The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) has helped make PBS a home for independent documentaries for more than 50 years. In an email to NPR, CPB said it provided over $24 million to documentary filmmaking during the 2024 financial year. The government's decision to rescind CPB's entire $1.1 billion budget in July, subsequently causing it to announce its closure, led last week to PBS's announcement that it would be reducing its budget by 21%. This on top of sweeping grant cancellations earlier this year at both the National Endowments for the Humanities and the Arts, which both served as important sources of federal funding for documentarians.
Despite these losses, the documentary community said it is not giving up. "Can't stop. Won't stop," said filmmaker Carol Bash, whose 2015 documentary about jazz musician Mary Lou Williams, Mary Lou Williams: The Lady Who Swings the Band, was made with public media support. " We're going to continue to find ways to think outside the box to get our films out there to audiences."
Bash said her community is now trying to figure out how to make up for the funding shortfall. "There's going more international with your funding models," she said. "And of course, there's the streamers."
Leaning into streaming
GBH is a public media powerhouse that produces such high-profile PBS series as Frontline, Nova and American Experience. President and CEO Susan Goldberg said GBH will pause production on new American Experience episodes next year, with the aim of reinventing the beloved, nearly 40-year-old history series. (It also laid off most of the team that produces the show.) Digital platforms are an important part of GBH's plan. "How do we use digital channels to gather younger audiences into being really excited about American history?" Goldberg told NPR.
Goldberg said GBH already works with Amazon and aims to develop more relationships with streamers like Netflix, as well as expand its offerings on platforms such as YouTube.
"I'm personally very invested in ensuring that storytelling through documentaries continues to find an audience," said Angela Courtin, YouTube's vice president of sports and entertainment marketing. Courtin said the platform provides analytics and other resources to help creators of all kinds figure out how to expand their reach, though it doesn't currently pay for content. (Popular creators can earn revenue through such mechanisms as YouTube's Partner Program and brand deals.)
Streaming platform Tubi does occasionally produce or co-produce documentaries, such as When Black Women Go Missing, a 2024 co-production with Vice about the disproportionately high number of Black, female missing persons. It also sometimes acquires streaming rights, as it did in 2023 for Satan Wants You, a film about satanic cults.
"It has been on the one level, a hit driven business," said Adam Lewinson, Tubi's chief content officer. Lewinson said Tubi is set up to accommodate not just documentaries likely to appeal to big audiences, but also niche titles by indie filmmakers that attract deep fandoms. Tubi mostly hosts movies in this latter category on its site – thereby helping films find audiences – but isn't generally financing this work. "For many documentarians, if you say, 'Are you looking to recoup your investment, or do you want your story to be seen by as many people as possible?' The answer is always both. But ultimately they'll lean toward, 'We just want our content to be seen.'"
The challenges of the open marketplace
Indie documentary insiders said it's tough for most indie films to gain visibility in the profit-driven streaming marketplace because they aren't necessarily made for mass audiences. " Independent documentary has, by and large, always been a non-profit enterprise," said Carrie Lozano, president and CEO of ITVS, one of the country's biggest co-producers of indie documentaries. Its output includes the 2004 Oscar-nominated feature The Weather Underground and the 2017 Peabody Award winning Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise.
ITVS received 86% of its funding from CPB. Lozano said her non-profit has directly invested more than $44 million in documentaries over the past five years. Owing to the difficult funding landscape, ITVS laid off roughly 20% of its staff in June. Lozano expects roughly 10 films to lose out on funding this year — a big cut from the up to 40 feature and short documentaries the group typically supports annually.
The basics of Internet connectivity are also an issue around streaming for many people, especially those who live in small, rural communities. "What about audiences who aren't connected to fast broadband, or live in Internet deserts?" said filmmaker Jessica Edwards, whose documentaries include the 2015 profile Mavis! about singer Mavis Staples. "Many folks rely on free, over-the-air programming not just for news and weather but for a diversity of storytelling. What replaces that? More paywalls? It's an equity issue as much as an artistic one."
But for people like Mike Gonzalez, who've fought for decades to stop the flow of federal dollars into public media, there's no reason why these films should get special treatment in the form of federal dollars.
A senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation think tank, Gonzalez told NPR that PBS — and NPR — needed to be defunded at the federal level owing to "the very biased programming" — a claim both networks' leaders reject. Gonzalez said he welcomes diverse storytelling in the media. "I don't want to suppress views that are opposite to my own in the least," Gonzalez said, adding that it's simply a matter of independent documentaries vying for eyeballs just like everything else in the content universe. "I fully expect that indie docs will not survive contact with the enemy once you have to compete in a commercial market," Gonzalez said. "But let the competition begin."
CPB declined NPR's request for comment and PBS did not respond.
Looking elsewhere
Given the realities of the marketplace, some documentarians are working to attract more funding from traditional sources such as corporations, foundations and individual donors.
"Maybe this is the opportunity to create a much larger fund specifically for Black stories that is not hampered by the whims of the political movement at the time," said Leslie Fields-Cruz, the executive director of Black Public Media. The non-profit supports Black-themed stories by indie filmmakers, such as the Oscar-nominated I Am Not Your Negro from 2016 and the Emmy-winning 2021 film When Claude Got Shot. Fields-Cruz told NPR almost half of her non-profit's budget got wiped out with the federal cuts. "We're here in what I'm calling the worst case scenario," she said.
Meanwhile, some groups, such as the International Documentary Association (IDA), are working to recoup some of the lost federal funds. " IDA is trying 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," said Dominic Willsdon, the IDA's executive director.
Mourning the loss
Underpinning all of this new strategizing is a tremendous sense of grief.
" Removing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting out of the media landscape means the world becomes much more impoverished, and the stories that get told will be much more anodyne," said Robb Moss, a documentary filmmaker and professor in Harvard University's department of art, film and visual studies.
Oscar-winning filmmaker Errol Morris described the loss of federal support for documentaries as a major blow to free speech. "Worrisome to anybody who values an independent media, who values the First Amendment, who values freedom of expression," the Fog of War and The Thin Blue Line director said. "The pursuit of truth is not a political issue. It's a moral imperative that's now being questioned daily."
NPR has also received funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. No NPR executive was involved in the editing of this piece.
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