Defunding Public Media: Threats, Stakes, and the Future of Democracy

Cory Barker: In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act into law, establishing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, known as the CPB. It was a monumental step ensuring that educational and public interest news was available to all Americans, free from commercial pressures. Fast forward 50 years. During his first term, President Donald Trump's administration made one of the most aggressive attempts yet to dismantle the CPB, proposing to eliminate federal funding for Public Broadcasting. The argument? That PBS and NPR should stand on their own without taxpayer support. The reaction was swift, with pushback from journalists, educators, and communities who rely on public media for everything from breaking news to children's programming. Now, the Trump administration is once again calling for the defunding of the CPB, a move that could drastically impact stations across the country. Could NPR and PBS survive another round of cuts? And what happens to journalism and democracy itself if they can?

Matt Jordan: To explore these questions, we're going to talk with Victor Pickard. Victor's research explores the history and political economy of media institutions, media activism, and media policy. He's especially interested in the future of journalism and the role media plays in democracy. Victor is the C. Edwin Baker Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, where he co-directs the Media, Inequality, and Change Center, known as the MIC Center. He has written extensively about media reform, public media, and the threats facing independent journalism. His books include Democracy Without Journalism, Confronting the Misinformation Society, and America's Battle for Democracy—The Triumph of Corporate Libertarianism and the Future of Media Reform. Beyond academia, Victor has worked on media policy in Washington DC and regularly advises journalists, policymakers, and activists on media reform. His insights have been featured in The Washington Post, the Guardian, Columbia Journalism Review, and many other outlets. Victor, welcome to News Over Noise.

Victor Pickard: Thanks so much for having me on the show.

Matt Jordan: It's really happy to talk with you about these issues, which are, obviously, the last couple of months have been a whirlwind of change. And so, somebody—having somebody who knows the history and knows the kind of future maybe of public media is going to help our listeners understand a lot of this. So, I'm going to begin with a historical question then. What is the history of public media in America? Where did it come from? And how did we get what we have?

Victor Pickard: Thanks, Matt. I'm glad you're starting out with such an easy, softball question. This could take a little while. But I will summarize it. I'll give you a capsule history, which really deserves a much longer discussion. Somewhat counterintuitively, I think the history of public broadcasting in the United States really should begin at least 90 years ago. And this goes back to the early days of commercial radio, when there was an actual debate about what the nature of radio should be in a Democratic society, how it should be structurally designed, whether it should be advertising dependent, for example, or whether it should be publicly supported. And unlike most Democratic countries around the world, the US went down a very different path by deciding to develop a predominantly commercial broadcast media system that was so heavily reliant on advertising revenue. But what few people realize is that there was—this was not inevitable. This was not for ordained. In fact, there was a robust debate in the early '30s, especially led by educators, many of whom were based at land grant universities, who really saw the Democratic potential, the educational potential of broadcast media. And they really pushed for an alternative system.In fact, it's a slight exaggeration to say it narrowly missed. Although if you look closely at the debate, it actually it was—it could have easily gone the other way, which was there was almost a Wagner Hatfield Amendment to the 1934 Communications Act that would have allocated 25% of all radio frequencies to non-profit programming. So had that gone through, our broadcast media and, indeed, arguably our entire media system, might look much different today. But not leaving your listeners in suspense, that it didn't happen that way. We went down this other trajectory. And there's sort of two—this is where the paths kind of bifurcate. So, within the commercial broadcast media system, there was still ongoing activism to try to carve out a public sector within the commercial system. And these media reform battles went on throughout the 1940s. I chronicled them in my dissertation and what became my first book. But down the other path, and this is where someone, for example, Josh Shepperd in his new book, Shadow of the New Deal, he chronicles what happened, which is it's not as if all the educators just packed up and went home once they lost that battle in 1934. They continued to advocate for an alternative system, a system that was focused more on educational programming. And this is what ultimately, after decades of advocacy, there were a couple important policy decisions. For example, in 1952, Frieda Hennig, the first female commissioner at the FCC, led the charge to make a big allocation for television spectrum to be devoted to educational affairs. So, there were a couple big steps along the way. But I would say the primary pieces of this movement that have ultimately led to our public broadcasting system was from the grassroots, this continued pressure from educators and other activist groups, but also the big foundations got involved. The Ford Foundation, for example. Carnegie got involved. And they devoted tremendous resources into incubating this alternative infrastructure that ultimately did develop into the Public Broadcasting system. And that maybe will fill in a couple more details in our discussion. I know this has been a long-winded historical journey already. But suffice to say that it officially came into being with the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 passed by LBJ. And that eventually led to '69 and '70. 1970, when PBS and NPR, respectively, came into being. So not as long of a history as many Democratic countries have with their public broadcasting systems. But that just gives you a broad overview. And again, some key details to fill in yet. But that's the broad sketch of the narrative.

