Can US public broadcasting provide a unique bulwark against disinformation? There are ample reasons to look to the service at a time when commercial journalism’s business model has eroded, and disinformation from US and other governments as well as from commercial sources abounds. The structure of public broadcasting both limits its ability to serve as a counter to disinformation, and, in some ways, also protects it against attacks.
Disinformation and Mainstream Media
As Yochai Benkler’s chapter in this book demonstrates, the ecology of mainstream media remains remarkably robust under pressure. The emotion-soaked, belief-driven ecology of the right-wing media dominated by Breitbart and Fox appeals to a minority of people. But in mainstream media, where fact-based claims matter to users, fact-checking, critiquing of rival news sources, and corrections are routine. Two-thirds of media users use and circulate this information. That journalistic work is the raw material that fuels democratic process.
Nonetheless, fact-based journalism is under stress. The digital advertising captured by Google and Facebook has impaired the business model of commercial journalism. The always-on feature of the digital environment creates pressures to produce more without providing resources to fuel production.2 “News deserts” have sprouted across the USA as a result. One in five newspapers has shut down since 2004, and half of US counties have only one local newspaper, often a small weekly.3 The failure of the marketplace to meet information needs has led some to call for state subsidy,4 and others to call for an increase in donor-driven and foundation-funded journalism, with some government support.5
Those for whom fact-based journalism and democratic process are threats have seized upon the weaknesses in the news environment. Among the forces taking advantage are longstanding ideological actors, with various motivations. Lance Bennett and Steven Livingston’s introductory chapter demonstrates the long-range investment in ideological control, and the capacity to play the long game, by social actors inspired by the pro-market arguments of Friedrich Hayek and committed to sabotaging regulation of capitalism. In her chapter, Nancy MacLean provides a terrifying view of the deep investment of “the Koch network” of disinformation, which works toward a radical libertarian agenda through 150 think tanks and other ideological organizations (as detailed in Jane Mayer’s Dark Money); through political organizations, especially the Republican party (as Theda Skocpol and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez have demonstrated); and through academia, as UnKoch My Campus has shown. Orchestrated information campaigns have sabotaged tobacco regulation, healthcare plans, and environmental legislation. Naomi Oreskes, in her chapter, reminds us of longstanding corporate expertise in distorting public opinion for self-interest.
What is new in this pattern is the creation of the ideal vehicles for the spread of disinformation memes, in social media. The economic imperatives of surveillance capitalism6 mesh perfectly with disinformation campaigns, as well as with deep endemic biases of the culture.7 Disinformation experts, such as those in the Russian Internet Research Agency,8 can design campaigns, and trust that Facebook’s algorithms and advertising staff will help them find their targets. The Russian strategy of sowing distrust by polluting the informational environment,9 or the Trumpian approach of disparaging the legitimacy of mainstream news outlets, or corporate efforts to fend off fossil fuel regulation can all benefit from Facebook’s advertising affordances; Reddit’s nearly unmanaged social spaces; and Twitter’s lack of consistent moderation.10
In this environment, as Bennett and Livingston argue, the crisis is not fundamentally one of disinformation, but of the core functioning of democracy. Nonetheless, any structural change to political process will require both knowledge and informed action; any mobilization requires media. So, it pays to look to the capacities of traditional media within the fact-based news ecology. It is within this ecology that the discourse of democracy can be conducted, and shared facts established. Such media, Benkler’s analysis shows, can and do provide important resistance to the polluting influence of social media-charged disinformation. They are the cultural breeding ground for the resistance and reenvisioning of political systems for a functioning democracy.
The Value of Public Broadcasting
In the fact-based media ecology, public broadcasting in the USA is a key resource. The majority of Americans say they get their news from television, and a quarter of them say they get their news from radio. Broadcasting, with its ancillaries on the Web, in social media, and in podcasting, continues to be a powerful force. Broadcasting interacts with social media dynamically, as people share links from mainstream or right-wing broadcast news.11 Public broadcasting is a public investment of billions of dollars in noncommercial information and the cultural expression for a broad American public. It is grounded in an ideological frame of public service, in direct opposition to Hayekian arguments. Often overlooked for more commercial, advertiser-driven outlets, it remains remarkably healthy and a source of daily, reliable local and national news.
US audiences recognize that. Public broadcasting includes entities that get the highest trust ratings in US polls: NPR and PBS. PBS, as the website valuepbs.org is proud to announce to potential underwriters, has been the most trusted public institution for fourteen years. For some of the most skeptical news consumers, public radio is increasingly important. In 2018, 94 percent of Americans found public radio news trustworthy. In addition, millennials and gen-Xers tended to find public radio more trustworthy than the general population.12 The trust ratings demonstrate, interestingly, that even many of those in the orbit of Fox, Breitbart and Reddit trust NPR and PBS.
International studies demonstrate a virtuous circle between public broadcasting news, audience trust, and public democratic participation. A cross-national study found that in terms of civic participation and levels of trust, public media perform better than commercial media, and furthermore, encourage the raising of media standards more generally.13 A recent Knight Foundation study provides a succinct summary of the conclusions of recent academic research:
Research shows that people exposed to news on public television are better-informed than those exposed to news on private TV. They are likelier to vote, and have more realistic perceptions of their societies, especially on issues related to crime and immigration. They are less likely to express negative attitudes toward immigrants. Countries with strong public broadcasters have higher levels of social trust, and the people who live in them are less likely to hold extremist political views.14
Public broadcasting is pervasive and ubiquitous. Public broadcasters’ signals reach more than 98 percent of the American public, more than commercial broadcasting does. Stations are in every Designated Market Area (DMA) in the country, with physical plants and public presence.15 This blanket penetration, with an hour-long, award-winning daily national news program and daily documentaries on PBS and four hours of daily national news on NPR, contrasts sharply with the news deserts of today’s local newspapers. Virtually every one of the people in “news desert” counties that don’t have more than a local newspaper, can get both television and radio news from a public broadcasting station (although this is usually national, and not necessarily local news).
According to Arbitron figures, the two most listened-to radio news programs in the country are NPR’s “All Things Considered” and “Morning Edition.” Their reach puts them in the same ballpark as Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh. Audiences in the Trump era demonstrate appetite for news, as well. PBS NewsHour’s weekly audience grew 17 percent in 2017, for instance; NPR’s audience, already ten times the size, grew 9 percent in the same period.16
Public broadcasting is local. At the base of the public broadcasting system are locally chartered radio and TV stations, each autonomous from the other and from any national system. Local public radio usually produces some local content (more than public TV), and both public radio and TV stations are responsive to their board of directors and, often, a community board as well. The fact that the largest single source of funding for public broadcasting is user donations strengthens the motivation to maintain trust and relevance with its users.17 Licenses are usually held by local institutions such as community organizations, schools or local universities.
Public broadcasting operates with a taxpayer subsidy, without being directly affected by government agendas. Thus, relative stability is built into the system. While triennial appropriations force broadcasters to justify their funding every three years and funding is not guaranteed, the funding has stayed stable or increased since 1967. The federal dollars that go to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting are insulated from governmental interference in part by the fact that CPB is a private, non-governmental organization. While only about 15 percent of public broadcasting’s budget is accounted for with federal tax dollars, that funding is crucial in supporting station infrastructure. It enables core operations (electricity bills, station equipment) rather than dictating the activities of stations.18
Because public broadcasting is not solely dependent on advertising, and is noncommercial, it has fiscal resilience. At a time when many commercial journalism operations suffer from the loss of advertising and subscriptions, public broadcasting benefits from a more complex funding model combining subsidy, donations, foundation and corporate contributions, and endowments. While solvency is never guaranteed, multiple funding streams – including advertising revenue from for-profit ancillaries and broadcasting such as podcasting – provide some financial flexibility. They also create multiple stakeholders, each of which can subtly affect programming choices. But diversity creates some protection from such influence.
