Public Media takes business out of the private sector while getting your tax dollars from both the Feds and the State.
Public Media Sponsorship
If you have watched, read, or listened to public media you have likely heard the messages about "sponsorship": this or that story is brought to you by, followed by (usually) a description of what the sponsoring body does.
It's an ad. Or is it?
I would call it an ad, but the FCC and public media (NPR, PBS, locals like CPR, KUNC, etc.) do not. A rose by any other name I suppose.
Public media and funding of same have come up a lot lately, and one of the offshoots of this is public media's use of what they term "underwriting". The first link below is an NPR story which details the head of the FCC investigating NPR for airing what he (the FCC head) refers to as "commercials".
Let's look at the rules as they stand. Public media is prevented from airing commercials. Period. In the grand tradition of meeting the letter, but no the spirit, of the law, however, public media has for decades let public and private entities pay them to do "underwriting" of their content.
If you can get past the obvious self-justification long enough, the second link below is NPR's written policy re. underwriting and sponsorship, the third (and more neutrally written) link below is PBS's policy.
A shorter bulletpoint version is attached as screenshots 1 and 2. They come from NPR's page.
To get a sense of what local public media was doing, I reached out to CPR's fundraising department to ask if their policy re. underwriting/sponsorships were the same or different than NPR's.
I didn't get any obvious direct answer, the person I emailed with instead pointed me to the fourth link below. I looked and looked but couldn't find any written policy on underwriting. The link does, however, offer an interesting peek behind the curtain at their marketing, as well as an apparent mismatch between their rhetoric for needing government money to reach those poor people out there who have no other alternatives and their marketing as to who their audience is (expect more on this in the future).
One last resource before pulling all the loose ends back into a bundle. The fifth link below is to a marketing blog entry (interestingly, the same marketing agency that CPR uses to help them market to sponsors-- Market Enginuity) on how to work around and with FCC guidelines so you can sponsor things on public media.
They run back through the guidelines and then through how sponsoring public media is a good idea for business (which of course they would because they make money off it in some way).
The rules about public media taking advertising make sense. If public media is supposed to be noncommercial, if public media is supposed to be of the people, if they are to have credibility in their notion of being a public good, and if we fund them with tax dollars, they have no business running ads for private entities.
The distinction between an ad and what public media does is the dumbest of fictions, however. The idea that something only becomes an ad when you tell someone they should buy your product is one of those fig leaves they're using to make themselves feel better.
Check out screenshot 3 from link two below for the language they use to justify themselves to their sponsors.
No wordplay can remove this simple fact: these sponsorships, this underwriting, whatever fancy term you use for it, is meant to operate in exactly the same way as a regular ad. They have monetary value. If they didn't stations wouldn't push them, consultants couldn't live off them, and companies wouldn't give money for them.
For the same effect then, does a distinction in what is said enough to make them different?
Only by strict reading of the FCC rules, only by attending the letter of the law and not the intent, is this different.
https://www.npr.org/2025/01/30/nx-s1-5281162/fcc-npr-pbs-investigation
https://www.nationalpublicmedia.com/npr-sponsor-guidelines/
https://bento.cdn.pbs.org/hostedbento-prod/filer_public/PBS_About/Producing/Red%20Book/Underwriting%201.2011_1.pdf
https://cpr.marketenginuity.com/
When public media takes away business, there's less for others.
In the previous post, I talked about how public media sponsorships and underwriting are a workaround the FCC rules about "noncommercial" public media getting commercial dollars.
This post is a reminder that money is finite.
What I mean is that money spent on one thing, is money that cannot be spent on something else. You have this happen every time you go to the grocery or fill your car. Once you spend on that food or tank of gas, you have less money to spend traveling, buying socks, whatever.
Companies are no different. Money is finite for them too. When they lay out their marketing budget, they only have so much to spend and spending on one form of marketing means NOT spending on another.
So every dollar spent underwriting public media is one less dollar spent on commercial advertising.
If public media were not required to be noncommercial, if it didn't take public money, this would be fine. We have a free market economy and it's (sadly sometimes depending) survival of the fittest.
But that's not the case. Public media gets your tax money. Then they turn right around and compete in the market alongside commercial outlets trying to survive WITHOUT public money.
This is not just my own lament. Mandy Connell recently did a (justified) rant about this on her show. That's linked below, check at about the 1:37:30 mark.
