- President Trump ordered a halt in federal funding to public broadcasters NPR and PBS in a recent executive order.
- WKAR, which broadcasts PBS and NPR content here in our neighborhoods, says halts to funding would impact the work they do in the community.
- Video shows thoughts from neighbors on the proposed funding halts, as well as from WKAR General Manager Shawn Turner.
(The following is a transcription of the full broadcast story)
President Donald Trump recently signed an executive order that requires funding to be pulled from public broadcasters, just like WKAR in East Lansing. Tuesday night, neighbors gathered here at WKAR to talk about what that could mean in our community.
"We came this afternoon because we walked by and my daughter wouldn't let me go anywhere else," Janell Troutman said.
Janell Troutman says she and her daughter, Henrietta, have a few routines. One of them is coming to the East Lansing Public Library. The other...
"This week we've been watching Elmo and Abby with her bedtime routine," Troutman said.
...is tied to Sesame Street.
"She'll repeat words that they say, numbers, sometimes letter for letter and number of the day," Troutman said.
Janell says shows like Sesame Street help to teach her daughter, and other children, important life skills.
"It sets examples for her, too, of just daily life," Troutman said. "What's normal? What do people do?"
But with threats to federal funding for public broadcasters from the Trump administration, the future of that programming is in question.
"There is no replacement for federal funding for public media," Shawn Turner said.
Shawn Turner is the General Manager of WKAR, which broadcasts PBS programming on TV and NPR on the radio here in our neighborhoods. But he says the work they do goes beyond what's on TV.
"We hand out 11,000 reading kits every year," Turner said. "We work to make sure people have information they need to make decisions about voting. So there are all of these things that we do here in this community that are just critical to children in this community, the families of this community, and really are part of the fabric of this community."
But without federal funding...
"Many of those things go away," Turner said.
We do want to be clear there are some question marks with the executive order. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting sends money to public broadcasters, and says Congress directly authorized the organization to be a private nonprofit, and decides on how much money it receives. So there's a debate about whether or not President Trump can stop the payments on his own.
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