Efforts to reduce — or as is now the case, eliminate — federal funding for public broadcasting are nothing new. However, current proposals to zero out the $425 million in federal support public broadcasting was expecting this year have public media outlets scrambling to rally listeners against the effort.

Michigan Radio, the public broadcasting station associated with the University of Michigan, and WEMU, Eastern Michigan University’s public radio station, are both doing as much as possible to make listeners aware of what the elimination of public funding could mean to them.

WEMU (89.1-FM) and WUOM (91.7-FM) are among stations nationwide participating in the grass-roots effort “170 Million Americans for Public Broadcasting,” designed to inform members of Congress that 170 million Americans use public media every month and persuade them that it's too valuable to be defunded.

The stations are urging listeners to visit the Web site www.170millionamericans.org, sign up, and contact their legislators to make their feelings known.

“It’s just something that we want the public to be aware of and know they can take action,” said WEMU General Manager Molly Motherwell. “We’re not telling them what to do; we’re an information organization. not an advocacy organization. But we do have to tell people what will happen if this funding goes away.”

At WEMU and WUOM, an end to federal support would likely lead to cuts in programming and staff.

“It’s 20 percent of our budget, but it’s a very significant 20 percent,” Motherwell said. “It pays for one full-time person ... and it pays for two-thirds of our network programming. If we were to lose that, probably what would happen is we would have to wipe out all of our locally produced music programs on the weekends and in the evenings, because the majority of our listening is between 5 a.m. and 7 p.m. weekdays. ... We would lose a lot of our unique flavor because of it. We probably would have to reduce our news staff.”

National programs, such as “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me!,” “All Things Considered” and “This American Life” would probably suffer as well.

Money already paid to stations for 2011 would also have to be returned if funding is eliminated, she added.

The circumstances are similar at Michigan Radio, which receives eight percent of its annual budget from the federal government via the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, an amount that’s equivalent to the station’s entire annual news budget.

Steve Schram, director of broadcasting at Michigan Radio, said that if all federal funding ended, Michigan Radio would first approach its listeners for increased financial support.

“We would need to communicate that to our audience and find out if they are in a position to fill that gap, and if we were successful there wouldn’t have to be any changes,” he said. “But if not, we would have to make some adjustments in our operation. We certainly would want to go last to our content and our product, but because a large part of that (funding) goes to our programming and news departments, that’s what we’d do.”

Annual federal funding amounts to $1.35 per American and is leveraged by local stations to raise six times that amount from other sources, including local fundraising drives, Schram added.

Although both agree that $425 million is a lot of money, that sum needs to be viewed in context with other government spending.

“Some of the statistics we’ve been getting out of this is the $425 million allocated to public broadcasting this year, radio and TV, is equal to 10 feet of an aircraft carrier, or less than a single day in Iraq. The AIG bailout alone would have funded public broadcasting for 155 years,” said Motherwell.

Although federal funding for public media has been targeted before, circumstances are different this time, she said.

“We were not in a major recession the last time (public media funding) came under fire,” she said. “We didn’t have this 24-hour news cycle. We didn’t have this huge activist contingent newly elected determined to cut spending no matter what. There’s a lot of factors we were not dealing with the last time.

"We did have an activist contingent elected in 1995 as well, but they weren't blogging, Facebooking, or tweeting non-stop back then. People had time to stop and think about issues and form their own conclusions," Motherwell added.

She said way the Juan Williams firing was handled last year (the NPR correspondent was let go after expressing unease about seeing Muslims on airplanes) gave the right an excuse to really go after public broadcasting. “I’m not sure it would have been as targeted without it,” Motherwell said.

According to Association for Public Television Stations, there are now six bills in Congress to either defund or reduce public broadcasting support. On Saturday, the House voted to eliminate all funding for the CPB, with backers saying it's a necessary cut to balance the federal budget and it reflects the will of the people.

“PBS may produce worthwhile content,” U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colo., said recently in a press release. “That is not the issue. The issue is that we cannot subsidize organizations that can stand on their own two feet in the day of trillion-dollar deficits.”

DeMint said his legislation to strip federal funds public media stems from its firing of Williams.

"Once again we find the only free speech liberals support is the speech with which they agree," Sen. James DeMint, R-S.C., said. "The incident with Mr. Williams shows that NPR is not concerned about providing the listening public with an honest debate of today's issues, but rather with promoting a one-sided liberal agenda."

The key to fighting funding elimination lies with listeners, said Motherwell.

“We’ve been told public broadcasting needs to have a strong showing of support in the House in order to ensure a decent outcome when it comes to negotiating with the Senate,” Motherwell said. “Right now, reaching members of the House is critical as they start to put their proposals through. In Washtenaw County we have one of the authors of the Public Broadcasting Act (John Dingell), so we know we have strong support here. But there are many areas that WEMU reaches that are not represented by Congressman Dingell and we are trying to reach out to our listeners in those areas and urge them to contact their representatives and let them know.”

Schram is pleased listeners are speaking up. “Michigan Radio was the top referring public radio station in the country (two weeks ago) in terms of people visiting (www.170millionamericans.org) and making a decision to make their voice heard — around 1,000,” he said.

“Elected representatives need to hear from the constituents and understand this is not something they are willing to budge on,” Motherwell added.

Roger LeLievre is a free-lance writer who covers music for AnnArbor.com.