Since revamping its schedule in 2024 and increasing local programming and music, WDET-FM has gotten an encouraging response.
“Our audience has grown 21%. That’s terrific. That’s not happening elsewhere in radio today. We’re delighted to have more listeners, a bigger audience,” says Mary Zatina, the general manager of Detroit’s public radio station.
Any media outlet would celebrate such good news. But the past two weeks have felt like a gut punch to WDET and other local stations across the country.
On July 24, President Donald Trump signed a bill clawing back $1.1 billion of previously approved funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for fiscal years 2026 and 2027. The Rescissions Act of 2025 essentially eliminated federal funding for public media.
A week later, on Aug. 1, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting —the private, nonprofit organization created nearly 60 years ago — announced it is shutting down. According to the official news release, most of the staff will be eliminated by the end of September, but a small team will stick around through January 2026.
The CPB was formed to distribute government money to public broadcasting and to buffer it from political and commercial pressure. While it provides some funding to PBS (about 15% of its budget) and much less to NPR (somewhere around 1%), more than 70% is granted to around 1,500 affiliated public radio and television stations.
Stations can receive anywhere from a small percentage to the majority of their budgets from the CPB. The $1.1 billion clawback is expected to hit smaller rural and Native American stations the hardest. Recently, NPR president and CEO Katherine Maher estimated that 80 stations may have to close next year.
In Michigan, the cuts represent $24 million in public media funding “that will not be put into our economy" over the next two years, says Molly Motherwell, president of the Michigan Association of Public Broadcasters.
The advocacy group Protect My Public Media ranks Michigan as the state with the seventh-highest amount of funding for public broadcasting. However, Motherwell notes that Michigan has rural areas that are not reached by broadband or digital and satellite services. In those cases, NPR stations can be the “only source for not only news and information, but emergency alerts,” she says.
During the March 2025 ice storm that caused widespread power outages, lost phone and cellular services, and blocked roads in the northern half of Michigan, “it was WCMU (in northern Michigan) and WNMU (in the Upper Peninsula) that kept everybody … informed on the emergency status,” says Motherwell.
For decades, Republicans have said public broadcasting has a liberal bias, an accusation denied by the broadcasters. The Trump White House has described NPR and PBS as entities that “spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as ‘news.'"
National shows like NPR’s “All Things Considered” and "PBS NewsHour" are usually the targets of the GOP, but it is local stations — the sources of community reporting, music, arts and culture coverage, educational content and emergency alerts, along with national news — that will be hurt most by the rescission and the closing of the CPB.
Already, the effects are being felt at WKAR in East Lansing (which includes both WKAR-FM and WKAR-TV). In late June, WKAR News reported that nine staff positions, the majority on the TV side, had been eliminated. The cuts were made amid concerns over the then-proposed rescission and mandated budget cuts in all departments by Michigan State University, which holds WKAR’s broadcast license.
Although WKAR declined to comment to the Free Press on personnel changes (explaining that Michigan State University and the affected unions are “currently engaged in a formal review” of the personnel steps taken), it said the rescission poses poses an annual loss of $1.6 million, or roughly 16% of its annual budget.
Across southeast Michigan, public media outlets are grappling with what the missing money will mean for them, too.
A 'Sophie's Choice' at WDET
For WDET-FM, which is licensed through Wayne State University, the cuts could lead to reductions in local programming, according to Zatina. She calls the station’s current budget extremely tight and says any trims would be from a “Sophie’s Choice” of options.
“From where I sit, there is nothing left to cut,” she says.
The station will lose $300,000 in rescinded funds, or about 6% of its annual budget, for fiscal 2026, which starts in October, and another $300,000 in fiscal 2027.
And those figures don't include the CPB’s funding of the satellite system for local stations or the CPB's role in negotiating and paying for music licensing fees. WDET probably gets another $250,000 in value annually from its portion of those shared services.
The station is busy with efforts to deal with the immediate shortfall. On July 1, it launched a campaign to add 1,000 more members. As of Aug. 4, it had added 869, “and we’re going to keep working toward 1,000 more members until the fall fundraiser,” says Zatina.
She also plans to reach out to group donors and major individual donors about making a three-year pledge to help build a resiliency fund “to bridge us to a better future.” The goal would be to raise around $1 million.
Zatina says that if you love WDET, now is the time to make a donation of any size in order to join the station’s 11,000 current members. “With almost 200,00 people listening each week, we need a heck of a lot more members” than that, she says.
There are concerns as well over at Detroit PBS, which consists of five TV channels — the main Channel 56, plus four subchannels: the PBS Kids Channel, the Create Channel, the World Channel and the Michigan Learning Channel — and one radio station, WRCJ-FM, Detroit’s only classical and jazz outlet.
For Detroit PBS, the federal clawback represents a loss of nearly $3 million annually, or 15% of its budget, according Rich Homberg, its president and CEO.
“When you have an instant rescission and those dollars get pulled back, what it means almost instantly is the impact on staff,” says Homberg. “That’s the challenging part that we’re fighting through. We’ve built an incredible team.”
According to Homberg, Detroit PBS has grown from 80 employees to 100 over the last 15 years and is one of the few media outlets that has been increasing employee size. The cuts could change that trend.
“It would be too soon to be specific, but we will have a cutback in staff,” he says.
