IN MY YEARS of writing this column, the politics and culture of U.S. public broadcasting has been a topic in regular rotation. During Democratic administrations, I’ve tended to bash both the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio for elitism, timidity, and pro-corporate bias.
But during Republican administrations it’s always seemed necessary to defend the very existence of a nonprofit, public-interest alternative in the vast, depressing, and sometimes dangerous strip mall that is U.S. commercial media.
These days the timidity of U.S. public broadcasting is still in evidence. For instance, NPR has steadfastly refused to join other prestigious media outlets in calling Donald Trump’s patent deliberate falsehoods by the appropriate four-letter Anglo-Saxon word: “Lies.” And as for elitism, take Victoria ... please!
But let’s put all that aside for now. The guard has changed again, and a new president has issued a budget blueprint that would eliminate any federal spending to support public broadcasting. So it’s time again to restate the obvious reasons why public media matter.
When you get down to it, the essential reasons are still the ones President Johnson cited in 1967 when he signed the bill creating the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. This commitment of resources, Johnson said, “announces to the world that our Nation wants more than just material wealth. ... [W]e want most of all to enrich [people’s] spirit [and to] make our Nation a replica of the old Greek marketplace, where public affairs took place in view of all the citizens.”
The last time the country was having this fight over public media funding, my passion came mostly from the fact that our family still had small children, and PBS programming provided some measure of insulation from the wolves of U.S. commerce. Today my kids are in their teens and 20s, and their favorite video outlets are Netflix and YouTube. But I’ll never forget what Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood meant to them when they were small. And our neighbor down the road tells us that Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood is doing the same for her preschoolers today.
However, in 2017, my main reason for defending public media is more about my adult neighbors out here in rural America, the ones who were tricked into voting for a self-obsessed billionaire who said he would be their voice. The important fact here is that 65 percent of the federal money spent on public broadcasting goes not for program production but simply to keep public TV and radio stations alive in rural areas where the audience is not large and affluent enough to support the station with donations.
Public broadcasting has become a crucial part of the national supply system for real news. In many cases NPR is the only institution left that brings high quality professional journalism into the homes and vehicles of people who may not have the time or educational background to navigate the wilds of the internet. Without it, they will be left with nothing but the poisoned flow of disinformation that dominates cable TV news. But maybe that’s what the new administration wants.
Previous efforts to kill public media have failed because Republican small-government types learned that the constituency for those services is not limited to latte-sipping, Prius-driving, Sufjan Stevens-loving urban sophisticates. Even in this age of fragmented, niche marketing, PBS children’s programming has a pretty universal reach. And judging from the listeners I hear on its call-in shows, the NPR audience has broadened considerably in the past decade.
Still, we can’t take any chances in the fight to save public media funding. U.S. public broadcasting certainly has its flaws—we’ll get back to those later. But its greatest strength is simply that it’s ours. Like the airwaves themselves, public media belong to all of us. And that idea alone is worth fighting for.
Danny Duncan Collum, author of the novel White Boy, teaches writing at Kentucky State University in Frankfort.
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