by Staff Reporter | Dec 18, 2025 | News
By Staff Reporter |
After this week, Arizona PBS will have one less program broadcasting the western news.
Arizona State University (ASU) declined to renew its contract with NewsHour West, a bureau in downtown Phoenix under the member station operated by ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Arizona PBS (KAET).
NewsHour West provided western regional news, late breaking news, and a West Coast version of the news provided by the East Coast-based NewsHour.
NewsHour Productions sent out an email to PBS News supporters advising that ASU based their decision on “revised priorities,” according to Current.
Arizona PBS will continue its other programs, such as “Arizona Horizon” and “Horizonte.”
Arizona PBS programming under its call sign KAET — meaning “Arizona Educational Television” — dates back nearly 65 years to January 1961.
NewsHour West will have its final airing on Friday. The bureau launched in 2019.
The NewsHour West team consisted of Stephanie Sy, anchor and correspondent; Phil Maravilla, senior producer; Lena Jackson, deputy senior producer; Madison Staten, associate producer; and Justin Stabley, digital editor.
Back in April, Arizona PBS expanded in a different direction. The broadcasting station entered an agreement with Amazon Prime to offer free streaming to Arizona-based viewers.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the private, nonprofit corporation which passes on federal funds to both PBS and NPR, announced in August that it would shut down after Congress reduced public broadcasting funds.
CPB lost around $1 billion in funding meant to fund broadcasting over the next two years.
A majority of CPB staff were laid off at September’s end; CPB said it planned to retain a skeleton crew until January, at least, to see through its remaining legal and financial obligations.
As it winds down, CPB has continued to administer its remaining millions as awards to various public broadcasting outlets and news organizations.
CPB’s demise occurred following its repeated resistance to efforts by President Donald Trump to bring the nonprofit to heel.
The Trump administration attempted to fire three CPB board members, prompting CPB to sue in April. That case is ongoing.
Then CPB refused Trump’s executive order, released in May, ordering CPB to cease federal funding for NPR and PBS. Longtime CPB President and CEO Patricia Harrison said Trump lacked authority over CPB, and that CPB was “wholly independent” of the federal government.
About 15 percent of the PBS budget relied on federal funding. The remainder comes from private donors, corporate sponsors, and nonprofits.
The NewsHour corporate sponsors are BNSF, Consumer Cellular, and Raymond James. Among the top foundation and individual funders are the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Doris Duke Foundation, Ford Foundation, Charles F. Kettering Foundation, Heising-Simons Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Judy and Peter Blum Kovler Foundation, Lumina Foundation for Education, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Park Foundation, Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund, and The Walton Family Foundation.
AZ Free News is your #1 source for Arizona news and politics. You can send us news tips using this link.
by Staff Reporter | Sep 19, 2024 | Education, News
By Staff Reporter |
Arizona State University (ASU) hosted a forum Sunday alongside left-wing groups to mobilize young voters in both high school and college for the upcoming presidential election.
ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication held the “New Generation Voter Forum,” specifically targeting Gen Z and Millennial voters (those born between 1997 and 2012, and between 1981 and 1996). Organizers billed the forum as a nonpartisan event offered to represent the facts and prepare new young voters for November.
Key organizers of the event were the Tempe Alumnae Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority alongside the historically black sorority’s ASU chapter, Iota Kappa.
Group participants within the forum included the Greater Phoenix Urban League of Young Professionals, League of Women Voters of Arizona, Black Student Union (BSU) DPC, and the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) at ASU.
These groups have long been advocates for left-wing causes and movements, namely Black Lives Matter.
At one table to register the young voters in attendance, a woman representing the League of Women Voters of Arizona wore a “Vote” shirt depicting the black fist to represent BLM, a uterus to represent abortion rights, and the pride flag to represent gender and gay ideologies. On the table were pamphlets on different ballot issues, including Ranked-Choice Voting.
Kara Pelletier, at-large board member for League of Women Voters of Arizona and president-elect of the Metro Phoenix Board, told Cronkite News it was “critical” to get more of the youth registered to vote. Pelletier was formerly the Arizona chapter leader for the prominent national gun control group, Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America.
“It’s critical that our youth get engaged and remain engaged. They’re actually a larger voting bloc than the next-largest voting bloc, which is boomers,” said Kara Pelletier of the League of Women Voters of Arizona. “That particular age group, 18 to 29, really is a huge section of the electorate, and they could really have a lot of influence and say in what goes on in our country, our politicians, what our budgets are focused on, who’s elected.”