Public broadcasting also has structural resilience, ironically because of its highly decentralized nature. The welter of local stations is served by a plethora of services. While PBS and NPR, both nonprofit programming services for stations, are best known, they have a variety of competitors. Most public TV programming is produced by independent companies. Several large stations are also production centers. There is not only competition, but collaboration, to achieve basic goals. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the nonprofit entity that disburses the federal funding that makes up perhaps 15 percent of the total budget, has regularly invested in collaboration among stations, both regionally and thematically. During the 2008 financial crisis, CPB funded Facing the Mortgage Crisis project, which generated both local and national programs on radio and TV, as well as community activities.19 Addressing news deserts in 2010, CPB funded regional initiatives to produce local news on TV and radio,20 which have evolved and continue to produce local news. NPR has developed a reporting collaborative in conjunction with local stations, the NPR Political Reporting Partnership.21 The Center for Investigative Reporting routinely collaborates with public broadcasting stations to showcase its findings, as do other nonprofit investigative operations. The California Reporting Project coordinates the analysis of newly released police records among dozens of public and commercial media partners, including newspapers, radio, and television outlets.22 In 2017, CPB Vice President Kathy Merritt pointedly invoked the concept of public service and the function of reliable news, when she commented,
Collaboration is a force multiplier; together stations can do more and innovate faster to provide the local journalism that is part of the bedrock of public media’s valued service to our country … We’ve seen the importance of our investments in collaboration when, for example, stations in the Texas Station Collaborative were better prepared to serve their communities throughout the devastation of Hurricane Harvey.23
Public broadcasting is innovative. It was the first broadcasting entity to use satellite technology, and it has been in the forefront of the digital transformation. NPR has overcome the profoundly local orientation of stations to permit the development of NPR ONE, an app that consolidates and remixes NPR news programming, and showcases podcasts from within and beyond public broadcasting. As of 2018, NPR is the top podcaster in the world, and, according to Hot Pod’s Nick Quah, sets trends in monetizing as well as distributing podcasts.24
PBS Digital Studios uses YouTube as a platform for online informational video series, pitched at younger and more diverse audiences. American Public Media (a smaller rival to NPR) created the Public Insight Network (www.publicinsightnetwork.org/about/) in 2003, in order to make use of the expertise of its listener base, and it has since become a collaborative project throughout public broadcasting. The Localore project (at localore.net), funded by CPB, features experiments in interactive media, each lodged at a station. They range from stories about the North Dakota oil boom to an interactive documentary about Chinese takeouts around the USA, to various projects that engage users in proposing questions for local public media journalists to investigate. One of those projects evolved into the nonprofit service Hearken, which provides deep engagement services for stations.
Public radio and public TV have different profiles. Public TV has much less news than public radio, partly because of right-wing and corporate attacks but also because production costs of TV are far higher than radio, especially for news and public affairs. Only a few PBS public affairs programs, such as the news shows PBS NewsHour and public affairs series FRONTLINE, are routinely carried by stations. Radio, on the other hand, built a presence and a brand in local communities around the country by anchoring listenership in morning and evening news feeds from NPR. Its morning news show, Morning Edition, usually marks the highest point of pledging during pledge drives. Relatively low-cost local talk shows generate listener engagement.
While public TV and public radio have dramatically different profiles, they share some common user demographics. Both services tend, using traditional ratings services, to skew somewhat older, better educated, and whiter than the general population. They both celebrate this when promoting the service to underwriters, arguing that they reach decision-makers. Public TV skews female, while radio tends toward male. However, both services also appear to reach diverse populations, particularly among more educated parts of the population. Within the college-educated bracket, public radio’s diversity almost matches national demographics.25 And using local research rather than commercial ratings services, the research service TRAC found that public TV stations actually drew about half their audiences, more or less depending on the market, from traditionally “underserved” populations.26
The Public in Public Broadcasting
Public broadcasting’s public mission centrally distinguishes it from other media. But most of that mission comes from the values and norms of the system, not from the law. Those values and norms derive from a clear ideological founding argument that American society needs reliable public information and cultural institutions, not only because the market will not provide them but because they are fundamentally not market services. This is in direct opposition to the neoliberal and radical libertarian ideologies fueling the current attack on democracy, as described by Bennett and Livingston, McLean and Oreskes. While the institution has been attacked by these forces, the core logic of its founding rhetoric can still be seen in both word and action. This logic echoes well with the arguments in Victor Pickard’s contribution to this volume.
Public broadcasting in its current state was created in 1967, after a slow buildup. At its origins, with the Federal Communication Commission’s decision to reserve spectrum for use by noncommercial radio stations in 1938, the notion of the public was associated primarily with the growth of new businesses serving general audiences. The fact that such a narrow definition of the public interest prevailed can be directly associated with the pro-business public relations and lobbying efforts also described by Oreskes. The crumb eventually given to noncommercial interests in increments starting in 1938 was reservation of FM spectrum (at the time inaccessible on consumers’ radios). The justification was market failure.27
Public television’s creation was justified by educational use. This took a strong step beyond market failure, toward the notion of public service. Truman FCC appointee Frieda Hennock – a New York city lawyer and Russian Jewish immigrant with a narrative of bootstrapped success – arrived with a politically liberal agenda to create reserved channels. “Educational television” became a trading point in a larger negotiation, highly conditioned by broadcasters’ commercial concerns, at the FCC.28
The creation of today’s public TV took place in a time of wide debate about the texture of civil society in a post-war world. There are parallels with today, in fact. The so-called “Hutchins Commission” in 1947 – formally The Commission on Freedom of the Press – had set the tone. It found that freedom in danger because of:
the economic structure of the press, in part the consequence of the industrial organization of modern society, and in part the result of the failure of the directors of the press to recognize the press needs of a modern nation and to estimate and accept the responsibilities which those needs impose upon them.29
It found, in line with Progressive thinking,30 that the public needed access to a truthful, contextualized accounting of the day’s events, which accounted for representative groups in society, as well as articulation of core social values, and a forum for comment and criticism.31 The Hutchins Commission’s logic was thus grounded in the logic of the “informed citizen,” the role of the Deweyan public, and the importance of the relationship between information and democracy.32 The notion that mass media had become as much a threat as a promise for a free society also drove a movement toward more active content regulation at the FCC. In 1946, the FCC issued guidelines (known as the “Blue Book”) on public service obligations of licensees, which included limiting advertising “excesses,” paying attention to local issues and offering public affairs programming, in order to mitigate the perceived negative consequences of commercial business models. Pro-business forces and broadcasters fought back with the same kind of anti-Communist rhetoric that had infused their lobbying for the 1934 Communications Act. While the Blue Book provisions were never enacted into law, for decades after, FCC public interest requirements for license renewal included some of its expectations, such as localism, community ascertainment (measures which ascertain the informational needs and wishes of community organizations and voices), and public informational programming. In addition, the National Association of Broadcasters preemptively adopted some of its terms in its best practices documents.33
The notion that an informed citizenry leads to a strong democracy has been perceptively critiqued as a myth.34 However, as Dave Karpf argues, it is a “load-bearing” myth. Because people believe it, it has its own capacity to establish expectations and norms. This appears to be true in the case of public broadcasting, where the notion has driven a sense of mission over the years, in spite of the fact that the law does not require it to do so.
Public broadcasting in its current form was created within Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society agenda, which openly embraced the notion that societies were more than markets and governments should actively intervene to improve social health. The civil rights movement and liberal funders, including the Carnegie Fund and the Ford Foundation, also fortified this perspective. Bill Moyers, a Baptist pastor who became a White House aide, argued for a bill that would provide some government funds to public broadcasters. The notion was developed over a series of public and private meetings by a blue-ribbon committee, colloquially known as the Carnegie Commission.35 Its report was designed to be more politically palatable than the Ford Foundation’s earlier support for a more openly liberal service.36
The Carnegie Commission envisioned a system funded through an endowment financed by taxes on television sets. It was to have an apolitical board of directors and to serve as a national source and resource, with creatively diverse and opinion-rich programming (and possibly even with free interconnection between stations through phone lines). Public broadcasting was imagined as an autonomous, citizen-responsive source of information, playing several roles in convening public life. As E. B. White famously wrote:
TV should be providing the visual counterpart of the literary essay, should arouse our dreams, satisfy our hunger for beauty, take us on journeys, enable us to participate in events, present great drama and music, explore the sea and the sky and the woods and the hills. It should be our Lyceum, our Chautauqua, our Minsky’s, and our Camelot. It should restate and clarify the social dilemma and the political pickle.37
The Carnegie Commission had imagined a service that would be “a platform for the unheard,” a “forum for debate and controversy” and “the clearest expression of American diversity.”38 Thus, the founding logic of public broadcasting clearly linked diversity, representation, cultural expression, and reliable information in service of democratically engaged public life.
This ideological framing has persisted and has been used in battles over resources throughout the years. A 1977 Carnegie Commission report on public broadcasting, “A Public Trust,” inveighed against rank commercialism, upheld the notion of media serving an open society, and boldly italicized one of its conclusions: “We believe the public broadcasting has the responsibility to use these most powerful communications media as tools to enhance citizenship and public service.”39
The report had the bad timing to be released at the end of the Carter Administration, which itself was populated with free-market, small-government officials profoundly committed to neoliberal ideology, just as the Reagan tide was sweeping in. So, no structural reforms were made. But the framing has persisted throughout public broadcasting. It was highly influential in one of the lasting changes to CPB structure over the years, brought about by documentary filmmakers.
