Bringing a Tote Bag to a Gunfight
With the change of leadership in Washington, there is a quiet debate going around about the future of public broadcasting federal funding. Here is what it misses.
Welcome to Dispatch #72 of The Audio Insurgent.
Like you, I’m clearing out a few things before checking out for the holidays. Here are a few.
Ho ho ho…
[TODAY’S FIRST THING: MY 2025 PREDICTION]
This year’s crop of Nieman Lab “Predictions for Journalism” have dropped. Here is mine. It is about how much journalism and media in 2025 can learn from independent bookstores. I struggled with what to write about this year, but after a reporting trip to The Kings English in Salt Lake City, Utah, the dots connected for me.
Now is the point that I say what I always say this time of year: I don’t do predictions. I think the most important function of predictions is it gives us permission to speak plainly about today. So I focus on those subjects.
The previous two years, I've written about media and journalism more broadly. Last year, I wrote words of caution about the amount of attention going towards the presidential election. In 2023, I wrote about the need for journalists to focus on people instead of power. In 2022, I wrote about large legacy media companies abandoning their ill-rendered podcast strategies (totally happened). For 2021, I wrote about podcast acquisitions ending and risk tolerance going down (still playing out). For 2020, I wrote about the coming dearth of hit shows in podcasting (that too). For 2019, I wrote about the emergence of cross-promotion to build audience (now a common practice). For 2018, I wrote about the emerging new styles of podcasts (yup). And in 2017, my prediction concerned the emerging stratification between haves and have notes in podcasting (still an issue today, perhaps more now than ever).
[TODAY’S MAIN THING: BRINGING A TOTE BAG TO A GUNFIGHT] Even though it has been nine years since I worked full time in public media, my social circle still really deeply intersects with U.S. public radio. So I hear a lot.
Over the past month since the presidential election, I’ve been hearing an uptick in concerned chatter about the future of federal funding for public broadcasting. Whenever this debate comes up, I think back to an afternoon when I was sitting in my triangularly shaped office in NPR’s old Massachusetts Avenue headquarters. From there I could see the very tip of the statue on the U.S. Capitol peaking above the building across the street. I always joked that my office had “a Capitol view.” I was sitting in that office staring out the window one afternoon in late 2010 when my phone rang.
After answering the phone, the caller just screamed “LIBERAL!” and said nothing else.
All NPR phone numbers shared the same area code and prefix, and some people were calling random combinations of the last four numbers and screaming at whomever answered the call. This time, it was my turn.
This happened in the wake of NPR’s firing of commentator Juan Williams and the network’s critics were worked up into a lather, demanding a withdrawal of federal funding and punitive measures against the network and its stations.
I informed my caller that I was, in fact (and against the trope repeated often through these debates), an NPR employee who was also a registered Republican. I could hear them stammer for a moment trying to figure out what to say, then screamed out “LIBERAL!” again and hung up the phone.
Those calls came in for a few days, the pinnacle being a bomb threat that led to a temporary evacuation of the building.
The anti-NPR fervor reached such a peak in the following months that the organization lost its head of news, its CEO, and took a lot of reputational dents, all over claims that the network had a liberal editorial bent and served an exclusive audience of liberal elites (neither of which are binarily true, btw). It became such a constant target of the right that a CNN poll in early 2011 asked respondents to estimate what portion of the federal government’s budget went to public broadcasting. The public’s response? Five percent.
If that were true, it would have been terrific. That would be $115 billion, or more than 250 times what the federal allocation actually was. Instead of five percent, the actual number was one-tenth of one percent of federal spending.
And here lies the major problem with these arguments over public funding of public radio’s public service: we have set an impossibly outsized burden on an underfunded system of stations and organizations, asking them to take on the Herculean task of providing public service to the American people on what could generously be called an unfunded mandate. And when public radio missteps, we blow it out of proportion and immediately move to punish. It’s setting public media up for a fight it can never win. It’s akin to them bringing a public radio tote bag to a gunfight.