Others also offered voter registration to the young participants: ASU through TurboVote, and Vote Everywhere. Both TurboVote and Vote Everywhere are programs of left-leaning organizations: Democracy Works and the Andrew Goodman Foundation, respectively.
The panel discussion centered around misinformation and disinformation in the media, such as deepfakes produced by artificial intelligence.
Featured panelists discussing media literacy and democracy included ASU professors Retha Hill and Pauline Arrillaga. Both professors have been vocal in their support of left-wing causes and Democrats, and critical of right-wing causes and Republicans including former President Donald Trump.
Arrillaga oversees the Carnegie-Knight News21 program within ASU. Under Arrillaga, their latest reporting projects cover stories related to the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and the January 6 incident at the Capitol.
The forum also included roundtable discussions on the importance of voting, handling double residencies when voting, getting involved in elections as international or out-of-state students, understanding nonpartisan races, running for office, and understanding the issues on the ballot.
AZ Free News is your #1 source for Arizona news and politics. You can send us news tips using this link.
by Elizabeth Troutman | Mar 20, 2024 | Education, News
By Elizabeth Troutman |
Arizona State University’s journalism school teaches students “cultural sensitivities, civil discourse, bias awareness and diversity initiatives.”
The Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication requires students in at least three of the undergraduate degree programs to take a course called “Diversity and Civility at Cronkite,” the Goldwater Institute uncovered.
ASU’s online course catalog says the class “emphasizes the importance of diversity, inclusion, equity and civility to ensure all Cronkite students feel represented, valued and supported.”
The course “Offers training and awareness on cultural sensitivities, civil discourse, bias awareness and diversity initiatives at the Cronkite School and ASU” and “Empowers students to approach reporting and communication projects with a multicultural perspective and inspire mutual respect among students from various backgrounds and beliefs within different Cronkite professional paths,” the catalog says.
The “Learning Outcomes” on the course syllabus lay out identity categories: “By the end of this course, students will be able to … understand the value of their own and other people’s identities in terms of the work and study at Cronkite.”
The course’s seven units affirm the theme of identity. Units include “Race & Ethnicity,” “Geography and Income,” “Language & Citizenship,” “Sexuality and Gender Identity,” “(Dis)ability,” and “Differences and Conflict.”
The “Race & Ethnicity” unit includes the learning objective “Learn what microaggressions are and why they matter.” The instructor asks students to review a list of “typical microaggressions” published on a University of Minnesota webpage.
Examples of microaggressions include “America is a melting pot,” a statement that demands that people “assimilate/acculturate to the dominant culture;” “There is only one race, the human race,” a statement “denying the individual as a racial/cultural being;” “I believe the most qualified person should get the job,” a statement communicating that “people of color are given extra unfair benefits because of their race;” and “Everyone can succeed in this society, if they work hard enough,” a statement communicating that “people of color are lazy and/or incompetent and need to work harder.”
A week of the course is dedicated to discussing “sexuality and gender identity” to make students:
- Understand the difference between sexuality and gender identity and why it matters.
- Recognize privileges related to sexuality and gender identity.
- Know how to ask for and why to use a person’s pronouns and the benefits of gender-neutral language.
The unit includes an assignment to read an article which defines nonbinary as “a term that can be used by people who do not describe themselves or their genders as fitting into the categories of man or woman,” and Agender as “an adjective that can describe a person who does not identify as any gender.”
Students are asked to demonstrate what they learned about gender ideology by responding to the following prompt:
“Imagine you’re working at a PR firm and you have a client whose first album is about to drop. Your client’s gender identity is nonbinary and they use they/them pronouns. They have a massive press tour planned.
How do you prepare journalists to talk with your client?”
Diversity initiatives at ASU are not limited to the journalism school. Goldwater identified more than 100 classes offered in ASU’s Spring 2024 course catalog that include terms like “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion,” or that fulfill the university’s general education requirement in “diversity.”
“To return Arizona’s public universities to their educational missions, it is imperative that the institutions themselves—or the bodies who oversee them—adopt a change in policy to eliminate politicized ‘diversity’ based course requirements such as DCC,” said Timothy K. Minella, senior fellow at the Goldwater Institute’s Van Sittert Center for Constitutional Advocacy.
Elizabeth Troutman is a reporter for AZ Free News. You can send her news tips using this link.
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