Matt Jordan: So, we talk about battles. We talk about contestations. And again, these things always emerge as things that we're talking about in a deliberative democracy. So, you've sketched out the kind of eventual emergence of this. But who was the opposition? What forces kind of won the day in terms of stopping that 1934 carve out of 25% for—like, what were the forces that were driving the anti-public broadcasting narrative?

Victor Pickard: Sure. So, as you probably could guess, and many of your listeners could probably guess, the people who or the groups that were most adamantly opposed to a public, more of a public broadcasting system, where those people and groups, those individuals and groups who stood to gain from a commercial broadcasting system. And already by the early '30s, you had a kind of industry coalition formation that combined commercial broadcasters. And to be clear, the 1934 Communications Act, which you could say, if you're going to be generous, there's a bit of a mixed bag in terms of it established the Federal Communications Commission. It established some normative guidelines. But by and large, what it really did was sanctify this commercial broadcast system. And not only that, but it basically granted the power to a handful of corporations. And the two biggest ones that ended up really dominating the early commercial broadcasting system was NBC and CBS. There was a smaller one, Mutual Broadcasting System, but much smaller than the other two. And almost immediately, despite all this lobbying from the commercial industries and I refer to them as corporate libertarians at this time. But despite all of that, media reformers very quickly pushed against this system. And you start to see signs of that by the late '30s and into the '40s, when I argue that the New Deal arrived late and stayed longer at the Federal Communications Commission than other sectors of government. And at first, they tried to do some old-fashioned monopoly antitrust busting or trust busting and antitrust. And they broke up—this is kind of beyond our imagination today. But they forced NBC to divest itself of one of its two major networks. So, they basically broke up a big media monopoly. And that's how we got ABC. But you might not be surprised at going from two big players to three big players did not transform the media landscape. So, these battles continue throughout the '40s. And again, it was very clear, not to sound too Manichaean about all of it, but on the one side, you had social movement groups. You had public interest defenders. You had New Dealers. And on the other side, you had these kind of market libertarians, these lobbyists for the industries who later used red baiting tactics as a way to discredit the reformers. And this is an interesting parallel with some of the things we're seeing today. But that is ultimately how we ended up with—by the end of the '40s, we got the Fairness Doctrine, which today is often held up as the high-water mark for progressive media policy making. But in fact, it was seen as a consolation prize by media reformers in the '40s. That was after they had lost all these other more structural battles to try to carve out a public sector within our broadcast media system. So again, another very long-winded answer. But there's just so much to say about this fascinating history. And we still probably will need to hit on a few more points to make sense of our present predicament.

Matt Jordan: So, one thing I could ask you in terms as a follow-up is that a lot of what we're hearing now is an echo of this day. In your work, you've talked a lot about one of the needs for public broadcasting that emerges from these longer debates about this is just the idea of public interest journalism, right? That serving the public interest is just something that the market can't do very well. And you've described this as market failure. So, can you just sketch out what you mean by media or news market failure in terms of our media ecosystem today?

