NPR top editor Edith Chapin resigns days after public broadcasting funding cuts

Today, just days after President Trump and Congress clawed back funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — which provides financial support to PBS, NPR and local stations across the country, including GBH — NPR’s top editor, Edith Chapin, has announced she’s stepping down.

Chapin oversaw some of the most challenging moments in recent history, from the aftermath of the pandemic to the current culture war battles in the media, and against the media — especially NPR. 

NPR’s media correspondent, David Folkenflik, joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to help make sense of it all. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.

Arun Rath: I guess we should say: We’re both journalists talking about both of our respective employers, NPR and GBH, and none of this was approved or vetted by executives of our respective public broadcasting organizations.

Let’s start with the latest news. What more can you tell us about Edith Chapin’s resignation? Was this expected internally?

David Folkenflik: You know, I was actually surprised. I learned of it this morning. I got to talk to her a little bit before I filed my story for NPR’s website. She is our chief news executive, editor-in-chief, but has also been the acting chief of content since August of 2023. That oversees pretty much everything we create and produce, our news programs, our news reporting, our visual elements, our entertainment shows, our podcasts — “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” and “Tiny Desk” [Concerts] — it’s all underneath our chief content officer.

What she told me is... Look, she’s been at NPR as a senior news executive one way or another for 13 years. She was a senior executive in the newsroom at CNN prior to that, or a senior editor, anyway. She just said, “I’ve been doing two very intense jobs at the top levels of NPR for two years, and I need to step away to make sure I’m taking care of myself and that the network is best served.” She’s like, “It’s just been overwhelming.”

Now, she said to me that she had told [NPR CEO] Katherine Maher this close to two weeks ago, so before the vote in Congress was clear in how it was going to go on clawing back all federal dollars for the next couple of years for public broadcasting. So, she said it had nothing to do with that.

Clearly, this is part of the landscape of her decision. It’s not as though her job is going to get any easier once this vote has taken form. NPR is going to have to figure out what it does with less money, and particularly, the stations we work with.

She tried to make a hallmark of her time as a news executive, figuring out ways to really cultivate collaborations across newsrooms within the public media and public radio ecosphere so that we could raise the level of our reporting for the network, but also particularly for the stations themselves and help them do a lot of the reporting and journalism that provides a sense of the texture of life across America. They’re gonna be really challenged, even more than we are, in some ways.

I think whoever comes forward — and we can talk more about this — is going to have to confront that. She just felt that the network would be better served for her to have some time away.

Rath: Let’s talk about what it means. Here at GBH, we’re still very much absorbing what this funding loss will mean for us, because it’s complicated here, with all the television, radio, local and national programming. At NPR, is there a sense of what this will mean for the network?

Folkenflik: You know, on a typical year, NPR receives maybe up to 2% of its revenues from the federal government directly. It’s all funneled through this not-for-profit, privately incorporated entity called the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. We’ve all seen it at the end of PBS shows, for example. They stress that. You see the logo on the air. It’s the funnel for federal dollars.

The average station gets between 8% and 10% of its revenues from the government — that’s for radio — and 15% for the average PBS station. But those are not uniform across the nation. Some stations rely less on that, some stations rely a lot more on it. For those stations — rural stations, often, in particular, stations that serve Native American tribal audiences and certain kinds of other stations — they are going to be sorely tested indeed.

What our CEO, Katherine Maher, said in the last 24 to 48 hours, to Oliver Darcy of Status Newsletter and also to Texas Public Radio, is that as a first step, NPR is going to cut how much it charges those stations by $8 million. That’s really going to be targeted at stations that are under the most acute financial duress.

Remember, the money that was taken back is money starting on October 1st for the next two fiscal federal years, and the federal element of that has just been wiped out. So, starting October 1st, the question is: Are there stations that are going to have trouble meeting payroll? Are there stations that are going to have trouble keeping their antennas up and operating? What is going to happen to these stations?

NPR is saying that for those smaller universes of stations where things are really going to be in doubt much more quickly, we’re going to give some relief. It is my sense and my guess in talking to people that NPR is going to have to take a lot more steps and think a lot comprehensively about how to work with the stations to help lift and preserve the stations, how, maybe, to encourage some to collaborate more, maybe encourage some to combine and even gear for the fact that some might shut down.

That’s going to be NPR’s challenge and mandate, even as each of the individual stations are independently owned and are going to have to figure out for themselves what to do as well.

Rath: You know, we both work in this medium and we love it, obviously, but it would be unbalanced not to point out that there are a lot of people who don’t think that the government should be putting anything into public broadcasting. Where do you think that leaves that discussion for NPR in particular, now that government funding is not part of the debate anymore?

Folkenflik: Sure. Well, look, Katherine Maher also said on Friday in a Morning Edition interview with Michel Martin and Steve Inskeep that she didn’t consider this to be over. There’ve been certain allies of public radio in Congress who have made the same claim in public broadcasting more generally that there may be moments and opportunities to restore some of this money to public media, that it may not be gone forever, simply because this Republican-led Congress, on a partisan vote, took this decision and action at the behest of President Trump.

That said, bias has been a major component and an engine that really drove this bill, this effort, past the finish line. I think it’s something that NPR has been forced to confront periodically over the 20-plus years I’ve been there. Starting in 2005 — this came up with President George W. Bush’s chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Board, and that resulted in Tucker Carlson, I think, getting his own show on PBS.

There have been waves of these things ... and let’s be clear, the criticism of bias or of failings by NPR and public broadcasting, those accusations have not simply come from the right, but they’ve been strongest from the right, and perhaps most consistent from the right.

Over time, there was a sense from some of our audience and certainly some of the public who were not as dedicated to public broadcasting that said this was an overcorrection, and this doesn’t feel like it represents us fairly. I think we have to be able to listen and accommodate that criticism and make sure that we feel confident that what we’ve done in the past measures up, and that what we do going forward is fair.

You know, we put things out in the public. It’s fair for people to critique us, and it’s fair to have the public debate of: Should public broadcasting be funded altogether? I think there is a greater sense within public broadcasting — particularly NPR at times — that there’s been a caricature created, and then that caricature is presented as something that shouldn’t be funded. Then, there’s frustration over that as a different kind of debate.