For more than 50 years, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) has contributed to PBS being a home for independent documentaries. CPB responded in an email to NPR that during the fiscal year 2024, it gave more than $24 million to documentary filmmakers. Following the government’s July decision to revoke CPB’s full $1.1 billion budget, which led to the network’s collapse, PBS said last week that it would be cutting its budget by 21%. This comes after significant grant cancellations earlier this year at the Arts and the National Endowments for the Humanities, two significant federal funding sources for documentarians.
The documentary community stated that it is not given up in spite of these setbacks. “Unable to stop. “Won’t stop,” declared filmmaker Carol Bash, whose public media-supported 2015 documentary, Mary Lou Williams: The Lady Who Swings the Band, about jazz artist Mary Lou Williams. “We’re going to continue to find ways to think outside the box to get our films out there to audiences.”
According to Bash, her group is currently attempting to determine ways to compensate for the lack of money. “There’s going more international with your funding models,” she stated. “And of course, there’s the streamers.”
Leaning into streaming
A major force in public broadcasting, GBH creates well-known PBS shows like Frontline, Nova, and American Experience.In an effort to revitalize the cherished, almost 40-year-old history series, GBH will halt production on new American Experience episodes starting in the upcoming year, according to President and CEO Susan Goldberg. (The majority of the show’s production team was also let go.)A significant component of GBH’s strategy is digital platforms. “How do we use digital channels to gather younger audiences into being really excited about American history?” Goldberg told NPR.
According to Goldberg, GBH already collaborates with Amazon and hopes to increase its connections with streaming services like Netflix and broaden its product line on websites like YouTube.
According to Angela Courtin, vice president of sports and entertainment marketing at YouTube, “I’m personally very invested in ensuring that storytelling through documentaries continues to find an audience.” Although it doesn’t yet pay for material, Courtin said the platform offers analytics and other tools to assist producers of all stripes in determining how to increase their reach. (Well-known creators can make money with tools like brand deals and YouTube’s Partner Program.)
Sometimes, the streaming service Tubi produces or co-produces documentaries. One such project is When Black Women Go Missing, which was co-produced with Vice in 2024 and explores the disproportionately high rate of missing Black women. Additionally, it occasionally purchases streaming rights, as it did for the 2023 movie Satan Wants You, which was about demonic cults.
“It has been on the one level, a hit driven business,” Tubi’s chief content officer Adam Lewinson stated. According to Lewinson, Tubi is designed to support niche films by independent filmmakers that draw devoted fan bases in addition to documentaries that are expected to be popular with large audiences. Although it doesn’t typically provide funding for this activity, Tubi mostly hosts films in this latter category on its website, assisting them in finding viewers. Saying, ‘Are you wanting to return your investment, or do you want your story to be viewed by as many people as possible?’ is crucial for many documentarians. It’s always both. However, they will eventually tend to say, “We just want our content to be seen.”
The challenges of the open marketplace
According to insiders in the indie documentary industry, most indie films struggle to make an impression in the profit-driven streaming market as they aren’t always intended for large audiences. Carrie Lozano, president and CEO of ITVS, one of the largest co-producers of independent documentaries in the US, stated that “independent documentary has, by and large, always been a non-profit enterprise.” Among its works are the 2017 Peabody Award-winning Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise and the 2004 Oscar-nominated film The Weather Underground.
CPB provided 86% of the funding for ITVS. Over the last five years, Lozano’s non-profit has made direct investments in documentaries totaling over $44 million. In June, about 20% of ITVS’s workforce was laid off due to the challenging financing environment. Lozano anticipates that perhaps 10 films will not receive funding this year, which is a significant decrease from the 40 or so feature and short documentaries the group usually supports each year.
For many people, particularly those who reside in tiny, rural towns, streaming also presents challenges related to basic Internet connectivity. Jessica Edwards, a filmmaker whose documentaries include the 2015 feature Mavis Staples, said, “What about audiences who aren’t connected to fast broadband, or live in Internet deserts?” “A lot of people rely on free, over-the-air TV for a variety of storytelling in addition to news and weather. What takes its place? More paywalls? It is both an artistic and an equity issue.
However, there is no justification for these films to receive preferential treatment in the form of federal funding, according to individuals like Mike Gonzalez, who have battled for decades to block the flow of federal funds into public media.
Gonzalez, a senior scholar at the Heritage Foundation think tank, told NPR that PBS and NPR should lose federal funding because of “the very biased programming,” a claim that both networks’ executives deny. Gonzalez stated that he supports a variety of media narratives. Gonzalez stated, “I don’t want to suppress views that are opposite to my own in the least,” adding that, like everything else in the content realm, independent documentaries are fighting for viewers. “I fully expect that indie docs will not survive contact with the enemy once you have to compete in a commercial market,” Gonzalez stated. “But let the competition begin.”
PBS did not reply, and CPB turned down NPR’s request for comment.
Looking elsewhere
Some documentarians are trying to get more money from conventional sources like businesses, foundations, and private individuals in light of the current state of the market.
Leslie Fields-Cruz, executive director of Black Public Media, stated, “Perhaps this is the chance to establish a much bigger fund exclusively for Black stories that is not constrained by the whims of the political movement at the time.” The non-profit promotes Black-themed films from independent filmmakers, including the Emmy-winning 2021 film When Claude Got Shot and the Oscar-nominated 2016 feature I Am Not Your Negro. Fields-Cruz told NPR that the federal cuts eliminated nearly half of her non-profit’s budget. “We’re here in what I’m calling the worst case scenario,” she stated.
Some organizations, including the International Documentary Association (IDA), are attempting to recover a portion of the federal monies that were lost in the meantime. The IDA’s executive director, Dominic Willsdon, stated, “IDA is attempting to pursue more strategic litigation to see how we can get the support to challenge some of the actions that have been taken at the federal level.”
Mourning the loss
All of this new strategy is based on a profound sense of loss.
Robb Moss, a documentary filmmaker and professor in the art, film, and visual studies department at Harvard University, stated that “removing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting from the media landscape means the world becomes much more impoverished and the stories that get told will be much more anodyne.”
“The loss of federal support for documentaries is a major blow to free speech,” said Oscar-winning filmmaker Errol Morris. “Worrisome to anybody who values an independent media, who values the First Amendment, who values freedom of expression,” the filmmaker of Fog of War and The Thin Blue Line stated. “Finding the truth is not a political matter. It’s a moral requirement that is currently being questioned on a daily basis.
Additionally, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has provided funds to NPR. This article was not edited by an NPR executive.
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