Inside the evolving role of philanthropy in a time of uncertainty and crisis
When the U.S. government cut funding for local news stations, the Knight Foundation moved quickly to help stabilize a rapidly eroding industry. President and CEO Maribel Pérez Wadsworth unpacks the evolving roles of philanthropy and government, and why philanthropic organizations must learn to move at the speed of the news cycle.
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The Knight Foundation has focused on promoting and preserving local news and journalism and local communities for decades. This year, that mission has come under unprecedented attack with big funding cuts for public media, lawsuits by President Trump against CBS News, The Wall Street Journal, New York Times. Is this what you signed up for when you took on this job 18 months ago? I mean, how prepared were you—was the organization—for this kind of seismic shift?
Well, no, I can tell you, it’s not what I signed up for. I don’t think anybody could have quite contemplated the things we are focused on in 2025. But that said, I’ve spent my entire career fighting for journalism and fighting for the First Amendment. So from that perspective, this is yet another part of that journey.
Is it harder right now? Absolutely. Are the fights coming across a lot of dimensions that we couldn’t have anticipated? Absolutely. But this is what the Knight Foundation was set up to do since it started its work 75 years ago. So while we’d all rather be able to pace ourselves a little bit more, I think the moment demands urgency, and it demands focus, and it demands clarity of purpose. The First Amendment is what makes all the rest of our democracy possible, so we have to defend that.
When Congress stripped $500 million in funding for public media this summer, part of the critique was that publicly funded media had become partisan, that it wasn’t always impartial. I mean, is there a fair critique in there about that?
I think that you’ve seen trust eroding in a lot of institutions, and as the country and the world becomes increasingly polarized and dependent on their own echo chambers for information, I think absolutely, trust is a problem, and inherent in that is a concern about bias.
The truth of the matter though is when you look at study after study, public media, particularly local public media stations, are still among the most trusted institutions by Americans. People believe in their local newsrooms. They trust their neighbors to report on their communities. The vast majority of these cuts did not impact, say, NPR at a national level or PBS at a national level. While the rhetoric around the cuts and the perceptions of bias centered on those entities and NPR in particular, the cuts in effect barely affected NPR but are devastating to the local stations, especially in huge swaths of the country that are primarily rural, what today we might say are in red states. That’s who’s impacted by these cuts.
As this bill was being debated in the Senate, Alaska experienced a significant earthquake. And had it not been for one small public radio station, a lot of Alaska would not have even known that they were under tsunami warnings.
And these concerns about news deserts, like apps like Facebook and Nextdoor and other ways that we’re sharing information these days, they can’t or don’t really fill that space.
No, they absolutely don’t fill that space. I mean, we’re on all these platforms. We know the kinds of information that is shared there. It is certainly not what any of us would call trusted, verified information. It’s not reliable. And let’s not forget that for a lot of the country, we still struggle with reliable broadband access. The stations most at risk represent some 40 million to 50 million Americans.
When these cuts went through, the Knight Foundation, alongside some other funders like the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, you jumped in to fill some of the gap. I know you put in a $10 million cash injection. How did that come about?
It was a meet-the-moment-urgently proposition. And let’s be clear that philanthropy doesn’t necessarily always move at the speed of news, but it was really important, because this was an imminent loss of funding and dollars that had already been appropriated, that these stations were counting on, in some cases for upwards of 30% to even 70% or more of their annual budgets. So very significant, very dramatic.
We had to move quickly, and it was great to see some key partners come to the table with us. We did $10 million to help lead the Public Media Bridge Fund that is being run by the Public Media Company. And today, just 11 weeks later, we’re at almost $60 million raised. That is nearly unprecedented for philanthropy to have moved that quickly.
That said, it’s not the long-term solution. This will help to stabilize the stations that are most at risk. That doesn’t mean that there won’t be loss of programming. That doesn’t mean that every single station will survive necessarily. But hopefully it buys the necessary time to think through the transformation of the overall system, what kinds of changes need to be made, from governance of public media to some consolidations that are no doubt necessary. But we need to buy the time, because the rug got pulled out from under them.
Some local radio and television stations, as you mentioned, they are shuttering, they are cutting back. Is the hope that you can bring them back, or does the focus need to be on, “Hey, let’s preserve the stations that are still alive that are the stronger ones”?
Well, right now, it’s a matter of truly preserving access to local news and information and community. So the prioritization around these funds will be prioritizing those stations that are, say, sole servers in their communities, that absolutely provide local news and information in addition to some of the other programming. But preservation is clearly important. The loss of these stations would represent a significant setback.
We have some, what, almost 2,000 so-called news deserts in the country today. So these stations would create that many more all over the country. But this has to be a phased approach. Right now it’s stabilized to ensure that we preserve something to transform, and then we need to get into the serious work of what does it look like for sustainability.
Sometimes I think that if public media is no longer supported by the government, is public media the right term or is it just media?
It’s a great question. At that point, you’re right, it’s just media. And so I think that will be part of the thinking going forward.
I have to believe, and maybe it’s just the hardwired optimist in me, that we will see a rational rethinking of the federal funding picture, specifically for stations in more vulnerable areas, in smaller communities where you don’t necessarily have a huge population base to self-fund these stations or a big business community that can help underwrite the cost of these stations. But where people still understand that there is a true vital role played by these stations in their communities in terms of being connective tissue, in terms of having the issues, the people, the things that are important to the community really front and center. So my hope is that we will see some level of federal funding coming back, even if it’s more targeted to the stations that would be more dependent on public funds to continue to exist.
For the Knight Foundation, obviously, you’re committed to freedom of the press and local news, but that’s part of a pledge to support local communities overall, right? I mean, it’s sort of linked together.
It is. And we think it’s foundational. To us, reliable local news and information is really a central force for good in communities. People see one another, they connect with one another, they have a common fact base to rally around. And so for a community to thrive, that’s table stakes.