Documentary filmmakers, looking for outlets for their point-of-view work, argued over a decade to Congress that public broadcasting had an obligation to serve the public diverse perspectives from throughout the USA, not just the coasts. They explicitly made the connection between media diversity and democracy, and they portrayed themselves as stand-ins for the general public in their regions. In 1988, Congress created a dedicated line of funding within the CPB authorization, for a coproduction fund for independent filmmakers, the Independent Television Service (ITVS). Independent filmmakers have continued to be an outsized voice in public television, repeatedly affecting both funding and programming choices, because of their ability both to organize and to invoke public values both to Congress and to public TV officials.40
Private foundations including the Knight, MacArthur, and Ford Foundations have also subscribed to the “informed citizen” notion of public broadcasting enriching democracy, as a justification for funding. The then-president of the Ford Foundation, Susan Beresford justified a five-year, $50 million Ford Foundation initiative41 supporting public broadcasting in these terms: “An informed citizenry is vital to good governance and community life and these grants challenge media innovators to enrich our education and knowledge. The grantees will help us understand the news we receive from various sources, and contribute to the public dialogue that is essential in a healthy democracy.”42 In announcing Public Square, a news initiative funded by the Knight Foundation in 2005, then-PBS president Pat Mitchell also invoked the informed citizen trope: “Public Square will deliver on public television’s mission to strengthen civic participation in communities and provide a trusted source of news, information and varied perspectives in order to better inform and engage citizens.”43
This framing can also be found on the CPB website, where, in 2016, it announced that “Digital, Diversity, and Dialogue are the framework for public media’s service to America” and that it was founded “to champion the principles of diversity and excellence of programming, responsiveness to local communities, and service to all.” In 2019, the Trump-era CPB, in a more toned-down language, still invoked the same values: “CPB strives to support diverse programs and services that inform, educate, enlighten and enrich the public … CPB’s core values of collaboration, innovation, engagement, and diversity, help to inform our program investments system-wide.”
Assaults on the Vision
The vision of a public broadcasting service to support public life was attacked from the start, by both political opponents and corporate interests. Commercial broadcasters originally were deeply suspicious of tax-subsidized, potential rivals, although they eventually found public broadcasting useful as an excuse to lighten their own public service loads. Congressional conservatives were deeply suspicious of the proposed bill, even though it had, thanks to careful politicking by Johnson’s staff, support from the military as well as from some business interests. Conservatives strove to curb the editorial independence that a national, financially independent media service would have. They were particularly concerned that the vision for public television had been supported by the Ford Foundation, to many the exemplar of liberal, “Eastern Establishment” thinking.44
The arguments of the conservatives are evident in the dissenting comments included in the Act’s legislative language, written by the few hold-outs unhappy even with the watered-down bill:
It will be the highbrow answer to mundane commercialism. … It will be a force for social good (as Mr. [Fred] Friendly and his fellow enthusiasts see the social good). It will bite at the broad problems of national policy and make timid men (such as Presidents, Governors and legislators) cringe. It could, and in the opinion of some witnesses, should and will crusade. We know that we are not alone in feeling some misgivings about creating a mechanism for the kind of broadcasting which might result from ambitions such as these.45
To accommodate commercial and political interests, public broadcasting was structured to limit its financial and political autonomy and national reach. CPB’s budget now came through triennial appropriations rather than an endowment. CPB’s funding was only a small fraction of what stations would need, so they would have to engage the marketplace. CPB’s nearly sole function was to give out federal funds to noncommercial stations, not to plan or program. In fact, it was banned from interconnection i.e., from creating a network. (Stations went on to create and use independent programming and distribution organizations, such as PBS and NPR, and CPB ended up providing some funds to some of them.) CPB’s board were political appointees. The only requirement for a noncommercial license was to be affiliated with a noncommercial entity. (Today, more than 40 percent of noncommercial licenses are held by religious stations, mostly Protestant; and they are not part of public broadcasting.)46
Even this seemed too much to Richard Nixon. Only two years into public TV’s existence, he discovered that a Ford Foundation-backed TV documentary on financial redlining targeted one of the bankers that had backed his campaign. His young lawyer, Antonin Scalia, warned him that public broadcasting was a “long-term problem” because it could become a BBC-like entity. Reagan attempted to defund all of public broadcasting. While he lost, his attack alerted all executives to the peril of public affairs, particularly in television. Television caught the attention of politicians the way public radio did not, at that point. It created a general sense of caution among television programmers.47
With Reagan’s presidency, a direct attack on the notion of publicness itself began. It was justified by a neoconservative substituting of competition and consumer interest for social concepts. This was seen in the bold pronouncements of FCC Commissioner James Fowler, who famously noted that the public interest is merely what the consumer is interested in.48
The political attacks from the right on public broadcasting have opportunistically and consistently seized upon this logic, and on claims of imbalance in coverage. In the 1970s, the right-wing focus was on TV, but with the Reagan election, right-wing organizations also turned to public radio. Right-wing groups in the 1980s derisively described NPR as “Radio Managua,” thereby implying a communist agenda.49 The Heritage Foundation published a report accusing NPR of liberal bias and catering to the Democrats in Congress, and calling for defunding. Right-wing media watchdog Accuracy in Media focused similar criticism on “All Things Considered,” calling NPR a “taxpayer-funded monument to 1970s radicalism” and “an easy mark for Soviet disinformation operations.”50 The New Republic repeated the accusations, focusing on foreign affairs in Central America. In the 1990s, the media criticism journal COMINT, edited by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, focused exclusively on public broadcasting.51
The punditry’s debates matched the policies of the Reagan Administration; Reagan tried to defund public broadcasting and then vetoed two bills until more commercializing measures were inserted. CPB stopped giving money directly to NPR and gave the same funds to individual stations, which could choose whether or not to purchase the news packages from NPR. State Department “public diplomacy” officials were charged with hounding reporters and outlets that provided news coverage unfavorable to the administration especially those officials, like Otto Reich, who focused on Latin America. They targeted NPR news. This documented targeting was part of a wider attempt by the Reagan Administration to have greater control over all aspects of Central American policy.52
The attacks, coming at a time when NPR had suffered financial setbacks, engendered caution. When an “All Things Considered” news segment by Charles Castaldi about a contra massacre in socialist Nicaragua (the contras were supported by the Reagan administration) violated expectations by running minute after minute of people sobbing at a funeral, it created a furor in Washington, DC about “balance.” NPR editors bowed to pressure and hosted State official Otto Reich, who was in charge of Latin American public diplomacy, to rebut the piece. Commercial news networks ABC and CBS, however, used the same footage without doing so. “We call you guys Radio Moscow on the Potomac,” Reich reportedly said off-air. Castaldi’s reports stopped.53 Castaldi’s producer, Gary Covino, noted two years later that news editor Robert Seigel’s “handling of the story sent a message, spoken and unspoken, that this was not the kind of stuff NPR should be doing in this part of the world … And many people picked it up really quickly and began censoring themselves.”54
Legislators have also joined in, over the years. Senator Robert Dole was particularly focused on radio, and created a clause in 1992 legislation requiring “strict adherence to objectivity and balance,” in order to limit “left-wing ideology.”55 In hearings for public broadcasting’s triennial budget approval, other congressional representatives have disproportionately targeted independent films, which are often made by or about underrepresented voices. More recently, in 2017, Representative Andy Harris, a member of the right-wing of the Republican Party from Maryland, (R-MD) accused public TV of bias, holding up three independent documentaries, all of which featured African American women.56 His highly strategic attempt to defund the film’s coproducer, Independent Television Service, through the insertion of arcane appropriations language, was narrowly avoided.
Most defunding threats, though, appear calculated to sow distrust by portraying the services as elitist and liberal, since inevitably there is strong Congressional support for continued funding, given strong local support in each district for the services. Such threats are perennial. For instance, in the 1990s, Senator Jesse Helms, a deeply conservative North Carolina Republican who came to politics working for a white-supremacist Senate candidate and a Reagan enthusiast, reveled in finding public TV programming that could rile conservative constituencies. He was able to generate very effective publicity and to discourage stations from airing Tongues Untied, a video poem about gay black identity by Marlon Riggs.57 Republican Representative Doug Lamborn has called for the defunding of public broadcasting in bills every year since 2007, on cultural grounds. Most recently, he argued that PBS “offended many conservative and religious taxpayers who do not want the children inculcated with liberal viewpoints on sensitive topics.”58 Trump-era Republicans continued to threaten to end funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.59
Public broadcasters have also been caught in the crosshairs of more specific disinformation campaigns. A public TV program on Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative came to the attention of anti-Communists at the right-wing George Marshall Institute. They sent a letter to station managers threatening to invoke the Fairness Doctrine and demanding “balancing” perspectives. Most stations did not air the program, a fact the Marshall Institute widely promoted in fundraising.60
Right-wing organizations perennially mock public broadcasting as both an unnecessary government expenditure and too liberal. For decades, author Laurence Jarvik has been on right-wing talk TV and radio, decrying the “liberal agenda” of public TV.61 The Family Research Council recently reiterated an old complaint – on the occasion of critiquing children’s cartoon Arthur for showing same-sex marriage – arguing that “for years, NPR and PBS have taken advantage of the airwaves to spout their radical agenda. And in the end, taxpayers are the ones that have been puppets – for the Left.”62 Organizations such as The Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute can also be counted on to bash public broadcasting. Cato’s David Boaz, who went on to give Congressional testimony, told Fox News back in 2005 that public broadcasting needed defunding because of its liberal tilt and its “wealthy” audiences.63 Heritage calls public broadcasting the tool of “the politically correct elite left.”64
Sometimes the attacks have come from inside within. In 2003, Kenneth Tomlinson, who had served as chair of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the US government’s suite of public diplomacy operations including Voice of America, and was an old friend of Karl Rove, was appointed as one of the Republican members on the CPB board. He quickly became board chair, with an overt agenda to promote more conservative views on public broadcasting. Among other things, he hired Michael Pack, fellow neoconservative and a former journalist for the public diplomacy agency, USIA, to be vice president for TV programming. Pack proceeded to commission several conservative series. Tomlinson’s behavior alarmed some board members, however, and a report from the investigator general for CPB in 2005 found that, among other things, he violated both federal law and CPB rules in fundraising for a news program hosted by the Wall Street Journal. He was forced to resign, and Pack left shortly thereafter.65 But NPR, for one, has remained profoundly cautious about any departure from an administration’s perspective on global affairs.
