KUT opened its inaugural news and music festival Friday night with talks on how political division and the end of federal funding are transforming public radio.
The discussions, focusing on the future of public media, were chosen weeks ago. But they took on unexpected relevance in light of recent tensions between festival organizer KUT Public Media, and the University of Texas at Austin, which holds the radio station's Federal Communications Commission broadcast license.
"Nothing tells you who your friends are like a crisis," General Manager Debbie Hiott said in opening remarks, alluding to last-minute changes the university made to the festival the week before that resulted in most panels being moved off campus.
"Times of crisis, whether it's the loss of federal funding or wholesale changes in a festival, they give us an opportunity to reinvent ourselves," she said later in the evening.
What that reinvention looks like in public radio reporting was the question put to a panel made up of veteran journalists: Leila Fadel, Domenico Montanaro and Maria Hinojosa.
The group described the scapegoating of journalists by President Trump, distrust of the media and increasingly violent political rhetoric as growing challenges in journalism.
"Reporting now is nothing like what it was, like when I started," said Hinojosa, anchor of Latino USA and founder of Futuro Media group. "The relationship between this administration and journalists is not normal. I can use the word 'authoritarianism' in my reporting."
Fadel said attempts to discredit journalists and cut public media funding reminded her of similar crackdowns in Hungary, a country from which she has reported.
Fadel worried that American news consumers increasingly don't know what to make of journalism that does not carry explicitly partisan content.
"Sometimes when people listen [to NPR's coverage] they're coming in with their mind made up," said Fadel, a host of NPR's Morning Edition. "They hear whatever doesn't work for their algorithm as bias versus part of a fuller conversation."
Part of the solution, the panelists agreed, was reporting that focuses on people's shared humanity and finding new platforms to share their journalism.
"I think it's really difficult to examine deeply with humanity, with understanding, without judgment, without condescension, to figure out what is at the root of this divide," said Montenaro, NPR's senior political correspondent.
The 'long wave' of funding cuts
A conversation between Hiott and NPR's CEO Katherine Maher at a private dinner later in the evening focused on the financial challenges facing local stations and NPR after the Trump administration defunded the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
"We are seeing this as a slow moving wave across the landscape," Maher said. "The funds were distributed for 2026 [...] but after that we don't know what is going to happen."
Hiott and Maher agreed the funding cuts have made public media ever more dependent on support from donors.
They also argued that closer collaboration between NPR and local outlets could strengthen the entire public media ecosystem.
Maher said some of the $113 million in donations NPR recently received will be used to improve that collaboration "on storytelling, on editorial planning, on reportage for big national stories."
"But nothing makes up for the loss of a half billion dollars a year in federal funding," she said.
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