PBS superstation WETA and its subsidiary News Hour Productions are ending broadcasts of PBS News Weekend in early January. The "public" broadcasting news site Current reported the cancellation is "part of a restructuring prompted by the rescission of federal funding for public media."
Weekend anchor John Yang will be folded into the weeknight News Hour staff. That's one less openly gay anchor on broadcast TV, promoting strange terms like "transgender men with a cervix."
The last airdate of PBS News Weekend will be January 11. “The weekend show has really done well for us, and I know people really like it, and stations rely on it,” WETA spokesperson Mary Stewart said. “And a lot of news happens over the weekend. This is solely driven by the federal funding cuts.”
The cuts do not affect the flagship PBS News Hour or Washington Week with The Atlantic -- which has predictable financial backing from The Atlantic owner Laurene Powell Jobs, the billionaire pal of Kamala Harris.
There's not a lot of "breaking news" on PBS Weekend News. It looks more like a magazine show, with features that are not time-sensitive. Here's the lineup for last Sunday, concluding with a piece on "How the loss of USAID funding affects Indonesia's ability to fight climate change."
This has also included inflammatory weekend segments like the eight-minute promotion for a film on George Orwell that linked the Republicans to totalitarianism. Maybe that was a final middle-finger salute to the defunders.
The rescission of funds from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting forced the trim, according to WETA CEO Sharon Percy Rockefeller, the wife of former Democrat Senator Jay Rockefeller:
Rockefeller told staff in September that the loss of WETA’s CPB Community Service Grant created a $6.7 million budget shortfall for FY26 and a projected $9 million shortfall for FY27.
WETA received about $17.5 million in federal funding in FY24, according to CPB’s website. The amount represented nearly 12% of WETA’s $140 million in revenues for that year, according to an annual financial report.
Most of the FY24 funding supported WETA’s television operations and programming, including an $8.6 million CSG and $8.1 million in grants for television programs. The balance went to WETA’s classical radio stations and unspecified system support.
Nevertheless, WETA will try to produce some half-hour weekend shows to replace the canceled show -- one on international affairs, and one on health and science. Apparently, removing the remote possibility of "breaking news" saves money?
Stewart added that Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication decided not to renew its contract for the News Hour West bureau based in Phoenix. That will close and will make its last contributions to News Hour programming on December 19.
