I’ve been a public media fan for most of my life. Whether I was listening to Chicago’s WBEZ in the backseat of my parents’ Oldsmobile in high school, tuning into Austin’s KUT in college, playing WAMU in my Washington, D.C., apartment or – nowadays – getting my bearings every morning with the “Up First” podcast, NPR’s media and cultural programming have been a staple of my media diet. And in early childhood, I watched “Sesame Street” on PBS.

The Trump administration is evidently less fond of public media. It’s taking steps that could reduce much of the funding NPR, PBS and their affiliated stations rely on. Most listeners and viewers get that these networks of interconnected nonprofits draw support from the government, their audiences, corporations and foundations. But few are familiar with the origins and current structure of American public media. In a recent article, University of Colorado Boulder media studies professor Josh Shepperd sums up the history of NPR and PBS and relays how early experiments with educational broadcasting morphed into the programs accessible to nearly all Americans today.

If government funding cuts force public media broadcasters to nix a lot of programs, I’d have trouble finding replacements for the shows I’m now hooked on, such as WBEZ’s “Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me.” But people like me would be less inconvenienced than those who live in rural areas. They “have few alternatives now that local journalism has been hit hard by corporate cuts to newsrooms,” Shepperd explains.

This week we also liked articles about real life mirroring “Star Wars,” presidents being caught saying the darnedest things, and the woman who turned publicizing the Met Gala into an art.

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