The right-wing attacks from inside do not stop. In 2013, Howard Husack, vice president for policy at the free-market Manhattan Institute, with funding from the Olin, Bradley and Sarah Scaife foundations among other right-wing funders, was appointed to the CPB board as a Republican representative. As his term was winding down, he proceeded to conduct a public campaign against, first, CPB’s priorities and then federal funding for CPB. In 2017, he published an opinion piece in several venues, openly calling for defunding. “Public media now rarely offers anything that Americans can’t get from for-profit media or that can’t be supported privately,” he asserted in one, invoking the market-failure argument. He also noted, “One area where public media does, increasingly, provide something the market doesn’t is local news and public affairs programming.” This, he argued strategically, was evidence local stations could survive without federal dollars, since local programming could raise local dollars.66 The specious argument that local news justifies cutting CPB out of the federal budget became a staple of his op-eds. (There is no evidence that individual stations alone can afford to produce consistent, quality local news without collaboration.)67 In one of several pieces in the Wall Street Journal, he also inveighed against independent documentaries produced by people of color and by ITVS as promoting “identity politics,” and sowing division.68 Other board members censured him, and declared their distrust; his term is now up.
The decisions of TV stations to preempt potentially controversial films (or to refuse to air specific shows while continuing to run the series) either for political or business reasons, may reflect the caution engendered by such attacks. Certainly, both POV and Independent Lens, TV programs that have some of the highest rates of attracting younger and diverse viewers, also have some of the highest rates of preemption. After the 1980s right-wing attacks, at least one station dropped “All Things Considered.”69
Local sensibilities may also influence the marked changes in national news programming toward a more cautious, government accommodating perspective over the years. The sensibilities of local elites can easily be seen in the boards of directors of local stations, which depend on them to promote donations and win support, often from conservative legislators, during appropriations. For instance, all South Carolina public TV stations, as well as the Charlotte, NC, public station, refused to run Uprising of ’34 (1995). Its oral history of a textile strike there, which was brutally suppressed by textile owners, implicated still-prominent families,70 and the scion of one headed the South Carolina public TV system. Southern stations generally refused to run Spies of Mississippi, about FBI involvement in civil rights protests in the South, and other stations refused to carry it in its scheduled prime-time slot.71
A starker example of the connections between disinformation funding and public TV programming can be seen in New York station WNET’s campaign to move the two TV series featuring point-of-view documentaries, Independent Lens and POV, off their prime-time slot. Billionaire David Koch sat on the WNET board at the time when a film critical of the 1 percent aired on Independent Lens; Alex Gibney’s Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream. Koch’s functionary complained to WNET’s CEO Neal Shapiro, who offered him rebuttal time. But Koch rejected it, resigned from the board, and withdrew a donation.72
Shapiro and PBS programming executives subsequently agreed to move Independent Lens and POV to a day that stations typically don’t use PBS’s nightly prime-time programming and instead insert local or self-chosen programs – effectively moving Independent Lens and POV off the prime-time schedule. However, this move did not go unnoticed by documentary filmmakers, who coordinated a national protest campaign. It worked, although two years later WNET and PBS again tried to move the series. Again, documentary makers led protests that in turn led to the reinstation of the programs.73
Still Here
Despite relentless right-wing attacks and disinformation campaigns, public broadcasters remain the most trusted media brands in the USA, and listenership and viewership is distributed throughout the country. How can this be? Certainly, the ethos of public mission, in service to civic health and an informed citizenry, endures and provides a rhetorical umbrella under which the work proceeds. In addition, stations, program strands, and CPB are also veterans at applying under-the-radar coping strategies to deal with the various pressures upon them, as we will see below.
Radio and television have different challenges. Radio has more news and bigger audiences, but television has greater visibility among politicians, especially for independent work shown in anthology programs. While public radio does have independent producer work, such work has flourished more on podcasts than on air. There is no national anthology showcase on radio such as Independent Lens and POV, and radio producers are less well organized than documentary filmmakers. There are left-wing stations in the Pacifica network, with a daily news show Democracy Now, but the show accepts no government funding and is most widely available on the Internet. The five stations in the Pacifica network do not receive CPB grants.
News organizations in public broadcasting are ever vigilant on issues of objectivity and balance. PBS NewsHour has a complaints section. NPR has an ombudsman, and complaints fielded there are never-ending; from underwriting issues, to claims by interested parties of bias one way or another on every conflict (but especially that of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict), to questions of inaccurate reporting.
In addition, CPB, public broadcasting programming services and the stations have been weathering frontal attacks from the right since 1969. Station management is ever aware of the permanent reputational threat they face, and hires are made with this in mind. Stations already face a legal standard of “objectivity and balance,” of course, but they are well aware that even featuring a program, with, say, people of color, can be portrayed by the right as unbalanced. Station boards are tilted toward the locally prominent and well-off, as part of their challenge to raise the donor dollars to meet budgets. Station and programming service resistance to the programs that draw the greatest right-wing attention demonstrate, among other things, the general caution typifying programming decision-making.
The biggest influence of right-wing pressure on TV might be seen in the encouraging of caution, a caution which, in particular, discourages public TV from investing more in news and public affairs than it does. It is notable, however, that the news and public affairs available are so widely trusted that PBS surveys find that 70 percent of those who voted for Trump have trust in PBS. The biggest influence of right-wing pressure on radio may be a combination of caution in airing potentially controversial material (the difference between Pacifica programming and NPR programming is useful here), as well as the demonstrated centrist and even at times pro-administration tilt to news coverage. Perhaps the great caution, the stress on journalistic standards, and the hewing to the familiar required to bulletproof the news on public broadcasting from the free-market ideologues has helped to generate across-the-spectrum confidence, at some cost both in range of perspectives and amount of news.
While public broadcasting has faced plenty of criticism from the left for blandness and catering to corporate and right-wing concerns,74 and has often been at odds with independent creator communities, all its left-of-center critics face a common reality. They want the service to continue to exist. In the end, the left-of-center critics make the same arguments that the service itself does for its survival. They too argue for service to an informed citizenry and for civility. If they succeed too far in showing the distance between public broadcasting’s programming and its claims, they give the right wing ammunition. Indeed, the moment that documentarians began to win in their fight for space on public TV came when they heretically went to Republican legislators with the argument that public TV did not deserve funding if it could not represent the voices of people from across the USA and especially from within the legislator’s district; CPB was alarmed enough to start paying attention. But generally, for public broadcasting’s leaders, a little left-of-center criticism just shows they are squarely in the center. At the height of Reagan-era attacks on public broadcasting news coverage, NPR editor Robert Seigel was able to say, “I’ve never been terribly concerned about left-wing magazines painting NPR as turning right. It’s not something that ever hurt terribly.”75
In addition, trust in public broadcasting is generated by far more than its news and public affairs coverage. Public TV benefits from its huge investment in children’s programming and its ancillary services to schools and for caregivers, as well as its “safely splendid” (in Erik Barnouw’s phrasing) programming of British drama and comedy. Public radio features a number of non-public-affairs programs noted for compelling storytelling (This American Life, 99% Invisible) and engaging personalities (Terry Gross on Fresh Air, Peter Segal and other comedians on Wait Wait... Don’t Tell Me!), as well as legacy figures like Garrison Keillor (Prairie Home Companion) and Tom and Ray Magliozzi (Car Talk). When people say they trust PBS and NPR, they are usually unaware of the complexity of public broadcasting’s structure, and unmindful that some of the programming they most love may not come from either.
