far.

0:28:53 - (Chris Clarke): And all I can say is thanks.

0:28:59 - (Joe Geoffrey): 90 miles from Needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy Media Network.