Homberg says the clawback could affect the depth, richness and capacity of projects involving programs that are coupled with community outreach efforts such as the well-received "Great Lakes Now" initiative and one involving caregiving that’s in the process of being completed.
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Last year, Detroit PBS made a large commitment to the future by announcing a move from its main headquarters, now in Wixom, back to the city, specifically to Detroit’s Milwaukee Junction neighborhood at 234 Piquette Ave.
Set to be renovated and open by fall 2026, the building will be a production and community engagement hub, says Homberg.
He sees a path forward in the resiliency of Detroit PBS, which has 67,000 members and gets 50% of its revenue comes from the community: “Our commitment doesn’t change, our relentlessness doesn’t change, and we’re going to move through this period and continue to expand our coverage."
WMNU: A lifeline for the UP
The challenges are different for WNMU in Marquette, the Upper Peninsula’s largest city. It has lost an annual $1.1 million in the rescission, one-third of its annual operating budget of around $3 million.
General manager Patrick Lakenen of WNMU-TV and WNMU-FM, which are licensed by Northern Michigan University, says it is too soon to discuss what that will mean for listeners and viewers. For now, he is reaching out to lawmakers and looking for low-impact ways to save money and new strategies to raise more.
If no federal funding is available in the long term, he says, “there will be some major effects.”
Like other stations with a large rural audience. WNMU has a lot of ground to cover, specifically more than 11,000 square miles of broadcast coverage. It reaches about 250,000 residents out of the UP’s total population of about 300,000, according to Lakenen.
WNMU also is a key player in Michigan’s emergency alert plan. It receives presidential, national, state, local, weather and Amber alerts and distributes them to its broadcast partners.
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“We may be the only way that they receive any programming, but especially emergency alerts,” says Lakenen, describing the “critical, lifesaving information” that WNMU offers certain areas without reliable broadband or cell phone coverage.
WNMU also is the place Yoopers turn to for local content on public affairs, the arts and human-interest topics. “We hear that from our supporters that they rely on us to hear what is happening in our community. We go in-depth with our stories. We don’t just provide quick sound bites,” says Lakenen.
Despite what could be an uphill road ahead, Lakenen says WNMU is here to stay. “While this is devastating and we’re disappointed that it has come to this, we are going to be here today and tomorrow when people tune in on the TV or listen on the radio,” he says. “We’re going to do our best to find some additional funding or other funding sources to find a path through this.”
'Overwhelming' support for Michigan Public
Over at Michigan Public — which consist of WUOM-FM in southeast Michigan, WFUM-FM in Flint, WRSX-FM in Port Huron, WLNZ-FM in Lansing and WVGR-FM in Grand Rapids — the clawback will means a loss of somewhere between $500,000 and $550,000 per fiscal year, or about 6% of the annual budget, says Wendy Turner, executive director and general manager.
While Turner knew "there was a strong chance that (the CPB) couldn’t survive without a source of funds," its closing still felt like a punch to the stomach. “It has served as not just a funding source, but the embodiment of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 and the ideals that have shaped our collective public service mission," she says.
Turner says that Michigan Public, which is licensed by the University of Michigan, is uncertain about the fate of a CPB-funded, nine-month effort called the Digital Transformation Project, an intensive training program in developing potential digital audiences that is supposed to conclude in December. It involves several Michigan Public staffers and those from 24 other stations across the country.
Turner says the mobilization of listeners everywhere to prevent the rescission, which passed in the House and Senate by narrow margins, was “overwhelming.”
“We understand from our consortium of folks working together on this over the spring (that) the number of messages that were sent supporting public media to Congress was in the millions,” she says. “We will go to the wall again to try to make that case, but it’s not as if we didn’t leave it all on the field the first time.”
Michigan Public has about 31,600 members and is hearing from people every day who are worried about its future, according to Turner.
“We were at the (2025 Ann Arbor) Art Fair. ... We had a booth there and we were just mobbed with people,” she says. “People coming and asking how we were doing, how they can help, feeling very angry on our behalf. “
Motherwell, who in addition to heading the MAPB is the general manager of WEMU-FM, the Eastern Michigan University-licensed station known for jazz, says it is losing about 8% of its budget of about $1.5 million with the rescission.
“We have been preparing our listeners and donors and trying to build up a reserve, so, at least in the short term, we won’t have to make any changes,” says Motherwell.
She still holds out hope that congressional appropriations bills could restore some of the $1.1 billion that was clawed back. ”The issue is not dead. It’s just for right now, for the next two fiscal years, everything is up in the air and in chaos. For stations that have very, very tight budgets and large staffs, it’s going to affect them immediately.”
The annual meeting of the MAPB is set for later in August. There has been talk of forming a public media caucus in the Michigan legislature, says Motherwell, ”The state of Michigan hasn’t directly funded public media since the early ‘90s, but it doesn’t mean they can’t go back to it.”
Says Motherwell, who is in her 34th year with WEMU: “There may come a time, if this doesn’t get resolved, that some of our great local programming will have to go away. We’re not there yet.”
For her station and public media in general, the battle is just beginning. “The emotional impact of this fight, it’s personal,” she says. “People in public broadcasting, we’re not here for the glory. We're here because we have a passion for what we do.”
Contact Detroit Free Press pop culture critic Julie Hinds at [email protected].
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Michigan public TV and radio stations ponder the rocky road ahead
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