Finally, the fact that public broadcasting is deeply dependent on listener and viewer donations, and that stations plead regularly on-air to donate, creates a relationship between the users and the providers of the programming that is uniquely intimate. The donating “members,” as they are called, can become helpful in times of political crisis, and, as shown, they inevitably invoke and reinforce the public-service mission.
New Fronts in Disinformation?
Public broadcasting’s decentralized structure has shown capacity for resilience, but it can also be exploited by those with knowledge of its arcane structures, awareness of market imperatives for local executives, and good-enough looking and sounding programming. This has been demonstrated by generations of mediocre syndicated programming, content that also appears on commercial outlets, occupying daytime and late-night on public schedules – particularly for television – in many smaller markets. Suze Orman, for instance, was a longtime public TV staple, and This Old House can also be found on commercial broadcast, dish, and cable channels. A Sinclair-like news program would raise eyebrows, but a more subtle product, particularly one that appeals to the “fair and balanced” concern of a programmer always in the shadow of a legislator’s disapproval, may fare differently. After all, Tucker Carlson started out on public television (during the Tomlinson era). In addition, the religious noncommercial stations are potential conduits for disinformation agents crafting programs appealing to a religious constituency.
Certainly, ascendant right-wing and alt-right figures have shown interest in public media structures. Michael Pack, former head of the extreme-right Claremont Institute and earlier senior vice president of TV programming at CPB under Tomlinson, was appointed in 2020 to serve as the head of the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM). The appointment had been stalled for two years, while Democrats in Congress pointed out Pack’s close friendship with Steve Bannon, the white-supremacist tint of the Claremont Institute, and financial improprieties he allegedly conducted while heading the Institute.
The USAGM, formerly the Broadcasting Board of Governors and now a single-executive position,76 oversees US public-diplomacy media such as the Voice of America. The cluster of news operations the USAGM controls are oriented outside the USA, but are generally charged with providing fact-based, reliable news that exemplifies American freedom of speech, while also functioning as an instrument of public diplomacy. This has always been a delicate act to perform, and the news agencies have had their scandals.77 Recently, as a 2018 US House oversight report noted, one of the Agency’s services, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, was found violating the Smith-Mundt Act, by targeting US citizens with social media posts without their request.78 But the Voice of America in particular has won respect for its journalism.
Immediately upon arrival, Pack controversially (and possibly illegally) fired all heads of the various services who did not resign and initiated an aggressively politicized era for the agency.79 This bold flipping of the agency’s official premise made American international news services the handmaidens of extreme right-wing ideology – at least for the duration of Pack’s term (the position, since 2017, is a presidential appointment). Furthermore, as someone who understands the arcane complexities of American public broadcasting, and whose role, as of 2016, is armed with the permission to reach back into the USA (so far, under the law, only at a citizen’s request), Pack was also put in a position to directly challenge the traditions of domestic public broadcasting.
US public broadcasting, grounded in the ideological frame of an informed citizenry and the role of public media in democracy, can play an important continuing role in combatting disinformation, within the limitations it has adapted to already. It builds on a well-established reputation for trust, across partisan lines. It has survived unrelenting right-wing attacks, which use neoliberal and neoconservative rhetoric, since its origins. Time and again, public support, particularly at the station level, providing direct pressure on Congressional representatives, has made a difference. This is an interesting counter-example to the effects of some disinformation campaigns described by others in this volume. It is also a demonstration of David Koch’s insight quoted in Nancy MacLean’s chapter: these right-wing strategies really are unpopular when tested against the actual delivery of even partially government-supported services.
But public broadcasting perennially, and now more than ever, needs both public support and vigilance, particularly at a moment when disinformation experts are acutely aware of structural weaknesses in the US media system. Members of the public can start with use of, membership in, and constructive suggestions for their local stations. They can support taxpayer funding that currently occurs at the local, state and federal level, and vote for the legislators who defend public broadcasting. Support for and defense of public broadcasting has, and probably will continue to be, grounded in an ideological framework opposed to the neoliberal understanding of both media and the role of the state. Listeners and viewers, as well as documentarians and other stakeholders in the public broadcasting ecology, have consistently invoked the value of a trusted public service, supported by taxpayers, through which the public can not only be better informed but can engage with others regarding the challenges of democracy. Not only does such a framework push back against erosion of public broadcasting’s capacity, but it also holds public broadcasting to the public-service mission that has become an expectation over more than half a century of evolution.
Events leading up to and following the 2016 election exposed long-standing structural pathologies in the American media system.1 Commercial excesses in television coverage, profit-seeking platform monopolies, and various kinds of “news deserts” helped usher in a dangerous politics. Despite racist, sexist, and xenophobic messaging, news outlets willingly amplified Trump’s campaign. At every turn along the way, venal commercialism trumped democratic imperatives in the American news media system. The now-disgraced CEO of CBS, Les Moonves, acknowledged that Trump’s campaign might be bad for America, but it was “damn good for CBS.”2
Despite the media’s unscrupulous behavior, one bright spot – if it could be called that – is that this political crisis has reminded Americans why democracy needs a functioning fourth estate. While many of us learn this truism in school, we usually take the press for granted, without reflecting on the necessary policies, laws, and infrastructures that sustain it. There is now, however, a fleeting window of opportunity to reimagine our news media system. In this sense, our current crisis may also be an opportunity – but it will require much intellectual and political work to make it so. Most of all, it will require Americans to move beyond the libertarian paradigm that has governed their media polices for decades. They must reclaim a social democratic tradition that can challenge market fundamentalism and protect public goods like news and information from systemic market failure.
Today, as we look to journalism to protect us against everything from misinformation to fascism, the press is in a deep structural crisis. Journalism’s institutional support is collapsing, leaving entire regions and issues without coverage at a time when we desperately need reliable information and robust reporting. How did this happen and what is to be done? In the following, I will argue that creating a new public media system is not the only answer, but it must be part of the solution.
We Have Been Here Before
Many of the media-related challenges facing us today – misinformation, unaccountable monopolies, news deficits – are actually old problems. Donald Trump’s election was symptomatic, not the cause, of a deeper institutional rot within America’s core systems, including its media system. These preexisting structural conditions, I argue, are the direct result of media policy failures over time – a long history of policy actions and inactions that led to contemporary crises in our information systems. These include the failure to 1) maintain open and democratically operated communication infrastructures, 2) confront monopolistic control of key sectors of the American news and information system, and 3) sustain public service journalism.3 Linking all of these policy failures is a systemic market failure arising from commercial imperatives that – with important exceptions – have long plagued the American media system.
The argument I propose in this essay is that many of the problems facing our communication systems today are structural problems and therefore require structural interventions. And more to the point, they are social problems that require policy interventions. While many analyses have focused on the growing lack of trust, partisanship, and other problems on the audience side of the equation – all significant issues worthy of our attention – I am suggesting here that at least as much emphasis should be placed on the supply-side. Any society that aspires to be a democracy must ensure the existence of a reliable news and information system. This is a baseline requirement. Without a functioning press system our many other social problems – from global warming to hyper-inequality – become insurmountable.
With such a focus in mind, this chapter begins to sketch out a public policy program that can confront the journalism crisis and democratize our media system. This requires a combination of regulating or breaking up media monopolies, creating public alternatives to commercial news outlets, and enabling workers, consumers, and communities to create their own media. Historical lessons gleaned from previous policy battles and media crises – ranging from contesting yellow journalism (what some might call “clickbait” today) to the decades-long campaign to establish a public broadcasting system in the USA – have much to tell us about charting a way forward. In the following, I discuss some of this context before turning to a set of concrete policy proposals for confronting the twin problems of misinformation and the crisis in journalism.
The Roots and Costs of the Journalism Crisis
It is generally indisputable that journalism today faces many challenges, especially economic threats such as the collapse of its advertising-dependent business model and the dominance of platform companies like Facebook and Google. The past decade has witnessed an accelerating decline in revenue and readership, leaving the nation’s newsroom employees reduced by more than half. Reliable journalism is vanishing, misinformation is proliferating, and our public media system – which ideally could provide a safety net for those occasions when the market fails to support the press – remains weakly supported compared to its global counterparts.
The journalism crisis is also disproportionately harming specific groups and regions, especially communities of color, rural areas, and low income neighborhoods. A growing body of scholarship documents the negative social effects caused by information scarcity and the rise of news deserts. Studies show that those communities lacking access to reliable sources of news are less informed about politics, less civically engaged, less likely to vote, more polarized, and experience rising levels of corruption in their local governments. These problems are likely to only worsen in the coming years.
With these concerns in mind, my essay addresses the following questions: how can we bolster reliable news media, especially the vitally important types of journalism that the market inadequately supports, such as local, international, investigative, and policy reporting? How are other democratic nations addressing similar crises, and what has America done historically to support journalism? Are there alternative models less vulnerable to market failures, especially within digital media systems? If so, what reforms and public policies could support them?
