South Dakota Public Broadcasting Recovers After Federal Funding Cuts

Republican backlash against NPR and PBS erupted in Washington a year ago. President Trump pushed for and signed a law pulling back more than a billion dollars already approved for public media. And just like that, six decades of bipartisan support and funding were gone. South Dakota Public Broadcasting was among those who paid the price. The state network laid off a bunch of journalists. It canceled some shows. And then, as NPR's David Folkenflik reports, some surprising things started to unfold.

Let's start with the way things were. On her hourlong daily show In The Moment, Lori Walsh set the agenda for the people of South Dakota, whether talking to authors, storekeepers or politicians in what she calls kitchen table conversations - I mean that literally - as she did in this interview from early last year with the state's Republican lieutenant governor.

Did you talk about public service at the kitchen table?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. My grandpa loved to talk about politics, and from the time I...

When Congress eliminated federal funds for public media, that meant $2.3 million gone from South Dakota Public Broadcasting's bottom line. Walsh's hourlong program went away.

So we went through a real grieving period of saying goodbye to beloved staff members and really qualified journalists and professionals.

The result of tough choices. The network had agreed to continue giving the legislature C-SPAN-style gavel-to-gavel coverage in order to hold on to state funds, and it also agreed to continue airing all high school varsity sports and artistic competitions. So South Dakota Public Broadcasting laid off two-thirds of its news staff, Walsh and her two producers among them. Something else happened at the same time. Incensed listeners and viewers stepped up to fill the gaps, starting before the congressional vote.

I mean, June 2025 was the start of that white-hot rage.

Ryan Howlett is the chief executive of the private foundation that supports South Dakota Public Broadcasting, which runs TV and radio programs.

We found just a bunch of first-time givers in the four- and five-figure range that we had never had before.

So South Dakota Public Broadcasting raised a record $8 million in private funds, enough to forestall other cuts and to sock some money into a rainy day fund. For the first time, the state offered a six-figure subsidy for the legislative coverage, and Lori Walsh was hired back. There's still no daily show, and her producing colleagues did not return, but...

I am on the air every day. I do a longer-form interview, around 13 to 15 minutes every morning, which we air during a Morning Edition local time slot. The In The Moment podcast, we were able to preserve that podcast. So we put that morning conversation on the podcast every day.

Walsh says it's less polished, more raw, because she's doing it solo. But Walsh still interviews political candidates, and she still finds other ways to explore life in the state. There was the segment she did about a piano put out on a street corner in the city of Vermillion for anyone to play on, another about a South Dakotan Air Force veteran who first met his daughter six decades after her birth in the U.K. His British girlfriend had changed her mind about moving home with him.

He passed away, like, three weeks after we recorded the conversation, and I was able to mix that down for Father's Day and play that as a 13-minute feature, essentially.

Lori Walsh knows she can't do everything she once did on her hourlong show.

And I do think people miss the full kitchen table experience of In The Moment. But now we have - I don't know - a breakfast nook where you start your day with a key conversation that you can carry with you throughout the day.

Now station officials are focusing on giving South Dakotans more coverage via social media, trying to build a sustainable financial structure and hoping to build back more - at least, just a bit more - of what they once had.