A public television station in northern New York says it will not go dark in the wake of federal cutbacks.
The vote by Congress to pull funding from PBS and NPR is affecting all public broadcasters. Mountain Lake PBS serves the Champlain Valley, Adirondacks and part of Quebec. President and CEO Bill McColgan says the cut is about $950,000 or 35 percent of the station’s FY26 budget, which began on July 1st.
“We run a small efficient organization as it is. We have some difficult decisions ahead of us in terms of what exactly is going to be impacted and how we move forward.”
Mountain Lake PBS has pledged that it will not go dark, but McColgan expects other small public broadcasters will close.
“The reality is that there are small rural stations around the country, both TV and radio, who will go dark because of this decision, whose budgets are even more dependent on federal funding.”
The cuts to public broadcasting will affect about 1,500 local public radio and television stations.