I'll let her play us out.
https://koacolorado.iheart.com/featured/mandy-connell/content/2025-05-07-88-the-mandy-connell-podcast-05-07-25-full-show-weather-wednesday-and-color/
You didn't mind paying public media twice did you?
You likely already knew that you pay federal tax dollars to public media, did you know state money goes to them too?
Federal taxpayer dollars go to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to fund public media such as PBS (which then passes through to local PBS outlets) and NPR (going to local public radio), but it turns out that state money also goes to public media in Colorado.
The first, second, and third links below are to TOPS expense reports run for the three public media outlets in Colorado that I could find:** Rocky Mountain Public Media Inc (RMPBS) and Colorado Public Television Inc (Channel 12 is what it was at one point), and Community Radio for Northern Colorado (KUNC).
The first two spreadsheets go back to 2015, as early as the TOPS reports go. The third (for KUNC) goes back to 2020.
I'll leave it to you to look through them all (download if you want to edit and play around), but the vast bulk of the spending by our state is advertising/marketing and grants. I ran a sum on all . From 2015 to present we have spent $1.7 million on RMPBS and $60K on Colorado Public Television. From 2020 to present we've spent $27K on KUNC.
Focusing in on one of the outlets above, I reached out to the media spokesperson at the Colorado Auto Theft Prevention Authority (CAPTA) to ask for details about their ad buys on KUNC's 105.5 FM radio station, The Colorado Sound (I chose this one because a reader had told me about hearing a CAPTA commercial on that station exhorting listeners to "lock their cars").
CAPTA has been around a while and was originally funded by voluntary contributions by car insurance companies. It then transitioned to being funded by involuntary fees on every car insurance policy in Colorado. Recent bills from the state legislature have also given them grants out of the state's general fund.
The money gets used for efforts such as the commercial alluded to above, as well as purchasing tags you can put on your catalytic converter to prevent theft. If you'd like to see some of their grant programs you'll find them in the fourth link below.
Returning to CAPTA's ad buys on KUNC, I got the following quote from CAPTA's media spokesperson (quoting from my email):
"Now more specifically to your question, the partnership with 105.5 (Community Radio for Northern Colorado) is the only public media company we utilize. We have partnered with them in the last two years of our public outreach program, to the extent we utilize them for the on air radio advertisements, as well as digital media. The public outreach program has used both cash funds and general fund grant dollars in this sponsorship, at various times. Specific to how we use the I can tell you we place all of our radio advertisements on all of the KUNC and affiliated stations, covering all of Northern Colorado and also many difficult to reach mountain towns. The other advertising we utilize from Community Radio for Northern Colorado is newsletter advertising, website advertising, and the radio pre-roll/single spot messaging [your reader] likely heard. "
Something to remember when you start seeing public media talk about concerns over losing their Federal funding. They're not only getting money from the Feds, they get it from your state taxes and fees too.
**I was not able to find CPR news, so I reached out to them and was told that they "do not receive any monies from the state of Colorado". I am a bit dubious, and wonder if perhaps they are referring only to straight money transfers and not revenues from doing ads (see "Related" below and the CAPTA stuff above)
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IG2ERWyfDdA_UhKbGrAboBtmeveU7ZNY/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=105405937749106967542&rtpof=true&sd=true
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jA76EUtBWCdzOi2LpbHUq4nYFqBCHlIw/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=105405937749106967542&rtpof=true&sd=true
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QtcK-lnEW8qDZ6it5E7XUaR24ymFhtDC/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=105405937749106967542&rtpof=true&sd=true
https://lockdownyourcar.org/grants/
Related, but not timely:
I was going to include this in the body of the body of the post above, but getting the requests back in time to fold it into the writing didn't quite work out as I'd have liked.
Below are links to the CORA requests I submitted to see how much, when, etc. CAPTA was doing for ad buys at KUNC.
The first link is to a summary that gives an overview of spending AND source (note the different bills that provide the funding -- some are from the $1 fee on your car insurance policy, some is from the general fund).
The others are invoices from KUNC and show the dollar amounts per "unit" of advertising.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1R3qjOG5yWxWIhkYWAQIJ4m9Th-H4jtwz/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/16JY3hqksm1VDurEzj0F2IKmmv2reGb2V/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/12El9VLNoFlfKnrXoVSEBLcTyovHe5H5N/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IOj_QC3POowcmG2Va78OnyXDaYWohOcu/view?usp=sharing
NPR underwriters aren’t advertisers and 2+2=5 😂