History suggests that when faced with seemingly insurmountable social quandaries, democratic societies can meet them with sound public policy. But this requires careful study and discussion about the structural roots of social problems. Exciting experiments and policy proposals are beginning to emerge, but they are still in their infancy. The many problems facing our media have outpaced research, but a growing empirical record shows that communities with access to strong public media systems are better protected against misinformation. However, the American public media system is under-funded and increasingly forced to rely on quasi-commercial support to maintain its current level of news production. Whereas public media systems in Europe and Japan may receive annual funding of approximately $50 to $150 per capita, the US system receives annually a paltry $1.40 of federal funding per capita. How can we build a new American public media system for our digital age, one that is fully funded, truly public, and can serve America’s critical information needs?
Public Media’s Moment
The current crisis is also an opportunity to reinvent journalism and strengthen our democracy. With increasing public attention focused on threats to the integrity of our news and information systems, now is an apt moment to consider reforms that reorient American journalism for the digital age. The analysis I am proposing here brings into focus the structural nature of the journalism crisis and potential systemic alternatives. Namely, I propose that we as a society design a new public media system. Toward this aim, we must consider what policies and politics are required to establish such a system. Drawing from the historical and international record of public media can help inform a policy program for establishing a new, multi-media network in the USA. As consensus crystalizes that journalism’s advertising-dependent model is irreparably flawed, the search is on for systemic reforms and structural alternatives, especially nonprofit and noncommercial models.
In particular, America’s journalism crisis and the misinformation problem require public options. A growing body of literature shows that public media are beneficial for strengthening political knowledge. Increasingly, public media systems are intervening directly into the journalism crisis. For example, the BBC has leveraged its resources to shore up the UK’s struggling news industry by funding 150 “local democracy reporters” at media organizations across the country to focus on local politics and share coverage with other news outlets. Other collaborative projects include a massive “local news partnership,” a “local democracy reporting service,” and a “news hub” giving news partners access to a vast trove of BBC video and audio footage.4
A “public option” for journalism can help address endemic problems in commercial media that render our information systems vulnerable to crisis. Looking at international models that address gaps in local coverage – as well as the history of American public media infrastructures, such as the postal system and public broadcasting – can help us envision what a new public media system might look like in our digital age. Such a comparative and historical research agenda can help us think through key questions, from normative considerations about public media’s role in a democracy to more technical and policy-oriented questions about design and governance, especially as public media institutions adapt to digital formats. Studying other public media systems can help us reimagine ours.
Press Subsidies Around the World
Many kinds of state-supported journalism exist around the world, and a wide range of international media policies mandate proactive government engagement to ensure diverse media.5 Most democratic societies have long invested in strong, publicly subsidized broadcast media systems. In addition, many countries, especially in western and northern Europe, also directly and indirectly subsidize print media. For example, Norway subsidizes newspapers to lessen commercial pressures and prevent newspaper monopolies.6 This model has been taken up in many Nordic countries, which have maintained media diversity and pluralism, and rank high globally in terms of democratic indicators.
To take one example, a similar model for funding local journalism exists in Sweden. When faced with a newspaper crisis fifty years ago, the Swedish government implemented a press subsidy model similar to Norway’s and began taxing newspaper ads. It created an independent agency that supported struggling papers and prevented bankruptcies. The government used these subsidies to support smaller newspapers and diversify news discourse via an administrative governmental body called the Media Subsidies Council that allocates funds based on circulation and revenue to newspapers other than the dominant paper in a particular market.7 Although these subsidies account for a relatively small percent of the papers’ total revenue, they have helped prevent one-newspaper towns from proliferating.8 Financial aid in the form of reduced taxes and direct distribution subsidies also supports Swedish newspapers.9
Canada is also pursuing significant journalism subsidies, reflected in important reforms to the Canadian tax code to allow for tax-deductible contributions to non-profit media institutions. The Canadian government also earmarked money for a refundable tax credit for news organizations to offset labor costs. An independent commission will determine the qualifying organizations and the precise percentage of the fees credited. The budget also established a 15 percent tax credit for individuals’ subscriptions to qualifying digital news media. The government allocated a total of $595 million (CAD) over five years in addition to a previous pledge by the Canadian government of $50 million to local journalism.10 These proposals have been met with some criticism – especially from smaller publishers who feel that these subsidies favor large incumbents – but they have initiated important conversations about public policy interventions that can support journalistic institutions.
Probably the best example of subsidizing news media is the previously mentioned BBC experiment. In 2019, the BBC proposed a new charity, the Local Democracy Foundation, to oversee and expand its local “democracy reporting” program. In conjunction with tech companies and other potential contributors, the BBC foundation would fund regional public interest journalism to cover council meetings and other local events that otherwise would likely go unreported. With over 50,000 stories published through this collaborative model so far, proponents hope the programs will continue to expand.11 However, this might be unrealistic, given the BBC’s recent cuts to its local news division and difficulties in finding additional external funding. Meanwhile, other countries, such as New Zealand, are beginning to consider or implement their own versions of such programs.
Despite positive developments, the BBC project, similar to the Canadian model, has faced accusations that its model reinforces market concentration by favoring large publishers. For example, the BBC has placed the vast majority of its reporters with local newspapers owned by only three major regional publishers, leading to charges that the program allows debt-laden publishers to exploit taxpayer support to compensate for their earlier profit-seeking measures – irresponsible actions that helped create the very journalism crisis that the program seeks to remedy.12 Nonetheless, the program offers a glimmer of hope at a time when the market is failing to support the journalism that a democracy requires. At the very least, it can provide the basis for future reforms to build upon, gradually removing news operations from the destructive effects of the market.
Potential Funding Models for a New Public Media System
Even the United States is beginning to see the rise of nonmarket experiments, including investments in public media and subsidies for local journalism. For example, in 2018, the New Jersey legislature passed a bill dedicating $5 million to the “Civic Information Consortium,” an innovative nonprofit focused on revitalizing local media. The media reform organization Free Press first proposed the project and further developed it during two years of grassroots advocacy and community engagement. Its primary mandate is to help provide for New Jersey residents’ information needs, especially in underserved, low-income areas, and communities of color. The consortium will subsidize both legacy and start-up news outlets, as well as support media literacy and civic engagement programs.13 While $5 million is tiny – and further reduced by the NJ government to $2 million – in comparison to the news industry’s catastrophic losses over the last decade, it serves as a significant proof-of-concept that government can financially support local journalism and other media projects.
One promising recent development with public media has seen local outlets shoring up local journalistic institutions under duress. For example, the New York City’s public radio station WNYC helped salvage the defunct local news site Gothamist.14 Other local public media stations around the United States are increasingly collaborating with other local news institutions and civil society groups to produce various kinds of digital print media – from investigative print journalism to stand-alone reports – in addition to traditional radio and television broadcast media. Increasingly, public media outlets are buying up outright digital journalism outlets – sometimes in partnership with philanthropic organizations – and this model could be replicated across the country.15
However, for these media experiments to be universally accessible, we must figure out a way to pay for their expansion at a systemic level. The most straightforward approach is that the USA could simply join the rest of the democratic world by funding a strong public media system. Indeed, the United States could finally guarantee long-term financial support by removing public media’s budget from the congressional appropriation process and instead create a permanent trust that would shield it from political pressures and provide economic security. With a larger funding base, the US public media system could experiment with new formats and expand its reach. Furthermore, in addition to the existing public broadcasting system, it could include community and low-power radio stations, public access cable television, independent community news outlets, and other local media. Such multimedia centers could combine resources and collaborate on the local and investigative reporting vacated by vanishing commercial newspapers.
Less direct government subsidies are also possible, and other countries are proposing plans such as tax vouchers that people can put toward their choice of media.16 Other experiments might include establishing an AmeriCorps-style, government-subsidized journalism jobs program, perhaps drawing inspiration from New Deal-era WPA programs. Yet other subsidy models could be developed without increasing government expenditures by, for example, repurposing funds for international broadcasting (worth hundreds of millions of dollars); charging commercial operators for their use of the public spectrum or outright selling it (worth tens of billions of dollars); implementing an equivalent to the universal service charge added to monthly phone bills; or placing a small consumer tax on electronics.17
An even more ambitious plan that I have discussed elsewhere would convert existing public infrastructure, such as post offices, public broadcasting stations, and public libraries, into local media centers. In addition to providing public internet access – perhaps as part of a community broadband network – these spaces could be used to produce local reporting through various kinds of media.18 The Indymedia experiment of the early 2000s could serve as a potential blueprint. However, these new community media centers should be publicly funded and/or receive financial support from local governments instead of relying on all-volunteer labor, which was always a major challenge for this model and a contributing factor to its decline.19
By competing with and thereby pressuring commercial outlets to be more responsible, diverse, and informative, strong public institutions can benefit the entire media system. Commercial media’s limitations in providing society with reliable news and information are readily apparent, yet significant barriers remain to making such arguments for public investments. Many Americans – including journalists themselves – assume that government support translates to state control over media content. Much evidence contradicts this assumption, but nonetheless, the necessary politics for creating a new public system in America are currently lacking. Therefore, the first step toward actualizing this system is to reorient discourses around public media subsidies. In doing so, we could take a page from the playbook of the libertarians and right-wing intellectuals who for decades toiled within think tanks and policy shops to craft economic arguments that we now take as almost commonsensical.
