Tolkkinen: Rural radio stations are reeling from federal funding cuts

CLITHERALL, MINN. – It’s the nine o’clock hour and on Niijii Radio, host Terry Goodsky is ready as ever to roast the cheese eaters east of Minnesota.

What do you call 10 Packers fans lined up ear to ear?

A wind tunnel!

What’s a Packers fan’s favorite wine?

“We can’t beat Minnesota!”

Known for his bad jokes, good music and Marilyn Monroe-inspired birthday warbles, Goodsky has become a fixture on the public radio station that broadcasts daily from the KKWE radio station on the White Earth Reservation in northwestern Minnesota.

For some 10 years, he’s been on the air. His main goal is to make people laugh, but never in a mean way, and to keep the Ojibwe language alive by sprinkling his shows with Native words. In a radio ecosystem of canned commercial patter and fire-breathing political talk shows, he remains part of the dwindling crowd of DJs who live where they broadcast, who are gloriously human and unpolished, who know personally the people who call in, and who are kind and funny and care about their communities.

Goodsky might not be there because his radio station gets 40% of its funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which the Republican-dominated Congress cut funding for and which, as I check the news, President Donald Trump just signed into law.

Public television and many metro public radio stations are expected to survive. Minnesota Public Radio, for instance, gets only 10% of its funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. That’s still a sizable loss, and MPR’s parent company just announced layoffs, but urban stations have much more access to funds than do rural radio stations across the nation, like Niijii.

Yet it’s the rural Republicans in Congress from Minnesota who voted to claw back $9 billion for public broadcasting and foreign aid. It’s Reps. Tom Emmer, Brad Finstad, Michelle Fischbach and Pete Stauber who don’t care whether people in their districts have access to publicly funded radio that broadcasts out of their own communities.

Republicans are trying to go after the “woke” leaders of public broadcasting, but ironically, the stations taking the brunt of their cuts are the ones in their own districts that are most likely to reflect rural values but, unfortunately, have the thinnest pocketbooks.

Niijii, for instance, operates out of one of the poorest pockets of Minnesota. At every turn, they ask for donations but the reality is that they operate in an area with scant resources. Listeners should not have to skip a car payment to keep Niijii on the air.

They will likely have to cut their already small staff of four in half.

“It’s going to take away locally produced programming,” Rousu said.

After Congress clawed back the $9 billion, South Dakota Sen. Mike Rounds announced that he had persuaded Trump to shift $9.4 million in unspent climate change funding to tribal radio stations in 11 states.

That’s like taking food from a baby and then using the rent money to buy more food. Um, thanks, Senator?

Rousu hasn’t heard whether Niijii will get any of that money, and she is skeptical about the legality of the move.

But the Republicans passed a budget that increases the deficit by several trillions over the next decade.

Congress and Trump gave ICE $75 billion in extra funding to round up not just convicted criminals here illegally, but people never convicted of any crime. Why not give them $66 billion and allow the other $9 billion to stay with public broadcasting and foreign aid? Better yet, why not give ICE only $5 billion? They could focus on the bad guys while Congress reforms our immigration system to keep the good guys here. We could put the difference toward our debt. Or, hey, tax billionaires. Undoing the Trump tax cuts would save the budget.

Instead, Congress and Trump are crushing something good while inflicting pain on vulnerable people. Trump in particular appears to be moving to stamp out independent journalism.

Let’s not end on a bleak note.

I started with Terry Goodsky and I’ll end with him. Goodsky doesn’t talk politics on his show. He likes to keep things light and easy. At the end of every show, the former wrestling champion, powwow drummer and drumming teacher closes this way:

If he loses his job, he says, that’s what he hopes people remember about him.

No matter what happens, no matter how hard life gets, he will always be their champion.