Public broadcasting has survived another bruising round of attacks, thanks to the enormous outcry from all corners of the country and across the political spectrum. Thanks, in other words, to you.

As we gathered in Boston earlier this month with 2,500 other media reform advocates at the National Conference for Media Reform (NCMR), the White House and Congress were on the verge of a possible government shutdown. The last minute deal our lawmakers struck included roughly $40 billion in cuts to an array of vital programs, but NPR and PBS were taken off the table. After hearing from millions of Americans, lawmakers got the message.

Since late last year Free Press activists have been making calls, sending emails, signing petitions and attending rallies to defend NPR and PBS against shameless political attacks. We worked with allies at MoveOn.org and Credo Action to hand deliver more than 1 million petitions to the Senate and held a major press conference with unions representing public media employees.

Thanks in part to all this pressure, Congress backed down and spared public broadcasting, ensuring your favorite stations will continue to be on the air. Just hours after we got word that NPR and PBS would remain largely untouched in the budget deal, Paula Kerger, the president of PBS, was on stage at NCMR talking about the future of public media. She thanked Free Press and its members for the support. In an interview later she said, "As eloquent as we hope we can be to articulate the case for public broadcasting, at the end of the day it's really the American people that count."

The budget compromise restored public broadcasting funding for the remainder of the 2012 fiscal year. However, funding for the future is a different story. There are still six separate bills in the U.S. House right now that would decimate America’s public broadcasting system. In the next few months, we'll need to make clear once again that cutting public broadcasting is off limits.

Public media is a common-sense antidote to an ailing commercial media, providing Americans with  hard-hitting journalism and arts and educational programs that the mainstream networks lack. Public media’s detractors won’t back down and neither can we. Free Press has big plans for the future of public media and we are building momentum to make those visions a reality.