Public Media Isn’t Optional for Democracy
Free Press Board Chair Victor Pickard explains why on the latest episode of ‘Money on the Left’
Victor Pickard is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and co-director of its Media, Inequality & Change Center. He’s also Free Press’ board chair.
On the latest episode of the “Money on the Left” podcast, Pickard talks with hosts Scott Ferguson and Billy Saas about authoritarian threats to journalism — and what it would take to build a public-media system that would strengthen our democracy.
The team at “Money on the Left” gave Pressing Issues permission to feature part of Pickard’s appearance, which we’ve edited for length and clarity. For the complete episode, visit the Money on the Left site or listen to the episode.
Money on the Left: It might be a good place for us to start with the death of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, as a kind of case study of where we are at.
Victor Pickard: We were pretty much a global anomaly by not establishing a more public-oriented broadcast-media system, one dependent on the public airwaves. Because we went down this commercial trajectory, there was this ongoing media-reform activism that sought to create a different kind of system, and at the same time, there was a growing awareness of the systemic limitations of a commercial broadcast-media system vis-à-vis democratic society.
In other words, we found out, quite glaringly, that there were a number of things a commercial broadcast-media system would never do — never make sure that all communities have access to a baseline level of news and information, as well as cultural and educational fare.
So this basically set the stage for why we finally established a public-broadcasting system in the late ’60s that was always woefully underfunded. It was never insulated sufficiently from economic precarity and from political pressures.
And just to bring it up to our current moment — public media was always chronically underfunded, and up until last year, when it was finally defunded completely, it was getting a whopping $1.60 per person per year at the federal level. This was literally off the charts compared to most democratic countries worldwide.
And this has created all kinds of problems, especially for rural stations that disproportionately relied on federal funding to stay afloat.
MOTL: We could spend a few minutes talking about what this Trump 2.0 regime is doing to the media system, and perhaps with some focus on Brendan Carr and what he’s been up to.
VP: Essentially, they’re trying to weaponize every instrument at their disposal. That includes everything from frivolous lawsuits to relying on an apparatchik like Brendan Carr at the Federal Communications Commission to carry out Trump’s agenda and serve as his attack dog.
And basically do everything they can in their power to ensure that our entire media system looks and sounds like Fox News and brooks no dissent. Basically, they’re trying to undercut any capacity for dissenting views or independent journalism. And this takes many different forms.
It takes the form of trying to facilitate these media mergers — the Ellisons, these friendly oligarchs that the Trump administration can lean on. And really, they’ve taken a page out of the Viktor Orbán playbook for controlling the media, about oligarchic media capture.
An authoritarian regime like Orbán’s, and like Trump’s, can quickly realize they don’t have to take over newsrooms by gunpoint. Instead, they can rely on friendly, aligned oligarchs. They can change media policy to undercut any potential for independent journalism.
They defund public media in various ways. They capture public media. We’re seeing all these things happening at once. It’s quite overwhelming to try to make sense of all of it. And also just constantly verbally attacking journalists, which has the indirect effect of chilling news-media discourse.
Journalists quickly internalize what they’re allowed to cover, what’s going to cause problems and what’s going to be inherently controversial. Take all these pieces together, and we’re basically left with a very compliant media system — much worse than Trump 1.0.
MOTL: So, to find our way to some promise — where do we look?
VP: The silver lining to the destruction Trump has brought upon so many of our core systems and infrastructures is that it really gives us this rare historical opportunity to rebuild things from the ground up. And to remind ourselves that what we had before was not necessarily awesome.
It was always already inherently, structurally flawed, especially our media system. So to be able to reset and rebuild, reconstruct, reimagine — that’s really an incredible opportunity, and something we'll hopefully be able to start working on in just a couple of years.
MOTL: Some of the concrete ideas you've discussed are using, amplifying and transforming extant public infrastructures.
VP: Absolutely. I think we have these already-existing public infrastructures we can leverage. I would also include post offices. There are tens of thousands of post offices across the country in far-flung locations, and that is critical public infrastructure.
And it would also be poetic if we were to deploy our postal system toward disseminating news and information, which really was its original purpose in this country — it was primarily a newspaper-delivery infrastructure, where up to 95 percent of the weight of the postal system, well into the 1800s, was made up of newspapers.
So I think just using those spaces as a place where we can house local community journalists — in fact, speaking of real-world examples, in the middle of the cornfields in Urbana, Illinois, media activists more than 20 years ago raised funds and bought the downtown post office.
And to this day, it serves as a multimedia hub for community-news production. I think that’s a great proof of concept of something we could replicate across the country. Also, public-access media centers — the PEG stations. There’s a fantastic one in Philadelphia called PhillyCAM, which is also multimedia. It does video, audio and various kinds of media production, and involves members of the community.
So I think these are things we can point out and say that this isn’t just pie-in-the-sky dreaming. These kinds of models already exist. We need to find ways to replicate them and scale them.
MOTL: When it comes to the politics of media — broadcast, print, journalism — what’s worked and what hasn’t? Are there any lessons here regarding the scale of politicizing this?
VP: Well, I think right now, just out of sheer necessity, we have to focus on the state and local levels. At the state level, we’re seeing a number of public-investment schemes toward subsidizing local journalism. The exemplar, the gold standard, has always been the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, where they’ve been allocating millions of dollars towards local journalistic initiatives and have been quite successful.
We’re going to need public investments. We're going to need to shift toward this predominantly public-media model, especially at the local level. So when I’m thinking of scale, I don’t necessarily mean scaling it up to the federal level — although I do think at a certain point we are going to have to have these policy interventions at the federal level — but it’s also just about replication.
And just learning what could work in communities across the country. I’ve been talking more and more about this idea of a public-media center in every community across the country, again federally guaranteed but locally owned and controlled.
So I think we need to have those dreams on our horizon and just work toward them however we can.
Teamwork
About that White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Over at the Free Press blog, Tim Karr shares insights into the “perverse bargain” journalists are making when it comes to covering Trump and attending the White House Correspondents Dinner.
“Why do corporate news outlets routinely cave in the face of dishonest and corrupt political leaders,” Karr asks at the top of his piece, which breaks down the “cowardice” of media outlets capitulating to the Trump administration.
Timothy Karr
Unconstitutional acts. In a July 31 filing with the Federal Trade Commission, Free Press told the FTC that its latest effort to regulate artificial intelligence is an unconstitutional abuse of its authority — noting that the agency’s proposal is designed to police speech that the Trump administration disagrees with.
“To serve the Trump White House’s censorship goals, the FTC appears dead-set on abandoning its own precedent and practice while violating the First Amendment in the process,” Shilpa Jindia, Free Press policy counsel and coauthor of the filing, said.
“The ultimate aim of the agency’s policy statement is to anoint itself judge and jury over AI content, deciding on the truthfulness and accuracy of what it vaguely describes as ‘ideological’ statements,” Jindia added. “And while there are many sound reasons to provide public-interest oversight of the unaccountable tech companies behind AI systems, this type of speech control is not one of them.”
The kicker
“I would keep coming back to the same drum I’ve been beating on forever, which is the collapse of local journalism, and how that’s treated as something utterly beyond our control. It’s like a natural disaster — unfortunate, to the extent that people even know about it.”—Victor Pickard from the “Money on the Left” podcast
