Public Radio, Public Media and Local News Deserts
Restoring Public Media to Its Founding Purposes Is More Essential Than Ever
The late sixties was a heady time for the civic pioneers who persuaded Congressional lawmakers to provide the American people with radio and television programs with real news—local and national—and also report what civic advocates and civic communities were proposing or doing. In 1961 commercial television stations were described by the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Newton Minow as a “vast wasteland,” before the National Association of Broadcasters. The audience was startled. (He could have included radio in his critique.) But things only got more commercial, profit-driven, and violative of the Communications Act of 1934 standard of providing for the “public interest, convenience and necessity,” information needs of viewers and listeners.
Encouraged by pragmatic visionaries like the former president of CBS Fred Friendly, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Ford Foundation, Congress acted and, in 1969, gave birth to Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and in 1970 the National Public Radio (NPR). They were mandated to be publicly-funded serious news gatherers, featuring presenters and reflectors of diverse voices, political and civic institutions, culture, and people in their communities. Commercial entertainment, music, sports, and incessant advertisements were left for the commercial stations.
As Bill Siemering, one of the organizers and first program director of NPR, said in 1970: “National Public Radio will not regard its audience as a ‘market’ or in terms of disposable income…”
Fast forward, NPR’s budget, mostly stripped of Congressional funding, became reliant on funding from corporations and wealthy donors and has indeed become a “market” with all that such commercialization entails for its programming priorities and biases.
Today, NPR and its affiliate stations have about 30 ads an hour using the repetitive phrase “support for this station comes from…” It has too many entertainment-celebrity stories, too much music time (especially after 6:00 pm on weekends), too little local content being produced by NPR’s hundreds of local station affiliates, too much self-censorship regarding corporate malfeasance and power, too much indifference to the civic community, too much aloof smugness. Many of their editors and reporters are uncommunicative and many of their managers are obsessed with raising money and shaping programming decisions accordingly.
NPR has been largely ignored by Congress because the former critics—conservative Republicans—now like its receptivity to their opinions and because commercial interests like Walmart, Chevron, Eli Lilly, Amazon, Raymond James Brokers, and large Banks advertise and support NPR and PBS. As a result, there has been a serious absence of supportive Congressional hearings and oversight. The House Energy & Commerce Committee did, however, hold a hearing because House Speaker Mike Johnson believes NPR needs to be held “accountable for its ideological bias and contempt for facts.” Speaker Johnson is not known for his appreciation of facts.
Public media escapes scrutiny and higher expectation levels by its audience because comparisons with the rancid commercial radio/TV stations makes it look good. NPR and PBS do have some good programs—documentaries, features from the field, and some investigative reports, especially when, for example, NPR collaborates with nonprofit media groups like Pro Publica.
However, its news slots raise the issue of mimicry of their commercial counterparts. Top-of-the-hour news by NPR is just like that of CBS or ABC—just three minutes or less of often the same news bite stories. The local affiliates are not much better with the exception of several stations like WNYC-FM (New York) or WAMC (Albany), WGBH (Boston), KQED-FM (San Francisco), and KAXE (Northern Minnesota) that have numerous full-time local reporters. Restoring public media to its founding purposes is more essential than ever as financing for the private press has collapsed and 1800 counties now lack a daily local news source.
Michael Swerdlow, the author of our report, “The Public’s Media: The Case for a Democratically Funded and Locally Rooted News Media in an Era of Newsroom Closures,” demonstrated that NPR’s “commercialization means that public media remains reliant on the satisfaction of corporate donors and is obsessed with treating its ‘audience’ as a market….” This has meant that many of its talented, experienced reporters are underchallenged, working on routine, repetitive abbreviated deliveries that invoke pathos.
Our report is designed to spark support to return Public Media to its original public interest missions and decrease corporate domination on its national and local station Boards of Directors. The report notes that “The United States spends $3 per person, New Zealand spends $21, Canada spends $33, Australia $53, Japan spends $67, the U.K. spends $97, and Germany spends 41 times more at $124.” Public Media needs more adequate public and per capita funding. The Public Media must become structurally more open to the civic communities’ information needs and inputs which were the legislation’s original inspiration.
Swerdlow’s report is deep on constructive reforms, innovative proposals, and references to other Western nations’ approaches to governance and funding of their Public Media. His analysis explains how the collapses of the “business model” for local for-profit news media—hundreds of daily and weekly newspaper closings or retrenchments—leaves Public Media with even greater responsibilities to fill gaps created by the spread of news deserts in county after county.
We invite audiences to raise their expectation levels for Public Media’s daily performance and demand an annual public budget of about $10 billion dollars (the cost of two-thirds of an unneeded aircraft carrier) to provide the information and two-way engagements with the audience that gives meaning to the functioning of our First Amendment protections. We also invite PBS and NPR staff to share their concerns about the decline of Public Media with us by sending an email to: info@csrl.org or sending a letter to the address below.
You can receive a printed copy of our report by sending a check for $15.00 to: CSRL, P.O. Box 19367, Washington, DC, 20036 (a PDF version is available online at CSRL.ORG).
You should find it troubling, fascinating, empowering, and quite original in its analysis, data, and recommendations.
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