Report Calls for Stable Public Funding and Community Representation in Public Media

NEWS RELEASE

FOR RELEASE THURSDAY, September 19, 2024, 11:00 AM
FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT:
Michael Swerdlow or Ralph Nader, 202-387-8030 or [email protected]

New Report Reveals Corporate Capture in NPR and Local Stations

Report Calls for New Approach to Public Media to Ensure Stable Public Funding and Community Representation

 The Center for Study of Responsive Law (CSRL), the Ralph Nader-founded public interest group, today released a groundbreaking study – The Public’s Media: The Case for a Democratically Funded and Locally Rooted News Media in an Era of Newsroom Closures. The report offers strong evidence that National Public Radio (NPR), The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), and local public media stations are failing to live up to the mission that The Public Broadcasting Act assigned them: “to encourage the development of programming that involves creative risks and that addresses the needs of unserved and underserved audiences, particularly children and minorities.” The report notes that these institutions lack the resources and connections to local communities that are necessary to sustain a free press in the face of the for-profit news media’s financial apocalypse.

“NPR has a long way to go upward. This report offers a variety of special, sustainable funding plans for contemplation by the listening audience, the NPR journalists, staff, and governing bodies. The founding laws of public broadcasting and their pragmatic visionaries afford a legacy of enablement for their reporting to adopt without further delay.” – Ralph Nader.

“Public Media is rightfully concerned that their funding is under threat from corporate advertisers, donors, and politicians; but that is ever the more reason to root themselves in local communities and advocate for the stable public funding that is necessary to pick up for the disappearance of local for-profit newsrooms.” – Michael Swerdlow

According to the report:

* The business model of local for-profit news media has collapsed. Two newsrooms close every week in America. With each closure, new communities join the over 1,800 counties that have no trusted local source of daily news. In many local communities, public media are now some of the only dedicated, professional newsgatherers.

* NPR and local public media stations receive public funding at roughly 1/20^th the rate of peer democracies. Accordingly, most local NPR stations lack the resources to systematically gather and report on local news. The public media stations that can afford to gather and produce significant news programming are reliant on the wealthy. This business model requires public news media to commodify their audiences and fund our public news media by maintaining what one NPR News Audience Profile called “a distinguished audience. They are educated, business decision makers that are active in their communities.”

* The private financing imperative has driven NPR and local stations to give controlling majorities on their governing boards to corporate leaders, their families, and station managers.  Former NPR Reporter Sonari Glinton summed it up: On the “WBEZ Board of Directors… [is] an executive of Bain,… Principle of Private Family Office,  Managing Director and Head of Alternative Private Equity…Discover Financial… where is the seat for the community on that board?”

The report concludes that public underfunding and elite governance leave existing U.S. Public Media unable to fill the gap left by the disappearance of local, challenging, for-profit news media that have been central to our democracy for nearly 250 years.

The report chronicles the United States’ history of guaranteeing the financial viability of a free press, from constructing the U.S. Postal Service in the 18th and 19th centuries to delivering newspapers at enormous discounts, building the mass media broadcast systems of the 20th century, and finally through the creation of over 1,000 public radio and television stations. Swerdlow said, “Similar action is required today.”

 The report catalogs the many possible public financing mechanisms that could secure the material existence of the free press, insulate it from politicians and the super-rich, and ground our newsrooms within the communities that they serve. “This is not a pipe-dream. In fact, it is a reality in most peer democracies,” added Swerdlow.

In addition to stable public funding, public news media must also be rooted within the communities that they serve. To achieve this, the report recommends that stations (1) maintain governing boards that are representative of the communities they serve; (2) provide communities with a freedom of information right of access to their news media’s operations; and (3) host and publicize representative deliberations on citizens’ informational needs.

“When we lose reliable local news outlets – as tens of millions of Americans have – we lose our ability to understand our neighborhoods, communities, governments, and even the economy. The Public’s Media makes the choice clear: spend the equivalent of one tenth of one percent (.01%) of the federal budget to maintain a free press and root public media institutions within the communities that they serve or watch as our democracy continues to fade away.” – Michael Swerdlow