WVIK, 90.3 FM, has become a mainstay on the Quad Cities’ air waves.
“We launched in 1980,” said Jared Johnson, WVIK’s general manager.
Last week, though, WVIK’s future seemed a bit uncertain.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order to stop federal funding to both NPR and PBS. In the executive statement, the president said neither entity presents a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events.
WVIK is an Illinois NPR member station.
“We knew something was coming,” Johnson said. “They had the hearings about PBS and NPR a couple months ago.”
A small portion of WVIK’s budget comes from federal funding.
“In this most recent year about 13 percent of our funding came from CPB, the corporation for public broadcasting,” Johnson said. “Local coverage is the most trusted coverage anywhere in the us. We’ve got a news director and news editor that vet everything we do here locally. There’s nothing more important than local journalism for a community like ours, and we need to do everything we can to strengthen it and not to weaken it.”
WVIK’s remaining funding comes from local sources.
Johnson doesn’t expect the executive order to have immediate effects on WVIK’s staffing or programming.
“If the executive order were to actually take effect, we would just not be allowed to spend that money on NPR,” Johnson said. “We would of course have all of the funds that we collect from local listeners, and other local sources, that we could spend on NPR, and we would just be able to use the CPB funds in other ways.”
Illinois senator Dick Durbin criticizes the executive order.
“Democracy cannot survive in silence,” Durbin said. “We must continue to allow NPR and PBS to provide essential news, information and life-saving services to the American public.”