Bringing PBS to the badlands

John Peterson turned his pickup onto a steep hill just past the entrance of Makoshika State Park, near Glendive. He was on his way to repair part of a TV transmitter that transforms packets of digital information into television broadcasts. The transmitter is perched in the badlands of eastern Montana. About 3,500 households, most of them in Dawson and Prairie counties, can pick up the signal.

Peterson, Montana PBS’ Bozeman-based director of technology, is responsible for maintaining eight PBS transmitters across the state. Because signals travel best from a high altitude, many of those facilities offer excellent vistas. 

“Most of our sites are fun to travel to, and beautiful,” Peterson said on the drive up.

Makoshika is no exception. The red-orange rocks and wind-gnarled flora give the landscape an alien vibe that’s interrupted only by the occasional campsite and a Frisbee golf course.

“I wish I was one of those Frisbee guys, because this course looks awesome,” Peterson said. 

Montana PBS acquired the transmitter in Makoshika State Park, along with another in Miles City, in 2025. The associated PBS stations went online in February 2026, bringing the number of PBS transmitters in the state from six to eight. Montana PBS spent $375,000 on the acquisitions, which also included a weaker broadcast unit in Sidney. The expansion represents PBS’ investment in rural communities, a goal the organization is pursuing in the face of uncertain funding and an industry-wide shift away from broadcast technology in favor of streaming. 

The transmission facility in Makoshika State Park is a relic of broadcast’s late golden era in the 1960s. The concrete structure contains a graveyard of antiquated analog equipment.

In 1962, after the military decommissioned the site, a commercial broadcaster moved in and installed a transmitter. The hulking metal device, the size of several large refrigerators and defunct for five decades, dominates the center of the room.

“That should be on Medicare,” Peterson said. 

An array of inoperable old broadcast equipment, much of it manufactured by a succession of companies that went out of business decades ago, takes up about half the room. The active transmitter, itself about 16 years old, isn’t holding up so well, either. The signal drops intermittently. Montana PBS plans to spend $15,000 to replace it in November. 

Montana PBS first considered acquiring the eastern Montana facilities in 2023, according to Executive Director Aaron Pruitt. At the time, Pruitt expected to receive financial support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the organization that distributed money from the federal government to public media. 

But at the behest of President Donald Trump, Congress defunded CPB in July 2025 and the grants dried up. 

“We did have the possibility to just walk away and not follow through with the purchase of the station,” Pruitt told Montana Free Press in 2026. “And we just knew that was not the right thing to do for eastern Montana.” 

CPB shut down in January 2026. Montana’s five public media outlets — Montana PBS, Montana Public Radio, Yellowstone Public Radio, Bozeman-based KGLT and Fort Belknap-based KGVA — collectively lost $2.6 million in annual revenue, which accounted for 16% of their collective annual funding. Montana PBS bore the lion’s share of that shortfall, losing about $1.8 million in revenue each year.

All four members of Montana’s federal delegation voted in favor of the cuts. U.S. Rep. Troy Downing, a first-term Republican currently running for reelection, represents the state’s Eastern Congressional District.

“I supported the Rescissions Act because I believe Congress has a responsibility to rein in federal spending and ensure taxpayer dollars are used responsibly,” Downing wrote last week in response to questions from MTFP. “PBS strayed from its original mission and became increasingly political.” 

Downing visited the transmission facility in Makoshika in August and wrote last week that he recognizes “the important role local broadcasters play in rural Montana, where access to reliable news and emergency information can be limited.”

Other members of the state’s federal delegation did not respond to requests for comment.

In the fall of 2025, Montana PBS raised $1.8 million with a Bridge the Gap campaign, backfilling the budget hole left by the congressional rescission. Pruitt said Montana PBS “decided to take a leap of faith” and purchase the eastern Montana facilities in October 2025. Even so, the cuts have indefinitely delayed improvements the broadcaster initially planned to complete after the purchase. 

The transmitters in Glendive and Miles City emit low-frequency signals, making them harder to pick up and more susceptible to interference. Upgrading to a higher frequency would cost about $150,000 per transmitter. 

In the early days of negotiations, Pruitt anticipated that CPB’s Distance Service Grants — funding earmarked for public broadcasters serving sparsely populated areas — would enable the improvements. 

