Stephen Colbert used the final eight minutes of The Late Show Thursday night to to underscore the importance of public radio, interviewing NPR president and CEO Katherine Maher about the impact of federal funding cuts that could force dozens of local stations to shut down.
In July, Congress cut $1.1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which distributes money to NPR and PBS, as part of Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” The CPB is set to close in October, leaving a large swath of public radio stations in jeopardy.
“The current estimate on the radio side is somewhere between 70 to 80 [stations] will go out of business,” Maher told Colbert. NPR currenrly counts 246 member stations that reach 99.7% of the country.
Maher said the closures would worsen the existing decline of local news. “One in five Americans currently lives without access to local news in their community,” she said. “When you take away local public radio, you’re undercutting our ability to trust one another… and the very institution of democracy itself.”
While NPR is probably most closely associated with its national news programming like Morning Edition and All Things Considered, those programs currently receive only about 1% of their funding from the federal government.
Instead, as Colbert pointed out, it’s local, folksier kinds of shows that will be most impacted by the cuts—shows like South Carolina’s Walter Edgar’s Journal, Vermont Public Radio’s But Why?, and Backed Up, a Cincinnati show about plumbing. Maher pointed to “lost dog reports” in Utah and community classifieds in Alaska as other examples of stations connecting neighbors.
“So much of the people who cut this funding keep on calling for a return to old-fashioned values,” she said. “This is old-fashioned community connection.”
Colbert closed the segment by thanking Maher “for the work that you do to maintain the public airwaves.”
Watch Colbert’s full interview with Maher at the top of this post.
