Public media funding has become so inadequate in supporting local news reporting that it needs a drastic overhaul, a report released Thursday by the Center for Study of Responsive Law concludes.
Consumer advocate Ralph Nader, who founded the Center in 1968, supplies the lengthy, alarm-bell-ringing introduction for the report, which is written by Michael Swerdlow, a researcher for the Center and a Columbia University law student. “This lack of funding for public media, at a time when two newsrooms are closing every week in America, animates the urgencies and proposals in Swerdlow’s report,” Nader writes.
The report asserts that National Public Radio (NPR), the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and local public media stations are failing short in their missions as established by the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. Much of the report focuses on NPR, lamenting not only the amount but also the nature of its funding and detailing how local news reporting across the country has suffered.
“Today, only one in five of the 1,100 public media stations produces local journalism,” Swerdlow writes.
“It’s a lousy situation, so we’re trying to provoke some discussion,” Nader said in a conversation with the Local News Initiative the day before the report’s release. He contended that the public media companies “need to be shaken up. They live in fear: fear of losing money, fear of the lobbies.”
The report states that the American public media system is “deprived of adequate public funding as a result of Republican antagonism and Democratic acquiescence.” It compares U.S. spending on public media to that of other democracies, noting that the CPB’s 2022 budget was $465 million, which is 0.008% of the 2023 proposed total federal budget of $5.8 trillion. “The U.S. spends about $50 million more a year on our 136 military marching bands than the entire public broadcasting system,” Swerdlow writes.
The report also notes that in 2011 the U.S. ranked last “among 18 peer democracies” in public media spending per person. “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 $124.46,” the report states. “By 2019, the United States was still spending $3 per person while France was spending $76. Botswana was spending $18, Czechia $60 and Norway $110.47.”
Given the relative lack of U.S. government support, the report asserts, public media organizations have attempted to fill the gaps via funding sources that cause other problems.
“Our public newsrooms must attract funding from corporate advertisers, donors and the ultra-wealthy to function,” Swerdlow said Thursday in a teleconferencing call with journalists. “This business model requires them to commodify their audiences in contravention of their non-commercial mandate to maintain what one NPR audience profile called a ‘distinguished audience.’…This is at odds with the founding mandate of serving unserved and underserved communities.”
NPR Chief Communications Officer Isabel Lara, who is quoted in the report, responded via email Thursday that Swerdlow’s reasoning regarding donors’ possible influence on the network’s coverage and audience’s makeup is “flawed.”
“Like I explained to Mr Swerdlow repeatedly, there is a strong ‘firewall’ between the news and the business side of NPR,” Lara said. “Funding is separate from the editorial decision-making process in NPR’s newsroom. NPR journalists have no role in selecting sponsors or donors. Sponsors or donors have no role in NPR’s editorial decisions. I said this to Mr. Swerdlow, with whom we cooperated fully during his research.”
The report offers several possible remedies to increase support for local news, including the public media system taking “steps to reallocate existing resources toward news deserts.” But most of the suggestions involve boosting government funding of public media.
“First and simplest, Congress could make funding for journalism part of mandatory spending,” Swerdlow writes, suggesting that the funding be “authorized on an indefinite basis” like programs such as Social Security and Medicare.
The report then offers various mechanisms for allocating these monies. One idea is “to give every citizen news coupons, the equivalent of a news subscription that they could give to any qualifying newsroom. This system turns every member of a community into a paying customer for newsrooms and reduces the ability of politicians to influence which outlets get funding.” Swerdlow writes that the District of Columbia is debating such a news coupon proposal.
He also suggests that community members could vote every two or four years “on which newsrooms receive public funding.” And if there are concerns about “unrepresentative groups allocating votes or coupons,” communities could convene “deliberative citizen bodies” to determine “what journalism is missing in their communities and provide funding to outlets to fill those gaps. In the citizen deliberation model, a quasi-representative group of fifty to three hundred citizens would be chosen by lot every few years to deliberate and decide on news funding decisions.”
No matter the mechanism, Swerdlow and Nader argue that public media needs more public money. “The choice is clear,” Swerdlow said on Thursday’s call. “Spend 0.1% of the public’s budget to maintain a free press and root public media institutions within the communities they serve, or watch as our democracy continues to fade away.”
Article image by Sage Ross used under CC BY-SA 2.0 license (Flickr)
