If
ever there was a sign that democracy in the
United States is in dire straits, it was Congress’s
rescission of $9 billion in
funding for public media and foreign aid,
achieved via a party-line vote of 216 to 213 on
July 18, 2025. The vote took place despite the
fact that millions of people wrote to their
elected representatives urging them not to cut
funds and that a majority
of Americans,
including Republicans, support federal funding
of public media.
Public
funding of media is not the problem that President
Donald Trump and
his puppet masters at the Heritage
Foundation claim
it is. Not enough public funding for it is the
real problem. According to public
media experts Victor
Pickard and Timothy Neff, “the U.S. government
is notable among democratic nations for how
little it funds its public media.”
Compare
the public media funding cuts to the $28
billion in
tax dollars that the Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) agency will receive thanks to
Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill—a subsidy that
goes against
public opinion.
A
well-resourced media ecosphere is essential to
democracy—an informed electorate is far more
capable of keeping its representatives
accountable than an ignorant one. Fascism
thrives on ignorance, and that is precisely what
the defunding of public media symbolizes within
the context of excessive funding of armed
enforcement agents.
Since
1967, congressionally appropriated funds have
been distributed to thousands of small broadcast
media outlets via the Corporation
for Public Broadcasting (CPB),
a private nonprofit organization. But CPB
funding represents only about 0.01
percent of
the federal budget. American media were never
very well-resourced—and that was always the
problem. For a nation of nearly 350 million
people, a few billion dollars of taxpayer
funding for public media is akin to crumbs from
a heavily laden table.
And
still, using those crumbs, small radio stations
managed to operate in all corners of the nation,
never fully thriving, and constantly relying on
pledge drives and corporate sponsorship to fill
budgetary gaps.
That
sliver of the federal budget just barely enabled
the maintenance of an essential public service.
“Although mainstream news media face
historically low levels of trust, public
broadcasting enjoys relatively high levels, even
among Trump supporters,” wrote Pickard
and Neff in the Columbia Journalism Review in
2021.
CPB
President and CEO Patricia Harrison concurred,
saying that “public
media has served families in every corner of
America, especially rural and tribal
communities, providing extraordinary vital
content and services free of charge.”
Moreover,
according to Harrison, “Cutting federal funding
could also put Americans at risk of losing
national and local emergency alerts that serve
as a lifeline to many Americans in times of
severe need.” Given the unprecedented flooding that
states like Texas and North Carolina faced in
July 2025 due to unchecked global warming, local
emergency alerts are more necessary than ever.
For
nearly two decades, I worked at KPFK, Pacifica
Radio in Los Angeles, a station that once relied
on CPB funding. At regular intervals, KPFK would
test—as required by virtue of being a public
radio station—its emergency alert system over
the airwaves. The loss of public funding is
likely to lead to the closure of many such
public radio stations, and therefore emergency
alerts, across the nation.
We
knew this was coming, and indeed, Americans
voted for it. The Heritage Foundation’s Mandate
for Leadership,
also known as Project 2025, made defunding
public media a major goal, claiming that “To
stop public funding [of media] is good policy
and good politics.” Advising a future Republican
president, the document’s authors quoted the
late conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin
Scalia as saying, “conservatives were being
‘confronted with a long-range problem of
significant social consequences—that is, the
development of a government-funded broadcast
system similar to the BBC.’”
Project
2025 specifically named those media outlets
deemed the greatest threats to conservative
ideology, saying,
“Stripping public funding would, of course, mean
that NPR, PBS, Pacifica Radio, and the other
leftist broadcasters would be shorn of the
presumption that they act in the public interest
and receive the privileges that often accompany
so acting.” And yet, NPR and PBS in
particular have often appeased the right, as per
years of analysis by the media watchdog group
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR).
Interestingly,
Project 2025’s authors understood that stripping
public funds for media would not impact big
media outlets such as NPR and PBS, saying,
“Defunding CPB would by no means cause NPR or
PBS… to file for bankruptcy,” and that “NPR and
PBS stations are in reality no longer
noncommercial, as they run ads in everything but
name for their sponsors.”
Indeed,
one can argue there is a correlation between
private funding and bias, and not public funding
and bias. The more a news outlet relies on
private sources of funding, the more likely it
is to play it safe to avoid upsetting its
sponsors.
U.S.
media has been so tilted toward the right that
we have a culture that is now dominated by
conservatism. If media outlets operated
according to the highest standards of
journalism, they would indeed be biased against
the doctrine favored by billionaires and
bigots—injustice, greed, domination, and
authoritarianism—values that thrive in a web of
lies and wither when exposed by facts. Not being
tough enough on right-wing ideas and policies
has, in part, paved the path to defunding the
media.
To
summarize, conservative forces have claimed
(wrongly) that NPR and PBS are biased against
them, admitted that those outlets aren’t as
reliant on public funding as smaller media
outlets, and voted to defund public media
anyway; they are hurting the constellation
of small
media outlets relying
on taxpayer funds. The long-term conservative
goal is to fuel public ignorance and the
subsequent embrace of the morally bankrupt
ideology of the right.
The
coming mass shuttering of small publicly funded
media outlets will happen within the context of
already expanding news
deserts.
The U.S. has, for generations, suffered from
unsustainable models of media funding. Without
public funding, news outlets have few options:
they can rely on corporate advertisements and
sponsorships, appeal to foundations for private
support, or cultivate subscriptions and
donations from individuals.
Corporate
advertising and private philanthropic support
are most problematic and can result in subtle
pressures on editorial coverage to appease
funders. Meanwhile, subscriptions and donations
are extremely challenging, especially for
smaller media outlets, and rely on a populace
weary of rising costs and stagnant wages.
Public
funding of the media is an antidote to bias, not
the driver of it. Just as public funding offers
solutions to the crises of health care, child
care, banking, and education, it is an obvious
solution to the crisis of unsustainable
journalism.
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