Creating Infrastructures for Democracy
The current journalism crisis presents a rare opportunity to reinvent American public broadcasting as a new media system dedicated to public service journalism across various media. Increasing public attention on the threats to the integrity of our news and information systems has created an opportunity to recalibrate American journalism for the digital age. While not the perfect panacea for all that ails our communications – and many variations are possible – a strong public media system can provide a solid foundation for a healthy information system. Evidence suggests that public media strengthens political knowledge and democratic engagement, encourages diverse and independent news coverage, and seeks to ensure universal access to information and communication infrastructures.
Beyond receiving high-quality news, we must also make sure that communities are deeply engaged in the news-making process itself. Community engagement is the best way to create a new kind of journalism, one that is accountable, representative of diverse views and voices, and trustworthy. Moreover, community members should be involved in the governing process, empowered to organize their own newsrooms, and able to collaborate in making their own media. Therefore, we must address the following questions. What might a new public media system look like? What policies and politics are required to establish such a system in the United States?
It is fair to conclude that our current misinformation problems are the direct result of policy failures. These include the failure to fund public service journalism, which created the ideal conditions for misinformation and low-quality news coverage to propagate; the failure to maintain open access to reliable information and democratic participation; and the failure to prevent monopolistic control of key sectors of American information systems. This latter failure created a wide range of harms, including news gatekeeping, lack of diversity, and sensationalistic content. These policy failures perpetuate a systemic market failure that has compromised the American commercial media experiment since its beginning.
Although there is a general unease toward policy interventions in the American media system, political economic scholarship has long established that tendencies inherent in media markets often lead to various externalities.20 It is the role of government policy to manage them – to minimize the negative and maximize the positive externalities for the benefit of democratic society. Moreover, the democratic imperative of maintaining reliable news and information systems requires approaching the journalism crisis as a major social problem that necessitates public policy interventions.
Democratizing the American media system necessitates a robust public policy program aimed at de-commercializing news media. This program has three components. First, it must regulate or break up information oligopolies; second, it must create public alternatives to commercial news media; and third, it must empower media workers, consumers, and communities. Of course, de-commercializing journalism will not solve all media-related problems. Problematic cultural orientations and power hierarchies within newsrooms and throughout society will continue even after removing journalism from the market. Nonetheless, de-commercialization is a first step toward democratizing the news media. Stripping commercial values (an emphasis on sensational and conflict-driven news) and instilling public values (an emphasis on high-quality information and confronting concentrated power), could help engender a journalism that is committed to universal service but sensitive to diverse social contexts.
Cultivating a nonprofit news model from the wreckage of market-driven journalism goes well beyond nostalgia for a mythological golden age. Any path toward reinventing journalism must see the market as part of the problem, not the solution. In many ways, commercialism drives the journalism crisis, and therefore removing it could be transformative. While the challenges facing journalism are legion, the ravages of the market pose an existential threat. We should therefore either remove journalism from the market entirely or minimize commercial pressures as much as possible.21 This is the only way we can create true structural alternatives.
The late sociologist Erik Olin Wright provided a useful framework that can help us envision what a truly public media system might look like and how we can get there. He proposed four general models for creating alternatives to capitalism, each one based on a different logic of resistance: smashing, taming, escaping, or eroding.22 Wright suggested that eroding and taming capitalist relationships offered the best prospects by reforming the existing system in ways that greatly improve people’s everyday lives (taming), while also creating alternative models to gradually replace commercial structures (eroding).
We can adapt this strategic vision toward freeing our media system from commercial logics. As I discuss in the conclusion of my recent book, there are five general approaches conducive to such a project: 1) establishing “public options” (i.e., noncommercial/nonprofit, supported by public subsidies), such as well-funded public media institutions and municipal broadband networks; 2) breaking up/preventing media monopolies and oligopolies to encourage diversity and to curtail profit-maximizing behavior; 3) regulating news outlets via public interest protections and public service obligations such as the ascertainment of society’s information needs; 4) enabling worker control by unionizing newsrooms, facilitating employee-owned institutions and cooperatives, and maintaining professional codes that shield journalism from business operations; and 5) fostering community ownership, oversight, and governance of newsrooms, and mandating accountability to diverse constituencies. While society should simultaneously implement all of these strategies, creating a truly public system – which remains the best defense against systemic market failure – should be paramount.
Foundations for a New Public Media System
Proposing the idea of massive public subsidies for news media in the United States typically invites two immediate objections. One concern is cost, and the other is that a publicly subsidized system would inevitably become a mouthpiece for whomever controls government. While recent actions by the Trump administration should give us pause, media subsidies do not necessarily invite totalitarianism. Democratic nations around the planet maintain strong public media systems as well as democratic freedoms that compare favorably to America. Nonetheless, preventing government capture is certainly a legitimate concern. An uncompromised safeguard for any public media system is that it must be firewalled from government control and interference. Regardless of the funding source, all contributions to a public media fund should be severed of any institutional or personal attachments to ensure that journalism retains complete independence. Any donations to a public media trust should follow a double-blind process whereby no funder will know what kind of specific reporting their contribution is supporting, and no grantee will know the origins of their financial support. Public media’s political autonomy must be founded on adequate funding and economic independence.
In terms of funding this system, other scholars and I have suggested that tens of billions of dollars should be drawn from the Treasury to create a solid foundation for a new public media system. Although this may seem exorbitant, relative to the profundity of the problem – as much as a priority as national security and other non-negotiable expenses – it is actually a modest proposal. Furthermore, if we consider the enormous opportunity costs incurred by going without an operable press system, the status quo of doing nothing becomes untenable. Americans rarely scrutinize the costs of maintaining essential services and systems, such as roads and public education. A functioning news media system is as vitally important as these other core infrastructures, and should be treated accordingly. In other words, we must not leave journalism’s survival to individual desires but rather treat it as a social necessity. We should sustain this vital service by providing the requisite tens of billions of dollars – a modest amount compared to massive tax cuts, military expenditures, and stimulus spending in recent years.
A second option would be a large public media trust fund supported by multiple funding sources. It could be supported in various ways, but instead of following the path of public broadcasting in being left to the mercy of the congressional appropriations process, this fund might rely on charitable contributions from foundations, philanthropists, and other sources mentioned earlier. This trust should be democratically operated and remain autonomous from government. While individual citizens could contribute to the trust, such a large fund requires well-resourced institutions and large funding streams. This might include collecting taxes from platform monopolies and having foundations pool their resources to serve as “incubators” for what can later develop into a fully-fledged public media system.
Platform monopolies such as Facebook and Google did not cause the systemic market failure undermining digital media, but they are certainly exacerbating the journalism crisis as they starve the very institutions that they expect to fact-check the misinformation that is proliferating through their platforms and networks. To offset some of their social harms, these firms should help fund local news, investigative journalism, and other kinds of coverage that a healthy democracy requires. In recent years, Google and Facebook each promised $300 million for news-related projects, and they are gradually increasing their support for similar programs. Google has pledged this money toward its News Initiative, and Facebook has sponsored several projects, including its $3 million journalism “accelerator” to help ten to fifteen news organizations build their digital subscriptions using Facebook’s platform and its “Today In” feature, which aggregates local news in communities across the United States. The latter program ran into problems when Facebook found many areas already denuded of local news. More recently, Google announced it would tailor its algorithms to better promote original reporting and Facebook has promised to offer major news outlets a license to its “News Tab” that will feature headlines and article previews. These efforts are woefully insufficient given the scope of the problem.23
Mandating that platforms redistribute a small percentage of their revenue as part of a new social contract could address the related harms associated with unaccountable monopoly power and the loss of public service journalism. Facebook and Google should help fund the very industry that they simultaneously profit from and defund. I have argued in the past that these firms could pay, for example, a nominal “public media tax” of 1 percent on their earnings, which would generate significant revenue for the beginnings of a journalism trust fund. Such a tax would yield hundreds of millions of dollars that could seed an endowment for independent journalism, especially if combined with other philanthropic contributions that accumulate over time. A more ambitious plan proposed by Free Press calls for a tax on digital advertising more broadly, potentially yielding $1 – 2 billion dollars per year for public media.24
These digital monopolies could certainly afford such outlays given that they currently pay a pittance in taxes.25 The European Commission has suggested instituting a new tax on digital companies’ revenues, and policymakers and advocates around the world are beginning to consider allocating such tax revenues specifically toward funding public media. In the United Kingdom, for example, the British Media Reform Coalition, the National Union of Journalists, and leading politicians all have proposed similar schemes. More recently, the Ofcom chief, Sharon White, called for a levy on digital firms to help fund public broadcasting. While such arguments have thus far been unsuccessful, they reflect rising awareness about the connections between digital monopolies’ unaccountable power, the continuing degradation of journalism, and the destructive role of misinformation in society.26
In addition to taxing platform companies, foundations could return to their historic role of incubating new public media experiments. Leading foundations such as Ford, Carnegie, and MacArthur played a key role in shaping what would become American public broadcasting in the 1960s. They could play a similarly important role today, especially in laying the groundwork for a new public media system until government can step in to fund these infrastructures. Given permanent support through a combination of private philanthropic contributions and public subsidies, a well-funded public service media system could help guarantee universal access to quality news and information. This “public option” for journalism can help compensate for commercial media’s endemic flaws that render it vulnerable to market failure. What would this new system look like?