When the Public Broadcasting Act was signed into law in November, 1967, leading to the creation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and eventually NPR, PBS, and hundreds of robust public broadcast organizations, it held up an inspiring idea: that our collective freedom relies on the communication of ideas without commercial or governmental influence. The Act called for public telecommunications to “encourage the development of programming that involved creative risks and that addresses the needs of unserved and underserved audiences” and to “facilitate the full development of public telecommunications in which programs of high quality, diversity, creativity, excellence, and innovation, which are obtained from diverse sources, will be made available.”
In the ceremony marking the signing of the Act by President Johnson, he remarked that the problem with advances in communication technology was “not making miracles–but managing miracles.” Public broadcasting was seen as a means to achieve that by “broadcast[ing] good music, exciting plays…reports on the whole fascinating range of human activity.” And that it should receive support from the Government but be “guarded from Government or from party control.” Arguably that mission is just as relevant today as it was when President Johnson signed it into law fifty-seven years ago.
These ideas were shared by countries around the world, who, often earlier than the United States, put systems and funding in place to create their own public broadcasting entities to produce and distribute television and radio programming. However, other countries did it at a significantly different scale.
The United States’ $535 million investment in public broadcasting equals a per capita investment of $1.72 per American citizen.
In Germany, the public invests €6.7 billion in its stations and programming, a per capita spend equal to $86.58. In the United Kingdom, the public investment is £3.74 billion, equal to a per capita investment of $69.59. Denmark’s investment in public broadcasting is on par with that of the United States, yet Denmark’s entire national population is roughly equal to the population of Wisconsin. Danish per capita investment is more than fifty times that of the U.S. And in each of these public broadcasting systems, the broadcasters serve a vastly broader cross-section of their population than PBS and NPR do in the United States. All these countries, and dozens more, agree with the need and value of public broadcasting, but invest in their own systems at levels beyond us…and achieve results that reflect those investments.
Yet, despite the meager investment in public media, our organizations and stations accomplish quite a bit. According to Nielsen ratings data, NPR alone generates 2.8 billion hours of listening a year to just its broadcast programming. To give you some way to wrap your head around how huge a number 2.8 billion hours is, 2.8 billion hours is basically the entirety of human history, as homo sapiens first emerged roughly 2.8 billion hours ago. And listeners give that amount of attention to NPR programming every single year. And when you factor in listening hours to locally produced content at public radio stations, that number jumps to over 8 billion hours of listening, every year.
One of the benefits of these occasional moments where public media’s funding and editorial value are brought into question is that its critics unintentionally reinforce the idea that public media is an important component of a healthy media ecosystem and democracy. By suggesting that NPR and stations don’t hold themselves up to the high standards of its mission, that’s an acknowledgement that the mission is meaningful and validates the need to protect that ideal.
The action often proposed by its critics, defunding NPR and public radio stations, is likely to produce the exact opposite result from what they say they want: a balanced, reliable source of news, information, and entertainment for all Americans. If we are really committed to building free non-profit media accessible to all Americans regardless of their ability to pay, representative and responsible media that, according to E. B. White, “should address itself to the ideal of excellence, not the ideal of acceptability,” then we need our financial support to match our ideals for it–or we need to have an honest conversation about expectations.
The reason I wrote this is to remind those who care about public radio of what the industry was founded to do–to see how inspiring those ideals still are today, and invite those who care to ask: is what we are doing the best articulation of those aspirations and ideals? Are we meeting the moment?
I’m not suggesting an answer to that question, but in its defensive posture, public media rarely, if ever, goes on the offensive on these issues and leads with a concrete vision for the future that deserves any level of federal support.
There are many breathtaking moments in public radio’s local and national programming every single day. But it isn’t perfect. It is not without faults and shortcomings. We give it so little, and yet ask so much of it. Instead of punishing its perceived missteps, we need to recognize its work towards our shared belief that a well-informed public is a foundational part of American democracy. As Mr. White concluded, “Once in a while it does, and you get a quick glimpse of its potential.”
Okay, that’s it for today.
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Make great things. I’ll be listening.
--Eric