In the United States, other than a few direct services, public broadcasting is almost entirely decentralized and is not operated by the government, but receives some government support. In July 2025, Congress approved a spending bill that terminated all federal funding for public broadcasting, including PBS and NPR.
Background The U.S. public broadcasting system differs from such systems in other countries, in that the principal public television and radio broadcasters – the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR), respectively – operate as separate entities. Some of the funding comes from community support to hundreds of public radio and public television stations, each of which is an individual entity licensed to one of several different non-profit organizations, municipal or state governments, or universities. Sources of funding also include on-air and online pledge drives and the sale of underwriting "spots" (typically running 15–30 seconds) to sponsors.
Individual stations and programs rely on highly varied proportions of funding. Program-by-program funding creates the potential for conflict-of-interest situations, which must be weighed program by program under standards such as the guidelines established by PBS. Donations are widely dispersed to stations and producers, giving the system a resilience and broad base of support but diffusing authority and impeding decisive change and priority-setting.Aufderheide & Clark."Public Broadcasting and Public Affairs", Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. 2008
U.S. federal government support for public radio and television was filtered through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which operated as a separate organization. The CPB is shutting down following a new law of the U.S. government in July 2025 which halted all funding to the CPB.
Public radio and television stations often produce their own programs as well as purchase additional programming from national producers and program distributors such as NPR, PBS, American Public Television (APT), American Public Media (APM), and Public Radio Exchange (PRX).
Public television and radio in the U.S. has, from late 1960s onward, has dealt with severe criticism from some conservative politicians and think-tanks (such as The Heritage Foundation), which allege that its programming has a liberal bias. Mostly due to this belief, some conservatives (including Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Donald Trump, and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich) have made various efforts to privatize or cut funding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting through federal budget legislation. Support for continuing CPB funding by liberals, independents and some conservatives in Congress has led to many of these efforts failing at the federal level; although there have been successful attempts to reduce—though not eliminate—funding for public television stations by some state legislatures.
Arts advocates and media observers opposed to defunding the CPB argue that PBS provides educational and arts programming that have limited availability on American television, even as the advents of cable television and online streaming have led to the development of similar content, including to viewers in rural areas where educational funding is even lower than that of urbanized areas and do not have access to arts education. Previous estimates by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting have illustrated that removing federal funding to the CPB would severely hamstring rural PBS, NPR and independent public broadcasting stations, and may result in the gradual collapse of the public broadcasting system. Comprehensive studies by the Government Accountability Office and other organizations have concluded that private financing would not be universally available to public television and radio stations in less densely populated areas to sufficiently replace taxpayer funding that makes up 40% to 50% of the annual budgets of some stations, and ensure universal access to public broadcasting services.
History Early history Early public stations were operated by state colleges and universities, and were often run as part of the schools' cooperative extension services. Stations in this era were internally funded, and did not rely on listener contributions to operate; some accepted advertising. Networks such as Iowa Public Radio, South Dakota Public Radio, and Wisconsin Public Radio began under this structure.
The Association of College and University Broadcasting Stations formed in 1925; in 1934, it was renamed the National Association of Educational Broadcasters. Over time, commercial broadcasting began to dominate the available frequency space.
The concept of a "non-commercial, educational" station per se did not show up in U.S. law until 1941, when the FM band was authorized to begin normal broadcasting (before 1941, it was experimental). The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), with lobbying from the NAEB, reserved the lower 5 frequencies of the band – between 42.1 and 42.9 MHz – for such stations; when the FM band moved in 1945 to 88-106 MHz (later expanded to 108 MHz), the frequencies from 88.1 to 91.9 MHz were set aside for non-commercial educational stations, though they are not limited to those frequencies (for example, WFIU in Bloomington, Indiana has its FM frequency at 103.7 MHz).
The W. K. Kellogg Foundation funded the formation of the "(NAEB) Tape Network" in 1951, and the Ford Foundation funded the National Educational Radio Network starting in 1961.
