The Plug Has been Pulled. Public Radio Funding on the Verge of Elimination.
They’ve been trying to do it for decades and now they have succeeded in eliminating funding to National Public Radio and PBS, gutting the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) which funds them all. They are clawing back 1.1 billion dollars already promised by congress. Promises made. Promises not kept. And the National Endowment for the Arts has been reduced to a propaganda outlet.
What does this mean for Echoes?
Consider that we started with a trio of grants from the CPB totaling over 1 million dollars. That was 35 years ago. That is gone.
We got funding for most of our 35 years from the National Endowment for the Arts. That is mostly gone.
So now our funding consists mostly of station fees for the show, Echoes Online subscribers, CD of the Month Club Members and you.
But station fees are in jeopardy because they are losing funding from the government. Listen to Roger Lamay, the GM of Echoes affiliate, WXPN in Philadelphia:
To put it simply: if the CPB funding disappears, WXPN would have to raise an additional million dollars per year to offset the loss of funds and services. While this wouldn’t halt WXPN’s operations, it would hamstring our ability to provide a wide range of programs and activities to our community of artists and audiences
This is true for all public radio stations. And guess what kind of shows would be on the chopping block then? That’s right, syndicated music shows like Echoes, despite us being a miniscule amount of any stations budget.
So we need you to do a couple of things.
1-Support your local station that airs Echoes with a donation. You don’t have to wait for the interminable fund drives. Just go to their website and hit the donation tab which I’m sure will be there.
2- Support Echoes. We need both ends of our major money streams to work, Broadcast and Online. One cannot survive without the other, at least for now. Go to our website and find a significant way to donate. You can subscribe to Echoes Online, join the CD of the Month Club, or just make a nice DONATION.
There is still a chance to stop this recission. There is one more round of voting in congress. To learn more about how to make your voice heard in support of Public Media, visit Protect My Public Media.
