CARBONDALE, Ill. — Larry Hunter arrived at the Carbondale Farmers Market on a recent Saturday with an edict from his wife — “don’t come home without three tomatoes,” she said — and a hope that he could help raise a bit of money, a dollar or five at a time. Maybe it wouldn’t make a dent, he knew, but these days anything is something for public media affiliates fighting to survive.
For months, Hunter, interim executive director of WSIU, had grappled with the fallout from the looming budget cuts tied to President Donald Trump’s directive to defund public media. Backed by Congress, more than a billion dollars in funding, to be funneled through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to stations around the country, was disappearing.
The CPB, itself, has announced it will close by the end of the year. An unknown number of National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting Service television stations face the specter of going silent or dark. And in Carbondale, a city of about 22,000 in rural southern Illinois, where long-established sources of local news and information have already endured blow after blow, Hunter understood the math as well as anyone:
Somehow, he needed to account for the loss of $1.4 million. And how, exactly?
WSIU’s NPR affiliate already operated at the margins, out of a basement studio — unrenovated and unchanged for decades — that staffers affectionately referred to as “the dungeon.” Upstairs, resources for the PBS affiliate, part of a joint public media operation subsidized in large part due to its ties to Southern Illinois University, weren’t any more robust. Upon the news of the funding cuts, anxiety rippled throughout WSIU, as it did at public media affiliates everywhere.
Hunter often found himself crunching numbers. Trying to comfort nervous employees amid uncertainty.
Even if they were secure, for now, how would they continue their mission of serving a part of the state that is more and more underserved by local newspapers and commercial broadcasters long mired in their own cycle of consolidation and cuts and offering less and less? Hunter calculated the loss of $1.4 million to be about a quarter of WSIU’s budget.
Hunter knew vacant positions would go unfilled. Programming was at risk. Covering approximately 40 of Illinois’ most rural and isolated counties, with 400,000 people spread among vast stretches of farmland, was about to become even more of an impossibility.
The immediate goal became one of survival and maintaining the status quo.
“I need lots of money,” Hunter said.
By the time he arrived at the farmers market the Saturday morning crowds bustled. Two long rows of vendors hawked everything from local honey to handmade crafts. And down on one end, in the shade of a tree, a couple of WSIU staffers and local volunteers manned their own table.
It’s there every Saturday, an exercise in community outreach. Equally important now, it has become one more opportunity to ask for support — to sell the mission of NPR and PBS and underscore what’s at stake. Tracy Ewell, WSIU’s director of corporate support, was among those who arrived early to set up. There were cardboard cutouts of PBS Kids characters, and WSIU pamphlets that outlined dire circumstances.
“DEFUNDED BUT NOT DEFEATED,” they read, and then: “POWERED BY YOU.”
Ewell tried to sell an upcoming fundraiser to anyone who approached — an afternoon French tea for $30 a seat. Some people, though, just wanted to give cash. A woman handed over a wrinkled $5 bill. A man walked up and politely turned down the sign-up for the tea.
“You guys got a donation jar or something?” he asked.
“We have an envelope,” said Jeff Williams, station manager for WSIU Radio.
“All right, well good,” the man said. “Let’s put that in there then.”
He dropped in a $20 bill.
“Glad to see you out here,” he said. “I know funding’s getting rough.”
The man’s name was Bob Sanders, and whatever the stereotype of a typical NPR listener — the canvas tote and the Subaru and the co-op membership — his appearance didn’t fit it. He wore blue jeans and big brown boots. He spoke with a slight country drawl. He wore an SIU hat, after teaching aviation mechanics at the university for 25 years.
“So I have a big history here,” he said, “and with all the cuts coming from the federal government — which they, in my opinion, should not be doing — it’s going to be tough to keep the university radio and TV stations on. It’s going to be very difficult, I think.
“What makes me so mad is they’ll take money from folks like this, and then they’ll just throw it away.”
Sanders listened to WSIU “morning and night” back when he’d drive back and forth to the airport to teach. It was his routine. He liked the shows and appreciated the reporting, local and national, that he found “straight down the line, not biased to the left or the right.”
Nearby, the donations continued, little by little.
“Our listeners and viewers have stepped up, and we’ve gotten a lot of love,” Williams said.
And yet he knows that love will only go so far.
The climb
Brian Sapp woke up hours before sunrise to drive to the Banterra Center on the SIU campus, where a steady stream of students and locals filed through the doors in the dark of early morning. It was Sept. 11 and Sapp, a jack of all trades at WSIU Radio, made sure to be there in plenty of time for the start of an event commemorating the 24th anniversary of 9/11.
