24-hour emergency pledge drive raises $55,000 for PBS Kansas after federal cut | Opinion
The emergency pledge drive to help out PBS Kansas ended Thursday morning, and I’d like to take a moment to thank all of you — including many of my regular readers — for stepping up to help preserve public broadcasting in Wichita.
Moments after the telethon ended at 8 a.m., I called and spoke with PBS Kansas president and CEO Victor Hogstrom. He was clearly exhausted and his usually rich baritone announcer voice was faltering.
It’s understandable after he’d just spent 24 hours at the studio, explaining over and over on the air why Wichita needs public broadcasting, and the effect of losing a quarter of the station’s budget to a congressional recission bill spearheaded in Washington by President Donald Trump
Hogstrom told me the marathon pledge drive had raised more than $55,000. There were still some calls coming in, but I wasn’t about to ask him to stick around until the last pledge was counted. The man needed to get home and get some sleep.
“It’s been very heartwarming,” Hogstrom said. “I don’t think we’ve ever made over $55,000 in a single day before.”
It’s a start, but there’s still a long way to go to replace a loss of $1.2 million in funding, abruptly cancelled by a presidential fit of anti-PBS pique enthusiastically supported by Kansas Sens. Jerry Moran and Roger Marshall, and Wichita Rep. Ron Estes.
I was proud to join the pledge drive, along with local notables including Wichita Mayor Lily Wu, Kansas broadcast legend Larry Hatteberg, KAKE-TV journalist Pilar Pedraza and Father Tom Welk, a Catholic priest affiliated with Newman University and a cousin of the late Lawrence Welk, whose “Champagne Music” still entertains on KPTS.
I was on air myself for about a half hour between regular programs, around 8:30 p.m. on Wednesday.
Hogstrom and I talked about a lot of things.
I told him how on my way to the station, I stopped to work out at the YMCA nearby. The way I look at it, public broadcasting is like a YMCA for the mind, television that gives your brain a workout.
And we talked about journalistic bias — an unfair charge leveled against PBS that was exploited to justify the federal defunding of its stations across the nation.
I shared my view that fair and unbiased journalism is not what lies at some imaginary midpoint between a lie and the truth. And it’s not about being a conduit for competing political spin machines and writing he-said, she-said stories where nothing is ever gained or proved.
It’s about doing your research, gathering facts, talking to all sides and reporting what you find, without fear or favor. PBS News Hour is among the best in the business at that.
PBS wasn’t defunded because it’s propaganda, but because it’s not.
As I’ve covered this, some have commented that taxpayer money shouldn’t be used for television. That’s a deflection. The cost of PBS to federal taxpayers was about $1.60 a year per person — roughly three-quarters of a candy bar.
PBS is needed to fill a void that can’t be filled by commercial stations, where the goal is profit maximization through appealing to the lowest common denominator.
For example, The Learning Channel was started by NASA and the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. It was privatized, rebranded as TLC, and now shows “90-Day Fiance,” where foreigners are given a three-month visa to either marry an American or get out of the country.
After I was done on air Wednesday night, I stuck around for a couple of hours manning the phone bank.
A very nice woman who I’d never talked to before called in to add an extra $300 donation to her regular pledge.
When I got to the question on the form, “Do you want this donation to be in memory of, or in honor of someone,” she said “Yes. It’s in honor of you, and what you write in the paper.”
If you know me, you’ll know I’m not often speechless. But I was. In these days of relentless attacks on journalism and those of us who practice it, “Thank you” just didn’t seem to cover it.
But thank you. And thanks for supporting Public Television.
There’s still a lot of work yet to do to save it. But Wichita wasn’t built in a day.
This story was originally published July 31, 2025 at 1:34 PM.