Victor Pickard: Sure. So, to give first a little bit of context for this idea of market failure, it comes straight out of neoclassical mainstream economics. Although oftentimes in a standard textbook, it's treated as this weird anomaly. It's like when things glitch a little bit. And it's the one time when government has a legitimate role to intervene into markets to make a few tweaks. So, they go back to being presumably self-correcting. What I argue in my work takes it a little bit further by saying that what I see is what I call systemic market failure. So, it's something that's, not a bug, but a feature of a commercial media system that's really baked into the DNA of that system, which is a market—there simply aren't the incentives in place for a market to provide the kinds of public service journalism, public interest journalism, as you note, in sufficient quantity or quality that a democracy requires. And so, another way of thinking of market failure is that it's an insufficient allocation of necessary resources. And there are various kinds of market failures that can be traced out. But again, neoclassical economics recognize that there are certain things that a commercial media system or a commercial market in general cannot do well. And one of them in particular is to provide public goods. And I don't think it's controversial argument anymore. I used to have to fight over this a lot more, say, like, 10, 15 years ago. But I think it's fair to qualify journalism, or at least the information, the news and information produced by journalism, as public goods. Public goods are, by their very nature, not like regular commodities. They're not like widgets that are produced in a factory. They are, by their very nature, very difficult to support through commercial market mechanisms. The fancy terms are they're non-rivalrous and non-excludable, which means it's very difficult to prevent free riders, people who may benefit from the service or the good. But they don't pay for it. It's also hard to monetize public goods. So, for these reasons and more, you see this constant market failure in our commercial media systems. And most Democratic countries recognize this. It's one of the reasons why they do maintain such robust public broadcasting systems. So again, it really shouldn't be seen as a controversial argument. But our policy has never truly—our media policies have never really reflected these iron laws of a capitalist media system. And I think that's a major problem and one of the main drivers for many of the crises that we're seeing today.

Matt Jordan: If we can go back to the attacks on public broadcasting, just thinking more recent history, President Trump tried to cut funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting every year of his first admin. It's back as part of the second administration's agenda. But even scattered polling shows that many Trump supporters are in favor of government funding for Public Broadcasting. So why, then, is there this constant focus in the Trump administration in defunding public broadcasting, maybe even in comparison to previous efforts to strip away funding or support for public broadcasting?

Victor Pickard: Yeah, that's a great question. And to your last point, I do think we can see, even beginning with the early implementation of NPR and PBS, from the very beginning, political conservatives, many Republicans and Republican administrations, have viciously attacked public broadcasting. So, it was pretty much attacked from its beginning almost. And so, I think in many ways, what we're seeing today is just a continued continuity of those attacks. So, I wouldn't say that it's entirely unprecedented. Although at the same time, I think you could say there's a qualitative difference in the aggressive nature. And there's also such an irony in the rationale for many of their attacks right now. And to be specific, the FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, is saying that it's because public broadcasting is relying on commercials. And that is the pretense for why these investigations are being launched with implication that maybe the what federal money they do receive is going to be phased out. And the irony is that from the very beginning, public broadcasting was set up in a way that it was economically and politically weak and vulnerable to these kinds of attacks. And from the beginning, LBJ had promised that within a year, they would find a more permanent way of funding public broadcasting. And there were various attempts to do this. But essentially, to make a long story short, they never found a permanent and reliable funding mechanism for public broadcasting. So, it's always been reliant on these appropriations process, which annually throws out a pittance of funding towards public broadcasting and forcing them to seek out alternative means of support. And indeed, beginning in the late '70s, but really taking off during the Reagan administration, there were these rule changes that allowed public broadcasting to air more identifiable commercials on the air. Today, any casual listener or viewer will see these sometimes euphemistically referred to as enhanced underwriting. But they're basically just commercials and advertisements by another name. And that, of course, blurs the distinction between public broadcasting and commercial broadcasting. But the key point here is that they were forced to do this. These were rule changes made largely during the Reagan administration that loosened the restrictions on commercial underwriting they could rely on. And we've seen an uptick over the years to the point now where NPR gets more than a third of its funding from corporate sponsorships. So, I think, ironically, it is an issue. It is a problem that we should be debating. But it really—the way that the Trump administration is going after public broadcasting right now really obscures this history and really the root cause of it, which is we've never sufficiently funded our public broadcasting, especially according to global norms, which is something maybe we'll get into at some point in the discussion. But those are just a few data points. There's of course, much more to say on all this.