Moments before it began, just after 6 a.m., country music played softly. Dozens of SIU athletes organized by team. Participants stretched or sipped coffee before they took to the stairs overlooking the basketball court, the climb meant to simulate the responders’ ascent into the burning towers.
“Each step is more than a challenge,” a host said into a mic. “It’s a tribute to those we’ve lost.”
There were similar remembrances across the country but this was the one in Carbondale, and Sapp felt it important to be there, to document the local angle and report it for a local audience. On that morning 24 years ago, he’d been a young videographer for a TV station in Tampa. He’d been dispatched to cover President George W. Bush’s appearance at a Sarasota elementary school, and was in the TV truck, documenting history, when Bush received word of the attacks.
“Everyone has their story,” he said, and 24 years later he’d come with his microphone and recorder, prepared to find whatever stories he could at the arena. Soon enough, with the event underway, Sapp went on the move. He shadowed participants up and down the stairs, clipping his microphone to a few firefighters who had shown up in their turnout gear. Sapp followed them while he asked questions, working up a sweat and capturing audio.
Almost an hour into it he found a local fire chief who said he’d gone to ground zero in the days after 9/11 to help sift through the rubble. It was a perfect anecdote for the story Sapp wanted to tell and about an hour later, in the WSIU studio, he said “I’ll probably start with that.” By then, around 7:30 a.m., half of the station’s four-person full-time staff was there.
Sapp put on his headphones and cut his audio for the feature while Leah Lerner, the station’s host during “Morning Edition,” worked down the hall, scanning her email and Slack. She’d spent 20 years on a morning show at a nearby commercial station before joining WSIU in 2020, just in time to become a conduit of public health updates during the pandemic. The work in public media, she learned, carried more of a purpose.
There were heavy stories, like those throughout 2020. But also lighter ones, and even the informational tidbits she offers daily as part of the WSIU Almanac — a local rundown of things to know and events happening in and around Carbondale, and sometimes far beyond.
“This might be one of their only ways to get that information out,” she said of some of those groups that relied on the station to find an audience. Lerner sat behind a microphone and recorded the morning news update — a warning from a local sheriff about a scam targeting the elderly; a condemnation from an Illinois Democratic organization of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, which happened the day before; a teaser about Gov. JB Pritzker criticizing the Supreme Court.
So much of what NPR and its affiliates cover is related to politics, and always has been, but it was only in the past 10 years or so that Jeff Williams, the station director, began to notice the change in how that coverage was received. He always found most of his listeners to be “reasonably informed.”
“They’re fairly level-headed, common sense midwesterners,” he said. But the criticism has grown louder, the complaints more frequent and perhaps more difficult to understand.
“Well, I can’t believe you reported this,” Williams said, repeating some of them. “You’re so woke.”
He didn’t know what that meant, exactly, as it related to the station’s coverage but he understood how everything had changed. He could trace that change to the rise of Rush Limbaugh in the 1980s and ’90s. Long before Limbaugh became a controversial voice of what was once the right-most fringe of the Republican Party, he grew up in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, about an hour south of Carbondale and just over the other side of the Mississippi.
WSIU’s coverage area dips into Cape Girardeau and rural parts of Kentucky and Indiana. It spans a lot of Illinois’ most sparsely-populated areas. Limbaugh Country, then; Trump Country, now, and pretty much all of it a news desert, to varying degrees, according to a Northwestern University study. In the old days, Williams would’ve had more resources to devote to those areas.
He used to have a health-focused reporter, until he didn’t. He used to have one focused on local politics, but now settles for what he can get out of a statewide content-sharing arrangement with other affiliates.
The radio station’s staff had gone from seven to four in 10 years, and it was three until Sapp started earlier this year. In the small newsroom, where Sapp worked on his feature about the 9/11 event, there were more seats and computers than staffers to use them. It was difficult even before NPR became something of a political target.
And then came the increasingly acrimonious rhetoric, with NPR taking its place among Trump’s least favorite news outlets. In a post on his social media site, Truth Social, Trump in early April wrote, in all capital letters, that “REPUBLICANS MUST DEFUND AND TOTALLY DISASSOCIATE THEMSELVES” from NPR and PBS. He described the outlets as “RADICAL LEFT ‘MONSTERS’ THAT SO BADLY HURT OUR COUNTRY!”