A Truly Public Media System
The many challenges to creating a truly independent public media system do not end with procuring adequate resources. To ensure that this system remains truly public and democratic, we must also address questions of governance, production, and dissemination of media. Moreover, we must devise a democratic system of determining a community’s information needs (what I refer to as questions of “ascertainment”). We must provide for the proper underlying infrastructure (everything from open broadband networks to cable television access). We must also have structures in place that guarantee these institutions – controlled by journalists and representative members of the public – are operated in a bottom-up, transparent fashion. These newsrooms must be constantly engaged with local communities.
Regional media bureaus that represent local communities should make key governance decisions while administrators can distribute resources democratically via a centralized hub. Federal and state-level commissions can deploy resources so as to target news deserts, meet special information and communication needs, and focus on addressing gaps in existing news coverage, especially at the local level.
Independent oversight could rely on a public media consortium comprised of activists, policy experts, scholars, technologists, journalists, and public advocates. Most importantly, this system should follow principles of “engaged journalism” and “solutions journalism,” with an emphasis on addressing social problems while highlighting local voices and narratives, especially from traditionally underrepresented communities.27
Freeing media-makers from commercial constraints might allow them to actualize the journalistic ideals that led them to the profession in the first place. News workers, under the protection of strong unions, should have a stake in the ownership and governance of their media institutions. Indeed, a truly public media system should include worker-run cooperatives and other forms of collective ownership. Journalists, in close conversations with local communities, should dictate what issues they report on. In other words, public media should mean public ownership of media institutions.28 This requires a social democratic vision that sees journalism as an indispensable countervailing force against concentrated power – a public good that requires public investments.
Under a heavily commercialized ownership structure, journalism too often bolsters the status quo and perpetuates social inequalities. But with the right structural conditions, journalism can be liberated to serve social justice and progressive change. Removing commercial pressures from our news media would not solve all of journalism’s problems, but it is a necessary starting point. Absent social-democratic policies that subsidize noncommercial media, it is impossible to support journalism that is expensive to produce but rarely profitable. Journalism left entirely subject to commercial logics creates a kind of “market censorship” whereby stories that do not attract advertisers and wealthy interests will be omitted in our news media.
Now more than ever, we need adversarial journalism that provides accurate information about social problems, challenges powerful interests, and opens up a forum for dissenting voices and alternative visions for our future. This is the media we need.
Imagining the Media We Need
If society treats news as only a commodity to be monetized and sold on the “free market,” then it is rational to maximize profits by any means possible. But if we see journalism as primarily a public service, then we should try to minimize commercial pressures, return news production to local communities, and sustain public media for future generations, just as we preserve permanent spaces in society for parks and schools. Commercial constraints have long filtered out particular voices and views from the press. Journalism’s public service mission and its profit motives have always been at odds. The purpose of developing ethical codes and professional standards for journalism was to prevent it from being overwhelmed by business priorities. Too often, these earlier lessons have been forgotten.
As we witness an apotheosis of long-standing structural contradictions in commercial journalism, our current crisis could fuel a period of bold experimentation with new journalistic models. Unfortunately, in the United States, we understand journalism and its crisis within the discursive confines of a market ontology, which encourages us to see the market’s effects on journalism as an inevitable force of nature. With some resignation, perhaps, we see the crisis as beyond our control or an unfortunate public expression of democratic desires. This paradigm simultaneously naturalizes the market’s violence against journalism and forecloses on alternative models. Moreover, it invites political paralysis in the face of an enormous social problem.
Despite this fealty to the market, all democratic theories and notions of self-governance assume a functioning press system. The fourth estate’s current collapse is a profound crisis in dire need of public policy interventions. The ongoing policy failure to address this crisis for democracy stems as much from discursive capture as it does from regulatory ineptitude. Such discourses typically overlook our communication systems’ policy roots and normative foundations. Combined with an abiding faith in technological solutionism, this discursive orientation at least partly explains why American society ever allowed platform monopolies to obtain such unaccountable power in the first place.29 The degraded media system resulting from these policy failures created an ideal landscape for various kinds of dis/misinformation to flourish.
Since the market alone cannot provide for all our communication and information needs, a policy program based on a social democratic understanding of public media would facilitate policies that 1) reduce monopoly power, 2) install public interest protections, 3) remove commercial pressures, and 4) build out public alternatives. More locally, we can work to support programs to build community broadband services and local journalism initiatives. American historical experiments – such as municipal newspapers and news cooperatives – can help us imagine what these nonprofit experiments might look like. Driven by grassroots social movements from below, now is the time for creating counter-narratives to the still-dominant corporate libertarian paradigm.
Commercial journalism’s collapse is now incontrovertible, but as a society, we have yet to face up to this reality. No new business model or innovation that can save journalism is waiting to be discovered. No purely profit-driven model can address the growing news deserts that are sprouting up all over America. It is abundantly clear the market cannot support the level of journalism – especially local, international, and investigative reporting – that democracy requires. If we acknowledge that the market will not solve this crisis – if we stop grasping for a magical technological fix or an entrepreneurial solution – we can begin to look more aggressively for nonmarket-based alternatives. And we can dare to imagine a new public media system that penetrates silences and ruthlessly confronts the powerful.
History offers tantalizing glimpses of an alternative media system. Sometimes good journalism exposes us to stories and introduces voices we otherwise would never hear. There are periodic cases of investigative reporting that reveals corruption, changes policy, and benefits all of society. But these moments have been the exception. The history of the American media system is a history of exclusion and ongoing market failure. But it does not have to be this way. Another media system is possible, one that is more democratically governed and publicly owned. The biggest obstacle to this vision is a constricted view of what is possible. It is precisely during dark political moments such as ours that we should imagine policies for a more democratic future.
Of course, a strong public media system will not serve as the sole panacea for all of our informational woes. There also is a dark side to public broadcasting in cases where it is misused by governments, especially under illiberal and undemocratic regimes.30 Moreover, there is compelling evidence across the world that even in nations with stronger public media, problems related to dis/misinformation are severe. And many countries are discouraging their public media from directly engaging with the journalism crisis, at least partly due to pressure from newspaper industries who fear competition. Furthermore, in many countries the demographic for public media is aging, with younger citizens inclined to consume news from social media feeds. This all begs the question whether creating a stronger public media is a worthwhile venture that can address core communication problems.
While these are legitimate concerns, and we should not assume that if we build it, everyone will come, a strong public media system is a baseline necessity for tackling the media problems facing us today. First and foremost, journalism is a public good and the market will not provide for our information needs. Tweaking markets, shaming commercial media firms, and slapping regulations on platforms – even outright trustbusting – is not enough. What is needed instead is a system founded on a non-market-based means of support that is liberated from commercial logics. Much research shows public media doing significantly better in terms of informing people, engagement, and trust.31 However, such institutions alone cannot solve all media-related problems. While we need to look to European models as a starting point to broaden the American regulatory imagination, they are by no means the Platonic ideal.
Indeed, we should not glorify the BBC, even if is noteworthy that British public media are directly confronting the journalism crisis. After all, the BBC has long been fraught with elitist tendencies and deep-seated structural problems.32 In the United States, what we need is not simply an American BBC but something more ambitious. Of course, we cannot simply throw money at it and expect that wide audiences will immediately manifest. But if we engage local communities in their own media production and create a new public media system that is truly publicly owned and controlled, we might have a fighting chance. Anything short of a major structural overhaul to our failing media system reduces us to placing Band-Aids on an irreparably flawed system.
If we are willing to recognize the root of the problem facing journalism’s future – namely, systemic market failure – we can begin to address the crisis. If we find ways to minimize structural threats caused by unchecked commercialism, we may actually achieve this new kind of journalism. But we must first consider the strategic frameworks and policies needed to realize this vision. Above all, we must see journalism as an essential public service – a core infrastructure – that democracy needs to survive.
Open access