“You bet I was planning on using those funds over several years to make the major upgrades that are necessary in Glendive and Miles City and even in Sidney,” Pruitt said.

For now, Montana PBS is using the existing weak signals — channel 5 in Glendive and channel 3 in Miles City — to broadcast national and local programming, including news and documentaries about Montana. That includes “Backroads of Montana,” which features deep-dive features about communities around the state; “Impact,” which produces segments about social and political issues in Montana; and “Jonnie,” a 90-minute documentary about a world champion bull rider from Billings that was released in October. 

“We certainly think that Glendive and Sidney and Miles City viewers deserve the opportunity to see those films just as much as somebody in Bozeman or Missoula or Helena,” Pruitt said.

Miles City, Glendive and Sidney are the three largest Montana towns east of the state’s largest city, Billings, population 120,000. The three small towns’ combined population is about 20,000. Nielsen, a media research firm, divides the country into 210 “designated market areas” for TV broadcasters. Glendive is the nation’s smallest. Until Montana PBS arrived, KXGN, the former commercial station in Glendive, was the only TV station ever to operate there, according to Pruitt.

After KXGN’s previous owner, Stephen Marks, died in 2022, his heirs struggled to attract buyers for the eastern Montana properties. Potential purchasers had trouble penciling out “how it would be commercially viable to acquire those very old stations,” Pruitt said. 

BROADCAST OR STREAMING?

In 2025, streaming became more popular nationwide than broadcast and cable TV combined, according to Nielsen. Montana PBS viewers can watch programming on the organization’s website or via its Passport app. Still, Pruitt said, rural broadcasting remains an important tool for “reaching all Montanans of every age.”

Madeleine Noland, president of the Advanced Television Systems Committee, a nonprofit that sets industry standards for broadcasting technology, said broadcast remains the best way to reach rural populations in areas that often don’t have adequate access to high-speed internet.

“There’s a reason why the commercial TV stations aren’t there anymore. And the same is true with the broadband access opportunities,” Noland said. 

Despite a recent federal push to build out high-speed fiber optic cables nationwide, about 59 million adults in the U.S. don’t subscribe to a broadband service, according to Pew Research Center. Only one state, Alaska, is ranked lower than Montana for internet access. 

“When you look at PBS’ mission to really reach everybody, I don’t think that streaming is necessarily going to reach everybody,” Noland said. 

Re-enter broadcast.

“You could argue, oh, it costs a lot of money, we’re not reaching a whole lot of people out in these rural areas,” Noland said of Montana PBS’ expansion into some of the nation’s least populated markets. “But in some ways, that makes the proposition even more important.” 

ARTHUR ARRIVES IN GLENDIVE

Representatives of Montana PBS have been making appearances as classic kids television characters — Clifford the Big Red Dog, for one — in Miles City, Sidney and Glendive over the last six months. Bozeman-based Nikki Vradenburg, director of education at Montana PBS, said the organization tries to regularly visit “as many communities as time and weather will allow,” but recent trips to eastern Montana have been more deliberate.

“It was a great opportunity for us while we were there to say, ‘You can watch us on TV,’” Vradenburg told MTFP last week. 

Vradenburg went to Miles City Public Library in April, prompting public libraries in Sidney and Glendive to request their own visits. She made those trips in August. 

With a host of classic PBS characters decorating the company car, Vradenburg travels to events with two coworkers. One staffs a table, another manages the crowd, and the third wears a PBS-inspired costume. The Glendive event featured Arthur, the titular anthropomorphic aardvark from a children’s show that’s been broadcast for 30 years.

“It is a very warm, warm costume,” Vradenburg said. The PBS staffers play rock-paper-scissors to determine who wears it at each event. Vradenburg said it’s worth the sweat to watch “faces light up.”

Peterson’s trips to Glendive are typically much more solitary. But he has no less enthusiasm for the work. And whether he’s at home in Bozeman or on the road, he’s both a purveyor and a consumer of Montana PBS’ product, whether he accesses it via broadcast or broadband. 

“If I miss my seven o’clock “Finding Your Roots,” well, it’s not the end of the world, because I’ve got Passport and I can stream it,” Peterson said.  

But that easy access isn’t available to everyone, and that’s why the eastern Montana expansion is important, he says. 

“You can just stream, but of course you’re going to be missing some people. Part of our mission is to not miss anybody.”