Matt Jordan: Well, if you think about the global norms, I mean, I think I just saw this, that these are the Congressional hearings right now are being called the anti-American airwaves is the framing for them that they're being used. So, we're going back to the red-baiting stuff. But if you look at what's at stake, I think it's the center—the Corporation for Public Broadcasting gets like $1.39 every year per capita. Whereas most of the robust democracies in the world get between $50 and $100 per head. And if you look at the indexes and the correlations of these, it's pretty obvious that countries that spend that much, they have a greater trust in democracy. They have more informed voters. And we have a media system that is disciplined by the market as such, that we have the idea of public broadcasting but don't really have public broadcasting. But that disciplined by the market, public broadcasting is kind of what we have. Right? That essentially, I always like to think of this as from the Streetcar Named Desire, the Blanche DuBois character that relies on the kindness of strangers. So, we have a public broadcasting system that requires donors and that requires—and it's heavily disciplined because of that. And in a way, can't really serve the public interest in the same way that a fully funded public broadcasting system would.

Victor Pickard: Yeah, that's absolutely right. And just to add a few more details to what you said, even to call our system a public broadcasting system is a bit of a misnomer, since the vast majority of its support comes from private capital, comes from individual donors, foundations, and again, from corporate sponsorship. So that's the first problem. And to tease it out a little bit more about, just in global comparison. And some of you may have seen, some of your listeners may have seen these charts, but the US is almost literally off the chart for how little we allocate towards our public broadcasting system at the federal level. It's now inched up just a little bit. It's now just a little bit over $1.50 at the federal level. And then if you throw in local and state subsidies, you might get a little bit over $3 per person per year. But compare that to the Brits, who spend roughly around $100 per year for the BBC. And some of the Nordic countries get well above that. And as you note, it shows. At least there's strong correlation between having a robust public broadcasting system and a healthy democratic society. There's a study that Timothy Neff and I did a few years ago, where we used some of that data from the democracy index that the Economist magazine puts out. And of course, the US is qualified as a flawed democracy for a number of years now. But again, it shows that the strongest democracies on the planet also have the strongest public broadcasting systems. And again, you have to be a little bit careful about you don't want to conflate correlation and causation. But we make argument that there's a kind of virtuous cycle—that strong public broadcasting encourages a strong democracy, which in turn, encourages a strong public broadcasting. So, they sort of rise and fall together. And at the very least, it shows that public subsidies for a media system does not lead to slippery slope towards totalitarianism. And that's often a kind of knee jerk reaction here in the US that god forbid the government ever gets involved in our media system, ever funds media. Well, media subsidies are as American as apple pie going back to the postal system, when we had subsidies that, in today's currency, would translate to tens of billions of dollars for the dissemination of newspapers. So, it's never a question of whether government should be involved. Government is always involved. The question is, how should it be involved? And as you note, the Trump administration wants to make sure that government is not involved in ways that might actually help the public interest in many ways. But this idea—even this—it's kind of euphemistic to say, disciplined by the market because that kind of obscures what's actually happening. I mean, you're absolutely right there. They're using that language also in describing how they're going after universities right now. They want these institutions to be disciplined by the market. But we know what happens. If it's disciplined by the market ultimately over time, that's going to serve wealthier members of society more. And it's going to harm the vast majority of members of society. So, I feel like that's part—that should be part of our framing as well.

Matt Jordan: Yeah, I mean, it was the early red-baiters, right? Who wanted to make commercial market equal media freedom, right? As opposed to thinking about these things in relation to something like positive freedom, which is like what can we do together if we make sure we do certain things together? And I think that that framing for, free market-ism, like you call it corporate libertarianism for a good reason, where it's don't tell me how I have to use my media. It almost invariably doesn't serve the public interest when it's doing that. It serves commercial interests when it's doing that, which is how you get something like we have today, which is the attention economy, where you're not going to get a whole lot of stuff that's going to help people. In the attention economy, you're going to get what gets clicks and ratings, right? And so that, think, why you and others have said that we need an option that is out there, a public option, if you were, that is going to be serving different imperatives than that free market corporate libertarian imperative.

