Fox 8 in New Orleans ran a story last night about the budding crisis Louisiana’s public TV and radio stations are about to face if Sen. John Kennedy gets his way and some $500 million in funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is struck from the federal budget.

A proposed bill in Congress is looking to strip federal funding from public television and radio stations across the country, including here in the New Orleans area.

At WYES this week, workers were preparing for their annual broadcast of the Rex Ball on Mardi Gras night. It’s just one of the many local productions the New Orleans public television station produces. Other locally produced WYES programs include Kevin Belton’s Cookin’ Louisiana, The Dooky Chase Kitchen: Leah’s Legacy and the weekly entertainment show Steppin’ Out.

“Often times, when someone thinks of WYES, the first things they think about are the local productions that we do,” said Robin Cooper, president and CEO at WYES.

If you mention PBS or NPR to Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy, you’ll likely hear about the $500 million in federal funding that goes to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. During a speech on the Senate floor this month, Kennedy said taxpayer money can be better spent elsewhere.

“The United States of America has $36 trillion in debt,” Kennedy said. “We can’t afford anymore to blow half a billion dollars for public broadcasting when Americans can find the same content — in many cases, better content — online for free.”

Earlier this winter, Kennedy introduced the Senate version of what’s being called “The No Propaganda Act.” The bill seeks to defund the CPB. Kennedy said Congress should not be funding any particular media outlets, especially National Public Radio, which he singled out as liberal and biased. He read a few NPR headlines to his fellow senators to underscore his claim.

“Here’s another headline from NPR: ‘How racism became a marketing tool for country music.’ I kid you not. The American taxpayers are spending half a billion a year to pay a local station to buy content that says country music is racist,” Kennedy said.

WWNO is located on the campus of the University of New Orleans. It is the local NPR affiliate in New Orleans. General manager Paul Maassen says the staff’s focus is on local content and the station has placed a larger emphasis on creating locally-focused programs instead of running national alternatives.

“We’re not looking at the politics of it or anything like that,” Maassen said. “We just want to be great storytellers about our community and what’s going on around us.”

To produce that local content, Maassen and Cooper say their respective stations rely on funding from the CPB.

For WYES, about $800,000 — or 13 percent of its budget — comes from federal funding. WWNO receives roughly $200,000 — or 9 percent of its budget — from the CPB.

It’s funny, because if you talk to folks who run independent TV or radio stations with audiences similar to WWNO and WYES, they’ll tell you those are absolutely staggering numbers. These are not what you’d call lean operations.

You don’t need 800K a year to put on cooking shows. Chef Alden B posts a few episodes every few months making Louisiana food and he’s got 240,000 YouTube subscribers, and nobody’s giving him $800,000. Louisiana Cookin’ Magazine has a YouTube channel with a once-a-week episode, and the production values are TV quality.

That’s what Kennedy is talking about.

What we’re getting here, abetted of course by the corporate TV media for no reason other than ideology, is the plaintive wail of the government bureaucrat that they just can’t put on their meager cable-access-channel-quality offerings without millions of dollars a year in funding.

It’s utterly ridiculous. New Media operations with a fraction of WYES’ budget are informing and entertaining many multiples of their audience.

Guess how many X followers WYES-TV has.

As of this writing? 2,112. That’s an utterly ridiculously low number. And they haven’t posted to their X account since 2022.

It’s a little better on Facebook; they’ve got 18,000 followers there. And they regularly post stuff on Facebook about…Mardi Gras parades and their fundraising events.

The Hayride has triple WYES’ X following, and I’ve done a lousy job promoting that account. We have 24,000 followers on Facebook.

And we have practically no budget at all. We eat what we kill. These guys have the better part of $10 million coming through the door and they can’t even hit The Hayride’s numbers on social media?

I’m using social media as a metric for connecting with the community because that’s generally how it’s done these days. These guys barely even bother.

So how many locally-produced shows are we talking about here?

WYES’ website says they have….two. There’s Peggy Scott Laborde’s “Steppin’ Out” show, which is about restaurants and bars and so forth, and there’s Marcia Kavanaugh and Errol Laborde’s “Informed Sources” show, which is a political show with a pretty definitive ideological bent that doesn’t generally win a lot of elections in Louisiana.

That’s it. That’s what WYES does every week.

Sure, they’ll show documentary series here and there, like the one on Dooky Chase they’re still touting after six years since they produced it. But as for continuously-running programs, for $7-8 million or so a year, you get…two shows.

Fox 8 did the best they could to advocate for the bankrupt federal government to continue funding this, but it’s utterly ridiculous. And from a New Media perspective it’s offensive. These guys are barely even trying, and they’re being showered with government swag, and independents like us are hustling to keep the doors open daily.

Kennedy is right. If WYES can’t survive a 13 percent budget cut putting on two regular shows a week, plus the occasional documentary which is almost always underwritten by some foundation or corporate philanthropy or other, then there is zero reason for anybody to care about their problems – regardless of how much energy Fox 8 is willing to do to white-knight for them. Enough already.