Texas floods, emergency alerts and the importance of Idaho public media | Opinion

Shame on the cowardly U.S. Reps. Mike Simpson and Russ Fulcher, R-Idaho, for voting for President Donald Trump’s rescission package, which includes cuts to public television and radio as well as foreign aid — money that Congress had previously approved.

Cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds public media outlets, including Boise State Public Radio and Idaho Public Television, will most hurt residents in rural parts of Idaho, whom Simpson and Fulcher are supposed to represent.

The rescission package now heads to the Senate for approval, with a deadline of July 18.

We urge U.S. Sens. Mike Crapo and Jim Risch, R-Idaho, to do the right thing and vote against this harmful package of cuts that will hurt untold thousands of their constituents back home in Idaho.

Funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting accounts for about 20% of Boise State Public Radio’s annual budget, and it accounts for $2 million, or 17%, of Idaho Public Television’s budget.

In other words, Simpson and Fulcher voted to cut Boise State Public Radio and Idaho Public Television’s budgets by 20% and 17%, respectively.

Public radio and television certainly have value in their programming. We all know about “Sesame Street,” along with cultural and arts programming, as well as national and local news coverage.

But our plea today to Risch and Crapo has to do with another crucial role that public media plays, especially in Idaho: its emergency alert system.

One need not look very far to understand the importance of alerting the public to potential disaster. Just last week, at least 120 people, many of them children, were killed in a flash flood in Texas. County officials there balked at spending $1 million for an emergency alert system, including sirens that would have awakened sleeping campers who were overtaken by a 27-foot wall of water that swept over them in the early morning hours.

In Idaho, we don’t have a history of such floods, but we do have a similar natural disaster that often requires timely notice of weather conditions and the need to evacuate: wildfires.

Public media often is the sole and primary source of emergency alert information for people.

U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Washington, gets it. Her state is also vulnerable to wildfires.

“Public television and radio aren’t just for quality children’s television and unique radio content,” Cantwell said in a press release. “For millions of Americans, these stations are often their only source of emergency information during weather disasters.

“Last month, House Republicans approved President Trump’s rescission request clawing back $1.1 billion in Congressionally-approved funding for public broadcasting. ... If Senate Republicans allow this devastating cut to pass the Senate, nearly 13 million Americans could be left without access to their public media stations and the life-saving emergency alerts or information they need. As people prepare for potential hurricanes, wildfires and other extreme weather events, we should not be gutting our support for public media.”

Libertarians will wail: “Let the free market handle it!”

Please. Do Republicans seriously think a private, for-profit radio station or TV station is going to set up and maintain a transmitter in remote areas of the state that have relatively few listeners?

Public media reaches nearly 99% of the United States, including in remote, hard-to-reach areas that may have limited or no Internet coverage.

When power goes out, public radio can still reach these remote listeners over the air on battery-powered or car radios.

But what do you think will happen if their budgets are cut 17-20%?

Those hard-to-reach remote areas likely would be the first to lose service.

“I think ultimately it would probably reduce support in rural areas,” Boise State Public Radio general manager Tom Michael said in May.

If Idaho lawmakers vote to kill this funding, it raises the legitimate question: “What constituents are they representing?”

Certainly not rural Idahoans, who number in the hundreds of thousands.

This story was originally published July 11, 2025 at 4:00 AM.