SDPB cuts will hurt the state

By now you’ve heard South Dakota Public Broadcasting (SDPB) is laying off 15 employees across a spectrum of programs and services that will impact SDPB local journalism efforts, eliminate the radio program “In the Moment” and the TV program “South Dakota Focus,” reduce output of the program “Dakota Life,” and eliminate the educational resources provided by SDPB’s education team. Several support positions are also being eliminated. The layoffs will take place this fall.
This comes on the heels of the announcement that four newspapers in the state were being shuttered. It’s almost as if there is a war on information and knowledge.
Having said that, the newspapers were (thankfully) rescued, and perhaps the same will happen with SDPB. These latest cuts aren’t because of anything done by our state legislators, as both sides of the aisle made it clear last session they valued what SDPB does after an onslaught of public feedback from South Dakotans telling them they in fact wanted SDPB.
These cuts were necessitated by a rescission package passed federally by Congress that eliminates money appropriated to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). The rescission takes effect Oct. 1, which is the beginning of the new federal fiscal year.
South Dakota’s delegation of Rep. Dusty Johnson and  Sens. Mike Rounds and John Thune all voted in favor of rescinding CPB’s funding. They did so at the behest of President Donald Trump as part of the recently passed “Big Beautiful Bill.” NPR, PBS, etc., have long been a source of anger for Trump, who has called them “Radical Left Monsters.” While you can probably safely make that argument about those entities in other states, it’s just not true here in South Dakota. Lumping everything together regardless of whether or not they belong together has become something of a national pastime these days.
You can make the case that media organizations should not receive federal funding, and that’s the case being made by those who are in favor of the cuts. The argument is also being made that with our country so deeply, deeply in debt (and that’s the absolute truth regardless of which side of the aisle you are on—and both sides contribute to it) cuts have to come from somewhere.
That’s a hard argument to support, however, when the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), both non-partisan institutions working for Congress, predict increased deficits by $3.4 trillion over the next 10 years thanks to the Big Beautiful Bill. Cutting money for public broadcasting to fix that is like taking a thimble of water out of the Pacific Ocean in an attempt to dry it up.
It’s clear the cutting of the money to CPB is political, driven by many who feel it has become too idealogical in some states. In that way, it has somewhat done this to itself. But by throwing the baby out with the bath water, we hurt public information in all states. Losing ways to gain information hurts us. It doesn’t make us better. 
There’s nothing political about that.