Congress is moving toward revoking a billion dollars in already approved funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the entity that steers funds to public media stations. William Brangham discussed the potential impact on PBS with one of the network’s most acclaimed filmmakers, Ken Burns. His documentaries covered subjects like the Civil War, baseball, Vietnam, country music and more.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: As we have heard, the House is moving to revoke a billion dollar in already approved funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the entity that steers taxpayer funds to PBS, NPR and public media stations. To talk about the potential impact on PBS, we turn to one of this network’s most acclaimed and most watched filmmakers and directors, Ken Burns. The Ken Burns collection on PBS includes more than 40 documentaries on a wide range of subjects, including the Civil War, baseball, Vietnam and country music. His new documentary series, “The American Revolution,” is scheduled to premiere on PBS in November. Ken Burns, so good to have you on the program. The federal government, as you well know, has for over five decades supported, through CPB, public media. That very much looks likely to end starting tomorrow. As someone whose work is so central to this network, how is this news sitting with you? KEN BURNS, DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKER: Well, not very well. I think we’re all in a bit of a state of a shock and also sort of reeling at the shortsightedness of it all. This is such an American institution trusted by people across political divides, geographic divides, age groups. And what’s so shortsighted about it, I think, is that this affects mostly rural communities or the hardest-hit. My own films probably get somewhere around 20 percent of any given budget from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. That’s a significant hit. We will scramble. We will have to make it up. I’m confident that, with the extra work, it will happen. But it’s those projects at the national level that might get 50 or 60, maybe even 75 percent of their funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, they just won’t be able to be made. And so there will be less representation by all the different kinds of filmmakers. People coming up will have an impossible time getting started. I think the first film that I made and was broadcast by PBS in the early ’80s called “Brooklyn Bridge,” had money from CPB and from various CPB programs. And so there’s a kind of pall that we feel. My biggest thing is, I travel around the system all the time. And I meet in big markets and small markets. And you begin to see the way in which, particularly in those small rural markets, the PBS station is really like the public library. It’s one of those important institutions. It may be the only place where people have access to local news, that the local station is going to the city council meeting. They’re going to the school board meeting. They’re going to the zoning board. There’s a kind of sense of local accountability. And as news becomes nationalized and even internationalized, there’s a loss there. It’s not just – they’re not just losing the prime-time schedule. They’re losing also contacts with emergency alert systems and Homeland Security and continuing education and classroom on the air, along with our – with children’s programming and prime time. So there’s a sense that this is an incredibly shortsighted move to do this. BRANGHAM: There are so many unknowns about how this will play out. I mean, the leaders of PBS and NPR and the “News Hour” have said, we are not going away. We will keep doing our work. BURNS: Right. That’s correct. BRANGHAM: But given that given that there are so many institutions getting cuts, public education, public health, medical research, do you think that PBS writ large, public media writ large will be able to fill this funding gap given there are so many other outstretched hands? BURNS: Well, that’s a really wonderful question. I think the answer has to be yes. We’re not giving up. One of my films that you mentioned is “Baseball.” And Yogi Berra said it ain’t over until it’s over. And I do not think it’s over. And I think we’re going to keep trying to make our case. And I think the absence of us will be particularly pronounced. And I think people across the aisle – this is not a political thing. This is the most American of institutions. People across the aisle will be suddenly realizing, oh, I think we’re going to be out of this and find ways to appropriate. I have been working for the last decade on a film about the American Revolution. And one of the things, of course, at the heart of it is all of those great ideas, particularly the second sentence of the Declaration, which ends with, for most Americans, a kind of inscrutable phrase, the pursuit of happiness. The key word in that is not happiness, I think, but pursuit. And I think a lot of people have understood happiness to mean the acquisition of things in a marketplace of objects. But what the founders actually meant was lifelong learning in a marketplace of ideas, that in order to be this new thing that had not existed in the world, which is what makes the revolution such an important moment, we were creating citizens, not subjects. And it was the opinion of all of the founders that these citizens had to be educated, that education had to be part of it, and it had to be continuing education. Otherwise, you couldn’t be virtuous. But I think we’re all kind of committed to redoubling our efforts and making our case for restoring funding in some way, shape, or form, perhaps in appropriations as we approach the new budget in whatever. It just seems like there’s no need – there was no need to have to reinvent the wheel that I think we’re now being forced to do. BRANGHAM: As you well know, Republican administrations going back decades have been trying to cut public media funding, alleging that there is a inherent liberal bias. How do you push back on that allegation? BURNS: Well, I push back everywhere. William F. Buckley, a noted conservative finger, had a program on PBS called “Firing Line” for 32 years. That program is still going on, is still moderated by a conservative. And so I think somehow we have to separate what becomes the ideological football of the moment, this idea – and it’s a legitimate argument that the government shouldn’t be in any way involved in this. So – though every government on earth is, of course, involved in some ways. And then the fact that it is so woven into the fabric of our American community as such a patriotic thing, the brand itself of PBS is the most trusted in the country, that I think we’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater here. And I think we have got an obligation to the people who depend on us to make sure that we can come back as vibrantly as I know we will. We will continue to do it. We will still have those programmings. But I’m still worried about that small town in Nebraska or South Dakota or Alaska that is suddenly really in the greatest existential crisis they have ever had. And their citizens will be bereft of the services that the public broadcasting service, not system, offers them. BRANGHAM: Ken Burns, always great to talk to you. Thank you so much. BURNS: Thank you.

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