We in public media must rally to support our peers at stations challenged by weather catastrophes. Public radio news is a lifeline for isolated people in devastated rural and urban communities. Our stations provide essential local and national coverage of these now-frequent hurricanes, floods, wildfires, tornadoes and heat waves. Our system needs to provide and count on a rapid response of mutual and federal aid.
Even at this time, when stations are dealing with volatile financial realities of their own, pooling funds is an ethical way of redistributing some of the wealth and human resources to those in need. And not just because you or your station might need similar support sometime down the line, but because it will help us help one another fulfill the most fundamental piece of our public service mission: to deliver vital life-and-death information to our communities.
Some of this mutual aid is happening already. Current reported that journalists from other public media stations stepped up to help Blue Ridge Public Radio with editing stories. On Oct. 11, Minnesota Public Radio’s membership team responded to Hurricane Helene by tapping their own donors, according to Ellie Pierce, communications manager for MPR and American Public Media Group. “BPR told us about the station’s needs, including repairing damage to their transmitter, overtime for news and hosting staff, and figuring out how to navigate the loss of underwriting revenue from the community’s devastated businesses,” she said in an email to Current reporter Tyler Falk. So, MPR “pivoted to take the opportunity to … support the station to help them cover these unforeseen costs.”
These expressions of solidarity are moving and the right thing to do.
We in public media often refer to our little world as “the system.” If we are, in fact, an interdependent system, fundraising to support fellow stations and staffers in distress is the kind of thing we can do to prove it. Our system is really just a small town — stations alone employ only about 20,000 people. So we need to act like good neighbors who look out for one another. Listeners and viewers will recognize your generosity through their generosity.
But it’s not just NPR stations that need an infusion of moral and financial support. We can’t forget about the under-resourced, largely volunteer-run community radio and low-power FM stations, some of which do not qualify for CPB funding. These broadcasters also provide unique community service and engagement, and they disproportionately feel the pain of indiscriminate weather crises.
On Oct. 7, this letter from KP Whaley, GM of Asheville FM, was shared in a public radio Slack:
Dear friends and colleagues, Things are pretty dire here in the city. Our station is still off the air, [due to] lack of power as the grid was hit pretty hard. But our station and equipment didn’t suffer any damage. We hope to be broadcasting again on Friday. … We are coming together to help our neighbors, and that is a beautiful thing. The full scale of Helene’s impacts are just starting to become clear as small pockets of internet, cell coverage and electricity return. Because of that, we haven’t been able to account for all of our volunteers yet. … Thanks to those who’ve reached out already to show support.
His message is both horrific and hopeful, and all too familiar. When it comes to “natural” disasters, we’ve “seen this movie before.”
Current has also been affected by Helene and Milton. Two members of our team live on the Gulf Coast of Florida, and thankfully both have survived the double whammy of Helene and Milton’s ferocious winds and raging saltwaters. We provided emotional support to our Floridian colleagues as best we could, trying to keep in touch even as electricity, cell service, Wi-Fi and fuel were hard to come by. We gave them space to deal with the disruption and aftermath of the storms by recognizing their priorities and lessening the pressures of work on these hard-working people.
The new normal
Hurricanes, superstorms, floods, wildfires, tornadoes, blizzards, heat waves. The weather is destroying lives, homes, schools, businesses, roads, cars, forests, animal habitats, and on and on. Unpredictable, uncontrollable, deadly climate events are as normal as mass shootings in our country. Both are getting worse.
Even if we stopped using fossil fuels today, we’ve altered the planet forever, and there’s no turning back the clock. Climate is the story of the century. And thankfully, mainstream journalists are increasingly attributing catastrophic weather emergencies to climate change. While public media stations don’t have meteorologists, Current has reported on many public media climate initiatives underway. And some newsrooms have successfully secured foundation grants for local climate reporting.
In the coming years, public media journalists need to prepare to cover some of the harsher outcomes of these continued crises: growing population in the U.S., as people in the global south travel north to escape unlivable conditions. There will be stories about the strain that migration puts on local and national food supplies, energy consumption, infrastructure, education, health care and more. And, sadly, as the anti-immigrant sentiment in the country continues to climb, we can expect unempathetic or inhumane responses by some Americans to the changing demographics and competition for resources in our country. Reporting on this will be traumatic to some reporters and audiences.