Houston's KUHT was the nation's first public television station, and signed on the air on May 25, 1953, from the campus of the University of Houston. This phenomenon continued in other large cities in the 1950s; in rural areas, it was not uncommon for colleges to operate commercial stations instead (e.g., the University of Missouri's KOMU, an NBC-affiliated television station in Columbia). The FCC had reserved almost 250 broadcast frequencies for use as educational television stations in 1953, though by 1960, only 44 stations allocated for educational use had begun operations.
The Ford Foundation funded the Educational Television and Radio Center in 1951, later renamed National Educational Television.
Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 The passage of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 – which was signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, and was modeled in part after a 1965 study on educational television by the Carnegie Corporation of New York – precipitated the development of the current public broadcasting system in the U.S. The legislation established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), a private entity that is charged with facilitating programming diversity among public broadcasters, the development and expansion of non-commercial broadcasting, and providing funding to local stations to help them create programs; the CPB receives funding earmarked by the federal government as well as through public and private donations. While the intention of the act was to develop public television and radio, a revision of the bill had removed all mention of radio from the original text; Michigan Senator Robert Griffin suggested changing the name of what was to be called the Public Television Act, and last-minute changes were subsequently made to the bill (with references incorporating radio into the bill being re-added with Scotch Tape) before the law was passed by Congress and signed by Johnson.
Cancellation of funding by Donald Trump As of July 17, 2025, Congress under the direction of president Donald Trump cancelled all federal funding for public broadcasting. Meanwhile, a national poll of likely voters released in July found 53% trusted public media in the United States, compared to 35% for the media in general.
On January 5, 2026, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funded NPR and PBS, as well as many local TV and radio stations, announced that its board had voted to dissolve the organization after legislators removed $500 million worth of funding from the company.
Radio The first public radio network in the United States was founded in 1949 in Berkeley, California, as station KPFA, which became and remains the flagship station for a national network called Pacifica Radio. From the beginning, the network has refused corporate funding of any kind, and has relied mainly on listener support. KPFA gave away free FM radios to build a listener base and to encourage listeners to "subscribe" (support the station directly with donations). It is the world's oldest listener-supported radio network. Since the creation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Pacifica has sometimes received CPB support. Pacifica runs other stations in Los Angeles, New York City, Washington, D.C. and Houston, as well as repeater stations and a large network of affiliates.
A public radio network, National Public Radio (NPR), was created in February 1970, as byproduct of the passage of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. This network – which replaced the Ford Foundation-backed National Educational Radio Network – is colloquially though inaccurately conflated with public radio as a whole, when in fact "public radio" includes many organizations. Some independent local public radio stations buy their programming from distributors such as NPR; Public Radio International (PRI); American Public Media (APM); Public Radio Exchange (PRX); and Pacifica Radio, most often distributed through the Public Radio Satellite System (PRSS). Around these distributed programs, stations fill in varying amounts of local and other programming. A number of public stations are completely independent of these programming services, producing all or most of their content themselves. Public radio stations in the United States tend to broadcast a mixture of news and talk programs along with music and arts/cultural programming. Some of the larger operations split off these formats into separate stations or networks. Music stations are probably best known for playing classical music, although other formats are offered, including the time-honored "eclectic" music format that is rather freeform in nature common among college radio stations. Jazz is another traditional, but declining, public radio programming staple.George H. Gibson, Public Broadcasting; The Role of the Federal Government, 1919–1976 (Praeger Publishers, 1977). Cultural Native American and Mexican American music and programming are also featured regionally.
The U.S. government operates some limited direct broadcasting services, but all are either highly specialized (and, since the dawn of the millennium, automated) information services (WWV/WWVH time service, NOAA Weather Radio) or targeted at foreign audiences like Voice of America. From 1948 to 2013, foreign-targeted broadcasts, many of which were intended as propaganda, were barred from U.S. audiences because of the Smith–Mundt Act, a restriction that has since been lifted. While NOAA Weather Radio has individual terrestrial repeaters across the United States (albeit on a special band reserved for such broadcasts), WWV, VOA and others operate from single shortwave facilities; none of these services can be heard on the AM or FM bands most common on U.S. radio. In early 2016, KIOF-LP (97.9 FM) in Las Vegas, Nevada began airing VOA News hourly, and is the only known public radio station in the United States to broadcast the VOA news service since the Smith–Mundt Act restrictions were lifted.