In June, the bill to defund public media advanced through the House. In July, it made it through the Senate. Both times it passed along party lines, with narrow margins, with Republican lawmakers celebrating outcomes that ultimately left public media stations around the country wondering how they were going to make it and what more they were going to cut.
On Sept. 11, Sapp needed a little more than a few hours to finish his feature. It aired on the radio that afternoon. Lerner that morning provided listeners with news and current events. It was about a week before a clip emerged on social media of Trump aboard Air Force One, answering questions in a press gaggle. One of them was about how he intended to target Antifa, which Trump designated a terrorist organization in the days after the Kirk assassination.
Trump asked the reporter where she was from. “NPR, sir,” she said.
“NPR?” Trump said, looking puzzled. “I heard they were gone. Are they still here?”
“We are,” the reporter said.
“Oh, good. Congratulations,” Trump said. “It won’t be for long.”
The cuts
At WSIU Radio, the federal cuts will amount to almost 20% of the budget. The PBS affiliate, with its more costly programming, will carry more of a burden. In a way, Williams felt lucky. He was in charge of the most rural NPR affiliate in Illinois but he remained confident in its survival, at least for now.
He felt fortunate, in a way, that between radio and TV, WSIU was only losing about a quarter of its overall budget. For some public media affiliates, he knew the cuts represented “50, 60, 70% of their budgets,” he said, underscoring that the latest estimate forecasted 70 to 80 affiliates shutting down.
“The majority of those are rural,” Williams said. “And a lot of those are in areas where there’s nothing else around.”
Illinois is one of 32 states that provides funding for its national public media affiliates, but the $1.7 million state appropriation ranks among the smallest nationally. Overall, the state’s NPR and PBS affiliates are set to lose almost $13 million in federal funding.
“I think we’re all suffering,” said Heather Norman, general manager of Tri States Public Radio in Macomb, and the president of the Illinois Public Broadcasting Council. She has “likened it to grieving,” she said, with her colleagues around the state trying to support each other through loss but unsure how exactly to account for it.
“It’s taking a giant wrecking ball to a system that’s been in place for 60 years,” she said.
The federal cuts go into effect next year but already they’re being felt. In Pennsylvania, the Penn State public media affiliate, WPSU, announced that it would shut down. In New Jersey, the statewide PBS network announced that it could go dark next year, citing a contract dispute with an operator and the national and state funding cuts it described as “very significant.”
In southern Illinois, meanwhile, those who depend on WSIU are fearful of what’s to come — if not now than in the not-so distant future. Joyce Fornes is among them. She’s 78, visually impaired, and has lived in the same modest apartment, not far from the SIU campus, for 35 years. She keeps three radios tuned to WSIU at all times: the clock radio next to her bed, a small Magnavox one of her sons recently bought for her and a waterproof one in her shower.
The only time she’s not listening to NPR is when she’s tuned into the Salukis or Notre Dame on Saturdays, or the Green Bay Packers on Sundays. She likes “Morning Edition” and “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me” and “All Things Considered,” among others, and she knows the local folks by their voices: Leah Lerner in the mornings and Brad Palmer, who’s been with WSIU for more than 20 years, providing updates in the afternoons.
“I hate to think that it’s going to be cut,” she said, and she wishes she could help.
“But I’m on a fixed income, so I haven’t,” and she almost sounded as though she felt guilty.
A little ways across town, Sarah Heyer opened her used bookstore, Confluence Books, in late 2020, and decided not long after that she’d donate 5% of her monthly proceeds to WSIU. For years, she taught in the Russian department at the university, until SIU shuttered it in the early 2000s. The bookstore was a way to give back and the monthly donation to WSIU a way to support local journalism, the state of which has concerned Heyer for a while now.
It was anecdotal, she knew, but she sensed that a lot of locals received their news and information from questionable sources. It wasn’t unique to this part of the state or country, necessarily, but perhaps it was exacerbated because there were fewer outlets to begin with, and now the ones that remained had to find a way with fewer resources. Facebook had filled a gap, Heyer said.
“And their phones. Whatever they look at on their phones.”
Jackson County, home to Carbondale, was one of the two counties in southern Illinois — along with St. Clair — in which victory eluded Trump in 2024. He won the others in the region and won most easily. It added to the challenge for WSIU: How could it hope to fundraise and account for cuts in an area where so much of its potential audience voted for Trump, and perhaps believed his characterization that NPR and PBS were, as he put it, “MONSTERS”?
