This article was originally published by Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative and is republished here with permission.

Last summer, Asia Burnett was staring into a financial abyss.

President Donald Trump was urging Congress to wipe out almost all federal funding of public broadcasting — some $1.1 billion in subsidies. As many Republicans had before him, Trump demonized PBS and NPR as biased against conservatives . But the “rescission,” or formal clawing back of funds appropriated by a previous Congress, would be a historic reversal: the first time Washington had withdrawn the financial support that had built and sustained the national network of educational and local programming for almost six decades.

For Burnett and WKMS , the public radio station she manages in southwestern Kentucky, the specter of defunding was an ominous prospect.…