Georgia Public Broadcasting has been around the state for nearly 65 years, allowing educational content to run for residents all day, commercial free. Regardless of whether someone grew up in Georgia, most college students likely remember watching some of the shows created by their affiliate: the Public Broadcasting Service, or PBS, as its more commonly known. Whether it be Sesame Street or Arthur, PBS has had a major impact on many people’s childhoods. However, that very same station is now having to weather a massive blow from the federal government.
On August 1st, the Corporation of Public Broadcasting announced that it would begin a “wind-down of its operations,” with many staff staying on until the end of September along with a small transition team operating until January 2026. This is in response to Congress approving the defunding of CPB, rescinding $1.1 billion in funds.
The Corporation of Public Broadcasting’s closure directly affects the future of public news forums such as NPR and PBS, and subsequently GPB. The CPB’s primary purpose was to pass and distribute federal funding to local public stations. More than 70% of the CPB’s funding went to these stations around the nation. According to the CPB’s site, it gave over $6 million to Georgia in the form of grants and allowances.
GPB released their own statement commenting on Congress’ decision to uphold defunding from CPB. They stated that CPB would have contributed $4.2 million to the station this year, which made up 10% of their budget. While they still receive much of their funding from individual donors and the state of Georgia itself, this is still a sizable gap that the Georgia station is going to have to account for in some form or fashion.
PBS CEO, Paula Kerger, noted that the impact of these cuts would affect all stations, but especially “small stations” as well as those broadcasting to “largely rural areas”.
The overall attitude towards continuing to fund NPR and PBS is mixed but leans towards being favorable. In a Pew Research Center survey published this March, 43% of participants supported continuing to fund NPR and PBS, with 24% opposing the continuation of funding, and 33% saying they were unsure.
PBS and NPR have faced criticisms of being biased towards liberal and left-leaning sentiments by figures such as Senator Ted Cruz and President Donald Trump himself. Ad Fontes Media, a popular public benefit corporation committed to analyzing bias in media, did show both NPR and PBS having a minor skew towards the left in their interactive bias and reliability graph. However, this skew pales in comparison to other news outlets such as MSNBC and Fox News. More importantly, when comparing TV shows alone, the PBS News Hour has the third highest reliability rank (43.48) out of all the TV shows listed on their grid.
According to the Pew Research Center, around 63% of Americans in 2024 received some of their news from television. This group may be larger when looking at rural communities in particular, where high speed internet is less accessible. This makes Kerger’s assertion that rural communities will face the brunt of the defunding all the more concerning.
It’s also important to note that PBS provides the most well-known, free educational entertainment for children. Shows such as Sesame Street have been shown to have a beneficial effect on children entering Kindergarten, as explained by notable economist Melissa Learney.
When recalling her research and investigations with fellow economist Phillip Levine to the American Economic Association, Learney comments that they found that children who watched Sesame Street as kids performed better in school and were less likely to fall behind.
Similarly, she noted that previous researchers found that children who watched Sesame Street had “sizeable improvements” in their cognitive measures.
That is simply one show PBS offers. New studies conducted have suggested newer shows provide educational benefits as well. A research study from the American Educational Research Journal detailed the effects of children watching and playing games from a show called “Molly of Denali”. This show was about an Alaska Native girl living in an Alaskan town with friends and family, and its goal was to help teach children how to learn from informational texts and apply them to the world around them.
In the study, the group who watched the Molly of Denali show and played the games on PBS’ website tended to have higher posttest scores on the informational test assessments designed by the research team. To be specific, out of a 27-test measure, every hour spent watching the program tended to translate to a 0.2-point increase on final scores.
Molly of Denali ended after its fifth season due to a prior funding cut from President Trump’s administration. The Department of Education terminated the Ready-to-Learn grant this May, a landmark initiative that funded many famous educational shows prior to Molly of Denali, such as Clifford the Big Red Dog, Reading Rainbow, and Sesame Street.
In their funding update, GPB remarked that since their inception in 1960, they have brought “quality educational programming, unbiased local news, homegrown sports and entertainment as well as emergency public safety messages” to Georgians everywhere. “We are not about to stop now.”
For more information on how GPB intends to navigate the recent defunding, their statement can be accessed here.