Public media journalists are first responders
We need to get organized and make local and national plans, but we don’t have to peer into the future to predict the demands on terrestrial public media to respond to the weather. Public TV stations are already part of the emergency alert system which will become even more critical. Broadcast engineers on 24-hour call must get up and go to deal with downed towers and stations off the air. We’ll certainly see more of that. Public radio stations will continue to deliver a constant flow of vital information to listeners: Where to get food, water, shelter, medical attention and Wi-Fi connections; what they need to know about road conditions, school closures and other vital businesses. Disaster survivors tune in to hear about missing people and pets; and to hear about local, state, and federal government responses, including live broadcasts of government press conferences.
We cannot ignore that staff at public radio stations are providing this urgent, heroic service around the clock with barely any rest, sleeping at stations, separated from and sometimes unable to reach their own families.
Material and moral support
After Helene and Milton, I searched CPB’s website for information about aid to suffering stations. I have to say it wasn’t super simple to find announcements about storm recovery. I contacted CPB’s press team to ask what they were doing to help stations reeling from these latest super-storms. On Oct. 15, Communications Director Tracey Briggs wrote, “We are in contact with eight Florida stations to determine if/what emergency needs have come from Milton. We reached out to 21 stations after Hurricane Helene [and] have provided a $47,500 grant (just executed today) to WCQS/Blue Ridge Public Radio in Asheville, NC. In many natural disasters, it takes a while for stations to communicate to us whether they need assistance and for what.”
Whew! It’s a relief to know that CPB is at this very moment providing relief to our stations suffering through the worst times of their broadcast lives. This aid is extremely helpful but it’s probably not enough to deal with the long tail of financial disaster that follows the weather disaster. Their budgets will not bounce back and staff will probably be depleted, some having PTSD.
Helene made landfall Sept. 26. CPB’s grant to BPR was finalized Oct. 15 — about a three-week lag between the floods and the funds. Everyone in the system understands that’s probably as fast as a bureaucracy like CPB can move, but I think we should expect CPB to be as nimble as it expects public media to be in crises like this. FEMA didn’t wait 19 days to send resources to the region. Even the Humane Society got there sooner. Public media: We should be able to count on the stewards of our federal funding to be rapid responders too.
But … stop depending on CPB
But, of course, we can’t always look to CPB to lead the way and solve our problems.
In response to the damage wrought by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Greater Public created a special fund to collect donations for our beleaguered sisters and brothers affected by weather emergencies. It was called “Colleagues Helping Colleagues.” Current ran free advertising online and in our newsletters to encourage generosity to support this effort. In solidarity and empathy, I personally donated myself. But, what happened to this impressive initiative of yesteryear? Greater Public discontinued the fund in November 2022, citing “the limitations of our small team, the increasing impacts of climate change and frequency of natural disasters.”
I don’t blame Greater Public. Who can keep up with all of the hurricanes, wildfires, floods and tornadoes? If Current had the bandwidth and capacity to revive Colleagues Helping Colleagues and collect and distribute funds, we would. But we don’t and we can’t. Who can? Who will?
It’s an unrealistic stretch to expect stations in the midst of such trauma to turn to their viewers and listeners to donate. Greater Public has been publishing some blog posts to help stations figure out how to handle fundraising in these dark times. Given what residents in their communities are going through, I can’t imagine that staffers have the bandwidth to ask for money or donors to have the capacity to give.
As Current reported, stations throughout Florida collaborated to help each other provide extensive, top-notch coverage of the latest weather emergency. Public media in that state is well organized to pool information and resources when a high-category storm heads toward Florida. Public media in other states should check out the Florida Public Radio Emergency Network as a model to replicate. I was proud when Current’s reporters teamed up to cover how stations are holding down the fort and providing seamless, in-depth coverage to their listeners. That included WUCF’s decision to broadcast Meet the Helpers, the Mister Rogers–inspired short videos that teach children about emergency responders and other public servants who they can count on in scary situations like this.
A lot of very impressive things are happening at the local level in our system. This is where we can be reminded that, while NPR and PBS have the most resources and do an incredible job, local public service is what matters most. National news can offer national perspectives, but it’s not the same as boots on the ground covering a tragedy that equally impacts people on both sides of the microphones and the cameras. In these tragic instances, national news doesn’t really save lives. Local public media stations can and do.
Colleagues, please tell your peers across the country what you need. Hopefully, more in the system will have your back.