Can Public Media Survive Trump?

For this week’s Fault Lines column, Jon Allsop is filling in for Jay Caspian Kang.

In 1911, voters in Los Angeles founded a newspaper. It was called the Municipal News, and proclaimed itself “Owned by the People.” The backdrop, according to Victor Pickard, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, was growing national dissatisfaction with “commercial excesses such as yellow journalism and propaganda—the ‘clickbait’ and ‘fake news’ ” of the day. (It was also a particularly volatile moment in L.A.: the year before, the L.A. Times building had been blown up by opponents of the publisher’s anti-union activities. Twenty-one people were killed.) The Municipal News could have been a model for something new. It was overseen by citizen volunteers appointed by the mayor, distributed for free, and covered local political issues, such as streetcar fares and tuberculosis testing for cows, in addition to broader topics, like music and fashion. But two years later voters in L.A. opted to get rid of it amid corporate opposition. The L.A. Times cheered its death, writing that it had been “born with pre-natal tendencies to damphoolishness” and become “a convenient dumping ground for the money of the taxpayers.”

Commercialism remained the dominant organizing principle of U.S. media. The Red Scare of the subsequent decades, Pickard once told me, locked in a cultural suspicion of government intervention, in the media industry and beyond. There were experiments with public and educational broadcasting, culminating, in the late sixties and early seventies, with the establishment of NPR and PBS. But they came to rely increasingly on private funding, and they still do today.

Critics of public backing for journalism have often argued that it represents a conflict of interest—a case of officials paying the piper to scrutinize their tune—and is vulnerable to the changing whims of politicians, especially if a tyrant comes along. Donald Trump’s new Administration has seemed determined to prove them right. Shortly after Trump’s Inauguration, Brendan Carr, the new chair of the Federal Communications Commission, suggested that NPR and PBS might illegally be airing commercials, and announced a probe; early last month, Trump signed an executive order bluntly demanding that they be defunded, decrying their supposedly radical coverage of everything from reparations to “queer ducks”; then, this week, the Administration sent a so-called rescissions package to Congress, asking lawmakers to repeal public-media funds that they had already approved. Trump has also sought to gut the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which funds news organizations that broadcast overseas, most notably Voice of America. These are very different entities than NPR and PBS—some have roots in the counter-propaganda operations of the Second World War and the Cold War, and all of them are still seen as tools of U.S. soft power—but they are designed to be editorially independent, and often do produce good journalism.

When I reconnected with Pickard recently, he acknowledged that it’s understandable why, “at first glance,” Trump’s attacks appear to be “a perfect enactment of every liberal and libertarian’s worst nightmare for when you allow government to get involved in our media system.” And yet Pickard, who has advocated for greater government support for journalism, doesn’t see this moment in such terms. Indeed, if anything, it’s showing how public media institutions can sometimes stand up more strongly to authoritarians than their commercial counterparts. And below the federal level, a groundswell of state-based initiatives—albeit nothing, yet, to match the ambition of the Los Angeles Municipal News—have started to funnel support to local news, a sector in dire financial crisis, with jobs drying up, news deserts spreading, and private-equity vultures picking over the bones. The Trump era could even come to be remembered not for reinforcing the taboo around greater public investment in media but for catalyzing a move toward more of it.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which would go on to channel federal funds to NPR and PBS, was founded in 1967, under President Lyndon B. Johnson, as part of the Public Broadcasting Act. This was a highly significant piece of legislation. But critics have argued that it didn’t go far enough to insure a sustainable funding stream. In the U.K., for example, TV viewers pay a dedicated annual “license fee” to fund the BBC; a commission making recommendations for the C.P.B. proposed that it be bankrolled with a somewhat similar levy, on the manufacturers of TV sets, but in the end funding was linked to the regular congressional appropriations process. It was decided that lawmakers would set budgets for NPR and PBS two years ahead of time, to insulate them from immediate political pressure—but two years isn’t a hugely long time, leaving the broadcasters, as Pickard puts it, “always looking over their shoulder, worried about their meagre appropriations being cut off or messed with.” And the meagreness is itself a problem. Today, Congress gives the C.P.B around five hundred million dollars per year, which is less than two dollars per taxpayer. NPR and PBS have to supplement their budgets by soliciting donations and corporate sponsorships, with direct federal funds accounting for just about fifteen per cent at PBS, and a measly one per cent at NPR. This makes the U.S. a sharp outlier among democracies. Pickard argues that describing NPR and PBS as “public media” may be “a misnomer.”

Now that Trump is trying to take away the broadcasters’ federal funding, it could plausibly be argued that their commercial revenue streams are protecting them. But the cuts would nonetheless be painful for NPR and PBS. And for the many local stations that operate in the wider public broadcasting network, and have ties to NPR and PBS, cuts do carry existential stakes. Some stations are much more reliant on direct federal funding, especially in rural areas where commercial media is less viable and where, as a result, public media is perhaps most vital, not only in its news output but in its provision of emergency alerts or educational services, such as connecting local schoolchildren with books and technology.

