This month, Congress voted to rescind $1.1 billion in funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, cutting all federal support for NPR, PBS and their member stations. While this will hurt public media throughout the country, it will also affect us personally. We are full-time college students who have become distressingly familiar with watching funds be torn away from institutions of higher education throughout the country. But we are also full-time reporters for WFUV-FM (90.7), an NPR-affiliated public radio station based at Fordham University in the Bronx.
Working at WFUV’s student-run newsroom has been formative for both of us, which has made these recent cuts from Congress especially painful. Now we are trying to navigate what these cuts will mean for our futures and for the station.
We attend Fordham, a Jesuit university in New York City. Owned by the university, WFUV first went on the air over 75 years ago and has trained hundreds of students in news, music production, sports reporting and more. The station’s most notable alumni include Vin Scully, the legendary announcer for the Brooklyn and then Los Angeles Dodgers, and Charles Osgood, the former host of “CBS News Sunday Morning.” There are not many places where a sophomore in college can have access to professional-grade equipment and training that introduces aspiring journalists to the working world.
We both started at WFUV as sophomores. Alexandra first heard about the station’s opportunities from her journalism professor, who encouraged her to apply. She loved reporting as soon as she started and knew immediately it was what she wanted to pursue as a career. Andrew had been writing and editing for various school newspapers, eager to one day transition to what he always felt was the best place for Fordham student journalists, especially for students hoping to report from City Hall: WFUV.
We grew up listening to public radio. For Andrew, it was KXJZ-FM (90.9) in his hometown of Sacramento, and for Alexandra, it was the NPR affiliate KUOW-FM (94.9) in Seattle. We both started as reporters at WFUV and have worked our way up to delivering the daily news on air.
We have been covering New York City’s mayoral race for months now. Andrew interviewed five mayoral candidates in the Democratic primary, including Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani and City Comptroller Brad Lander. Alexandra was out on the streets on Election Day, conducting interviews and tracking voter turnout. That night, at Mr. Lander’s official watch party, she was there when he announced that former Gov. Andrew Cuomo had conceded the primary to Mr. Mamdani. She recalls WFUV’s team being the youngest reporters in the room. Moments like these are why WFUV is something that we hold so close to our hearts. These types of opportunities don’t often come around for people our age, especially not with the support of an NPR-affiliated newsroom.
In the face of these funding cuts, WFUV is relatively lucky. As a mid-sized station in a media market as large as New York City, we can turn to community donors, corporate underwriting and university support. But hundreds of smaller public radio stations, particularly in rural areas and underserved media markets, rely heavily on C.P.B. grants. For many people on Native American reservations or in rural or low-income areas, public media is the only source for local news and emergency alerts. Taking it away could leave countless people in dangerous news deserts.
When crises like Hurricane Helene battered North Carolina last year, it was public broadcasting that kept communities informed when power lines failed and internet connections dropped. For many across the country, public radio stations like North Carolina’s WCQS-FM (88.1) still serve as active and integral lifelines. In the next natural disaster or local emergency, what will inform communities if public radio can’t? That is one of the many unknowns following Congress’s decision.
Public media will survive, but it won’t survive unchanged. Stations like WFUV are bracing for the loss of nearly $900,000 a year in federal support, which will ripple across everything we do, from championing local musicians on air (with over 100 live music sessions each year) to training the next generation of New York City and national journalists. Programs from our news department, like WFUV’s “Strike A Chord,” which connects volunteers with community service opportunities, and our daily news podcast, “What’s What,” amplify local voices and public service reporting. They now face a very uncertain future.
But we won’t let that uncertainty stop us from doing what we do best. We and everyone else at WFUV are committed to helping our station by rallying the support of our listeners, foundations and partners who believe, as we do, that public media is still worth fighting for.
