GBH is cutting about ten staff members from its WORLD Channel and shifting the channel’s programming focus in response to a funding cut made by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, GBH President and CEO Susan Goldberg announced in an email Friday.
As of July 1, Goldberg said WORLD “will move away from original documentaries, while continuing to offer a home for exclusive series like Stories from the Stage, Bloomberg’s Wall Street Week, North South East West, and A French Village, as well as five hours of daily international newscasts from the BBC, Deutsche Welle, France 24, and NHK Japan.”
“We are hopeful the stations that carry WORLD will continue to take it and use it as a home for the series mentioned above, other non-fiction content from other shows, and local news,” Goldberg added.
Goldberg stressed in her email that the format change and layoffs, which take effect June 30, are not a product of what she described as “the current federal funding fight.”
Recently, President Donald Trump signed an executive order requiring that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting stop funding PBS and NPR. The Trump Administration is also trying to claw back money already allocated to CPB over the next two years.
A spokesperson for GBH reiterated this to GBH News, saying CPB’s decision to stop funding the WORLD Channel preceded Trump’s executive order. CPB funding currently covers roughly half of WORLD’s cost, Goldberg and the spokesperson said.
A spokesperson for CPB said its decision to stop funding the WORLD Channel was made “[i]n consultation with GBH,” and reflected the fact that station fees and philanthropic contributions “were not sufficient to sustain the channel, as previously anticipated.”
The spokesperson added that CPB has a responsibility to make business decisions based on long-term sustainability.
A year ago, before Trump was elected to a second term, GBH laid off 31 staffers — 4% of its overall workforce — as it pushed to close a $7 million budget gap. Those layoffs included about 10% of the staff of GBH News, GBH’s local news division, which had approximately 100 employees at the time.
Zoe Mathews, a steward for the union that represents some of the WORLD workers who will be laid off, criticized the cuts and the station’s upcoming editorial shift in a statement to GBH News.
“The WORLD Channel is staffed by a team of award-winning documentarians who humanize complex issues through the work they do, often facilitating first-time filmmakers and storytellers from historically underrepresented communities,” Mathews said. “To eliminate these journalists in this moment, in the way GBH has moved to do, is a betrayal of the very mission of GBH.”