It was a question that weighed on Mike Podolsky, who has lived on his same wooded and isolated property in Fairfield, about 90 miles northwest of Carbondale, since the 1970s. He comes from a family that made its living in the oil industry, when it was more robust in Illinois, and from a time when there was more homogeneity — when everyone at school wore the same “Sears and Roebuck blue jeans with holes in them,” and when “we had three television channels, and Walter Cronkite was kind of America’s uncle.”
“And we all got the same news and whether you agreed with it or didn’t, it started from the same place. And that’s where we are not today.”
Fairfield is in Wayne County, where 85% of the 8,000 people who voted in the 2024 election voted for Trump. It is a place where neighbors can live a long way from each other; where houses along narrow roads can remain hidden behind cornstalks, and in mid-September they were just starting to turn brown. Not far up one of those roads from Podolsky, more than two dozen flags erected along a fence stood out amid the serenity. They were Trump flags, all.
They offered Podolsky a reminder of how much of an island he inhabited. Among the radio stations he could access, he said, there were “a gajillion religious channels,” one that offered St. Louis Cardinals baseball that he tuned into and one he relied upon for information about the state and his general region. And that was WSIU, to which he and his wife donated annually.
“And we intend to increase it this year,” he said, “because WSIU needs to stay alive.”
‘That’s special’
On the drive from the outskirts of Fairfield toward Carbondale, no fewer than seven FM radio stations broadcasted area high school football games. On some of them, the sounds of the cheerleaders could be heard faintly in the background, the crowd noise rising with the announcer’s voice on the occasion of a big play.
Every week during the season Brad Palmer, WSIU’s afternoon anchor, looked forward to calling a game. He appreciated that football on the radio remained a Friday night ritual in rural areas, an enduring piece of Americana, and these days it offered a reprieve from his job in public media.
At WSIU, Palmer writes and delivers the afternoon news update during “All Things Considered.” He reports in the field, too, though now there’s not as much time for that as there used to be. He’s been at the station for more than 20 years though the last five “have felt like 20,” he said, what with the pandemic, staff attrition, fewer hires and, now, the forthcoming loss of federal funding.
“Cut us anymore, and we’re probably going off the air at this point,” Palmer said, adding that “we’re concerned about the product we produce for our listeners.”
The station’s range, amplified by towers in Carbondale and Mount Vernon and Olney, has remained the same, but the ability to cover those areas has decreased. It’s difficult enough to get to everything in Carbondale, though on this particular Friday a story had arrived with some measure of anticipation: Bob Odenkirk, among SIU’s best-known alums, was back in town.
Odenkirk, of “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul” fame, had returned with his brother, Bill, a distinguished comedy writer, to lead student workshops and attend a public event at the Varsity theater downtown. Palmer and Sapp covered the Odenkirks’ appearance for WSIU and Larry Hunter, the interim director, made it out too. He wouldn’t have missed it.
Hunter attended SIU in the ’80s, along with Bob Odenkirk, and the two were friends. During the brothers’ visit, Hunter played tour guide and gatekeeper, driving Bob to his hotel and to Starbucks and Smoothie King. Hunter shared public media’s plight, too, and Odenkirk signed a few of his latest movie posters, to be auctioned, and agreed to record some WSIU promos in the dungeon.
During a conversation in his office before the Odenkirks’ public event, Hunter grew emotional at the thought of the uncertainty facing public media and his staff. Like most who worked there, he was a local who’d grown up in the area and gone to school at SIU, and like most of his employees he found meaning in serving a region that’s always been home.
“That’s special,” he said.
The next morning at the farmers market, Hunter arrived with a bluetooth speaker and streamed the WSIU broadcast. Coincidentally, a national NPR interview with Bob Odenkirk happened to be airing. Hunter shared stories about spending time with Bill and Bob over the past two days, and began to beam. He’d convinced them to take a helicopter tour of campus and shared a phone picture from when they flew over WSIU’s main tower.
“That’s my favorite picture, right there,” Hunter said.
All around, the scene spoke to the connections of a small-town community. Steps away from the WSIU booth, Confluence Books had set up shop. A local animal rescue group brought a dog to adopt. Two local musicians, a duo known as Ruth Ann and Lizzie Jane, sang Neil Young while Hunter went looking for his tomatoes. The Carbondale Farmers Market goes back 42 years but WSIU, a charter member of NPR’s affiliate network, has been around longer.
The locals who stopped by its table want to see it survive. Some signed up for the fundraiser. Some made photographs with their kids posing with the cardboard cutouts. Some handed over what they could, which might’ve only been a few dollars.
By the end of the day, the donation envelope had about $120.