And Trump’s executive order appears to be blatantly illegal—while critics think that the C.P.B. isn’t as protected from political influence as it could be, Congress did clearly establish the body as a private nonprofit beyond the reach of direct executive meddling. The C.P.B. has refused to enforce the order, and, last week, both NPR and PBS went to court to fight back. (Both suits also cite the First Amendment, which generally forbids the President from retaliating against speech he doesn’t like, be that about queer ducks or anything else.) Congress could claw back the funding. But past attempts to defund NPR and PBS—including in Trump’s first term—have failed, and public media has quite a wide base of support. (People tend to like Big Bird.) A few Republicans in both the House and the Senate—where the Party’s margins are fine—have expressed skepticism about legislating any cuts, though senior Republicans told reporters from NPR that they are confident the bill will pass when it comes up for a vote in the House next week.

More than anything, Trump’s attacks seem intended to demonstrate leverage—that he’ll use the tools available to come after journalism that displeases him. This applies regardless of how the journalism is paid for. Public funding is one potential source of leverage, but that leverage is far from total. Nor is it unique. Trump’s authoritarian designs have often been compared, including by Andrew Marantz in this magazine, to Viktor Orbán’s regime in Hungary. Orbán has gained a large measure of control over the media, but, as Matt Pearce, a former Los Angeles Times reporter who is now director of policy at Rebuild Local News, a public-policy advocacy group, noted to me recently, he did this, in no small part, by making it easier for outside allies to buy up and capture private companies. Nothing on this scale has happened in the U.S. (Yet.) But there have been some worrying signs. Jeff Bezos—the owner of the Washington Post, whose many other business interests are very dependent on the federal government—has interfered with his paper’s opinion pages in ways that have been widely interpreted as sucking up to Trump, and of which Trump has expressed explicit approval.

The most worrisome case is that of Paramount Global, the parent company of CBS, which is currently seeking F.C.C. approval for a merger; Trump has sued CBS News for supposedly defrauding the public in the way it edited an interview with Kamala Harris on “60 Minutes” last year, and, even though the complaint is absurd, CBS is poised to settle, a stance that appears to be linked to the merger. (Paramount has denied this.) Recently, Bill Owens, the executive producer of “60 Minutes,” quit, suggesting that corporate bosses were meddling with the program, which has continued to cover Trump sharply; last week, Lesley Stahl, the veteran “60 Minutes” journalist, told David Remnick on The New Yorker Radio Hour that the majority of the staff saw Owens as “heroic” for standing up to the pressure and viewed his departure as a “punch in the stomach.” The pressure, Stahl added, “makes me question whether any corporation should own a news operation.”

The White House, Carr, and supportive Republicans in Congress have tried to cast Trump’s crusade against NPR and PBS as an expression of “small government” principles, arguing that the modern media marketplace is abundant, and that state funding is fiscally irresponsible. And yet this isn’t true, at least, not at the local level; according to one study, the U.S. has lost more than a third of its newspapers in the past two decades, and more than two hundred counties now have no local news source at all. Craig Aaron, the co-C.E.O. of Free Press, a media-advocacy group, told me that for politicians who “want to do crime and steal, it’s great. But if you want to get reëlected, and you want to have your constituents know what you are doing, it’s a really big problem.” Aaron has heard this sentiment from lawmakers all over the country, he said.

In recent years, various states have passed, or at least considered, a range of measures to support local outlets, including tax breaks, fellowship programs for early-career journalists, and redistributing tech profits to newsrooms. New York, Illinois, and California each enacted one or some of these measures last year; there’s been movement in a similar direction, albeit to differing extents, in Connecticut, Maryland, Kansas, Hawaii, Washington State, and Oregon. (New York, meanwhile, just allocated four million extra dollars to public-radio stations in light of the federal threat.) These are mostly blue states, but such efforts have often had at least some bipartisan backing. And while popular perceptions of national media are sharply polarized, people generally trust their local news sources more—a bit like how “people hate Congress, but they kind of like their own Congressperson,” Pearce told me. Republican lawmakers in Oregon recently opposed a plan that would require Big Tech to pay for journalism that was shared on its platforms, he noted, but then counterproposed a tax-credit program for subscriptions to local news. “You have Republican leaders proposing public subsidies for journalism, out of recognition that there is a local-news crisis,” Pearce said.

Progress in public support for media has a long way to go, and is not linear. State governments have less money than their federal counterparts, and some states have lately proposed cuts to their public broadcasters—red Indiana, but also blue New Jersey, both citing budgetary constraints. California and Google both scaled back their initial contributions under a deal, struck last year, to jointly pump millions of dollars into local news.

The decline of local news, however, has already made it clear that the private sector can’t be trusted to produce it at scale—and the Trump years, marked as they have been by polarized tumult, distrust, and disinformation, have made it clear that what local news offers is more necessary than ever. More broadly, “we’re seeing, spectacularly demonstrated before our eyes, all the limitations of a hyper-commercialized media system, in the ways that they fold so easily, they prematurely obey a would-be autocrat, and also the rise of these media and tech oligarchs,” Pickard told me. “This is what the market produces.” The Trump moment might be one of threat and chaos—but it’s also, as a consequence, one of possibility. Pickard stressed to me that the world’s strongest democracies all spend much more on public media than the U.S., and that any long-term “re-democratization” project must learn this lesson. “It’s hard to imagine any of this happening under Trump,” he said. “But Trump’s not gonna be in power forever.” ♦