From WNYC Studios. I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Thursday, May 15th.

For today's podcast, we have WNYC president and CEO LaFontaine Oliver to explain some of what President Trump

and Congress are doing with respect to public radio and television. We'll talk about the executive

order, the budget proposal that would kick in in the fall, and the attempt to fire members

of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Board. Hi, LaFontaine. Always good to have you on the show.

Hi, Brian. Always great to be with you and the listeners. So the way the president's executive order

would directly affect us is, tell me if I understand this correctly, that local stations like WNYC

would not be able to use federal funding that we get to help pay for the national NPR programming,

like Morning Edition and All Things Considered.

So could you explain to the listeners how that works, how we pay or help to pay for those

bedrock national shows?

Yeah, absolutely, Brian.

So what's important to understand is that NPR only gets about 1% of its funding

directly from CPB. The lion's share of their support is coming from local member stations like

WNYC and WQXR through our programming fees and our carriage fees to run programs like Morning Edition

and all things considered and some of the other shows that NPR may not produce but

distribute.

So, you know, fresh air, wait, wait, don't tell me.

And so we receive through the federal appropriation our community service grants. So that's

the federal money that if the executive order stands, we would no longer be able to use that money

in order to purchase programming or to pay dues and fees back to NPR. So that's essentially how that would work. And that's why when we talk

about public radio being an ecosystem, we talk about how sort of intricately connected we all are

...