GPB Lobbies Lawmakers for State Funding, Avoids Mention of Federal Rescission

“GPB Day at the Capitol” culminated in CEO Bert Wesley Huffman’s first appearance on Lawmakers.

Screenshot of GPB video showing Daniel Tiger and GPB advocates lobbying at the State Capital.

Last week, Georgia Public Broadcasting lobbied for itself at the state capital complete with an interview with President and CEO Bert Wesley Huffman on its flagship Lawmakers show.

[embed]

2025’s federal rescission battles and the Republican-led elimination of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting went unmentioned, at least on air. So did the 2023 cut to GPB’s state funding that came late in that year’s session. Both cast shadows over this legislative season as primary elections approach, and many legislators are running for statewide office.

Host Donna Lowry’s interview with Huffman pitched GPB as a kind of state utility, emphasizing that taxpayer funds support its infrastructure, education programs like digital textbooks used in state classrooms, and its public safety role in the state’s emergency management system. Programming, such as Lawmakers and High School Football, which the lawmakers love, and the PBS/NPR content often criticized by Republicans are funded by private donations.

Citing the mantra this pro-business state has emphasized for decades, Huffman called it a true “public-private partnership.”

The erasure of last year’s federal defunding was glaring if strategic on GPB’s part. Georgia is, currently, a Republican-run state and the gutting of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was entirely partisan. Led by Marjorie Taylor Greene, every Georgia Republican member of Congress voted for rescission while every Democrat voted against.

Yet GPB’s strategy in Georgia is an almost perfect local echo of the arguments that dominated the 2025 debate. By rebranding as a “community engagement engine” focused on “infrastructure” and “education,” GPB is using the same defensive playbook that national advocates used to try to save the CPB. The Republican response at the federal level was to acknowledge those roles but to no longer view public media as the exclusive or most efficient way to provide them.

While national leaders like NPR’s Katherine Maher called the federal cuts “cruel” and an “irreversible loss,” GPB has taken a notably different path to appease state lawmakers.

GPB held off participating in the national Protect My Public Media campaign until after last year’s state legislative session and suspended participation during a May recess when the threat had seemed to pass. When Congress returned, it took up and passed the rescission bill that July. “Protect My Public Media” continued with efforts to restore federal funding but at its post-rescission board meeting that October Huffman said GPB would not participate.

“We really made a decision as a company that we had done our part in advocating for those [federal] dollars. It was time for us now to turn to our donors and start moving away from advocacy mode and into heavy fundraising mode. So just reminding people that if you love this service, you depend on it, it’s on you to keep it up. … But I would say to you from a bragging standpoint, that’s not what a lot of public media companies are doing right now.”

Several red states have pushed further cuts to public media but there are risks to Georgia Republicans in doing so. President Trump is unpopular as are many of his blanket federal cuts. GPB has been under Republican control since the early 2000s and in that time has leased space to Fox News at its headquarters, hired the state’s Senate Majority leader for a $150,000 a year job at the urging of then Gov. Nathan Deal, and hijacked student-funded college radio icon WRAS to create a second NPR news station in Atlanta in direct competition with WABE. (Intriguingly, Huffman notes in the interview that WRAS is the “only separate radio station” in the GPB network while all 21 others simulcast together.)

I’ve long argued Georgia Democrats have been too dependent on legacy media, like the AJC, broadcast stations, and public radio, for their own partisan good while Republicans have built up an extensive conservative media ecosystem. I’d now argue Georgia’s Republican establishment needs Lawmakers and the GOP-friendly legacy media, like WSB radio, more as counterweights to conspiratorial MAGA media outlets like Steve Bannon (no relation!), X influencers and citizen journalists turning the James O’Keefe model against RINOs, or Republicans viewed as insufficiently conservative or pro-Trump.

I’m a Progressive citizen journalist myself with all the limitations that suggests. Yet the coziness between Atlanta’s political class and its legacy media outlets keep me going. As seen in the interview, GPB’s coverage of itself isn’t objective and its coverage of state lawmakers is rarely adversarial. Moreover, Atlanta media’s coverage of Atlanta media is too often self-serving or selective with little accountability reporting on corporate ownership, conflicts of interest, and the access relationships between political reporting and its sources.

Both WABE and GPB enjoyed a surge of donations following rescission, but while college radio and arts programming get cut, the same political insiders keep getting on public radio.

Each legislative session features two rounds of budget negotiations and hearings, first for an amended budget to the current fiscal year, then for the budget covering the next fiscal year beginning July 1st. GPB sailed through the first round with little changes to Gov. Kemp’s initial proposal and no one from GPB testifying before Appropriations Committees.

Tellingly, the video montage of GPB Day at the capital included a glimpse of Bert Wesley Huffman chatting with Senate Appropriations Chair Blake Tillery. Both are smiling.

Screenshot of GPB video showing CEO Bert Wesley Huffman and Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Blake Tillery.

Tillery is now a candidate for Lieutenant Gov. When asked via email after announcing his candidacy about funding for public media after the federal rescission Tillery told me:

“My beliefs are there’s nothing inherently wrong with public broadcasting, but in the ranking of priorities, when funds are finite, public safety, infrastructure, healthcare and education come first.

“If broadcasting is done with public dollars it MUST be politically neutral and fact specific only. There’s no room for editorialism with taxpayer dollars. If that can’t be achieved, then we can’t have public broadcasting. For NPR specifically, I believe NPR has always had a liberal tilt, but when it embraced left-wing identity politics, and became a voice of the resistance over the last 10 years, it undermined its argument as a service to all taxpayers.

“News is being provided by non-public sources and those stations are able to turn a profit doing so, so I’m not convinced a lack of public broadcasting ends local news. In fact, if I were a private company, I’d be upset that my tax dollars were competing against me.

“GPB’s role as the emergency radio maintainer for our state is different than its role as broadcaster and I do believe we have a public safety mission to keep citizens informed during storms, disasters, emergencies.”

GPB board member Steven Lawson is now a semi-regular part of the Cox and Friends AJC politics universe, penning an Op-Ed in its Feb. 2nd e-edition, just ahead of a major layoff announcement by the paper, and guesting on its Politically Georgia podcast to horse race about billionaire Rick Jackson’s entry into the Gov.’s race. That’s the same podcast the AJC pulled from WABE’s airwaves a year ago, just ahead of the rescission battle.

For its part, WABE’s resident “Republican strategist” Brian Robinson has signed on to Jackson’s campaign as spokesman.

Maybe public media isn’t really political insiders’ priority.