Victor Pickard: That's right. That's absolutely right. I mean, I feel like if you peel back the layers a little bit, because so often in our everyday lives, to the extent that we think about these issues at all, we're really grappling with symptoms of deeper structural pathologies. And the main one that you're putting your finger on is this underlying logic that treats our media as commodities, not public goods, that sees our media as primary value is how much it fetches on the so-called free market. Of course, free market is another one of these great misnomers. There's typically very little competition involved whatsoever. And it's really about these monopolists and rich individuals like Elon Musk making as much money—or at least exerting as much power as they can. And democracy be damned. So going back to those media reformers and how they were red-baited in the '40s, they were trying to actually define what the public interest should mean. They were trying to put some flesh onto those bones. And you can trace it out historically that every time the FCC really made an attempt to operationalize what the public interest should look like, should mean, industry pounced on them in various ways. And in the '40s, it was just very convenient for them to weaponize this kind of red-baiting rhetoric where one of the things that they accused the FCC, the progressive FCC commissioners of doing was to BBC-ize American radio. I always trip over that word. BBC-ize. But god forbid that we actually have some kind of robust public broadcasting system in this country. And yet, that was treated as somewhat of a suspect, socialistic, American thing to do. And to convince Americans that the American way, that American media was this market-driven, advertising-dependent system, very monopolistic, that took a tremendous amount of ideological work. That's not how most Americans felt early on. And we can find throughout history all kinds of moments and examples of where people push back against this system. But of course, over time, it becomes naturalized. I think of this as capitalist media realism with apologies to Mark Fisher. But this idea that it just becomes—we basically are socialized to believe that there is no alternative to this hyper capitalistic media system. And that, again, is, I think, one of the main reasons why we're in many of these—dealing with many of these problems today.

Matt Jordan: So, I want to talk a little bit about who's impacted by these potential changes in allocations or full-on cuts. I mean, to me, it seems like rural stations or smaller stations would be ones that receive more federal support because the bigger stations are going to receive more of that kind of corporate or mixed support. So, aren't they most likely to be harmed by any sort of major shifts in funding? And wouldn't that create kind of a similar situation to what we've seen in the newspaper industry? Potentially creating even larger, wider news deserts in the process?

Victor Pickard: Yeah, unfortunately that's absolutely true. And you know, again, these key details that get left out of the discussion. While it is true that public broadcasting in general gets relatively small percentage of its funding from public investments, from the government, it disproportionately would harm these smaller, more rural-based public broadcasting stations that do depend sometimes as much as 25% or more of their funding comes from government. And here, we're thinking about these far-flung stations and places like Alaska and Wyoming, where it really is the last institution standing that's providing any semblance of local news and information. They also often serve as the emergency broadcast system of last resort. So arguably, and I know part of the rationale is often that it's almost anachronistic to have a public broadcasting system. Do we even need it anymore? We have access to the internet. Well, of course, tens of millions of Americans don't have access to broadband internet services. And many of them live in these so-called news deserts. So there really is no local news media left whatsoever. And all of our data, it's intuitive. But we're seeing, almost on a monthly basis now, a new major report or study comes out showing all the social harms that occur when communities lose access to local news media. And so, this news deserts metaphor has some limitations to it suggests that people aren't consuming media. They're still consuming copious amounts of media, just oftentimes from dubious sources. It also suggests it's a new phenomenon. We've had these deserts. Many communities have never been well served by a commercial media system. All that said, it is also true to say that it is worsening by the day. I mean now, we have lost over a third of our newspapers since the early 2000s and over 2/3 of our newspaper journalists. And unfortunately, our newspaper industry, even in its beleaguered state, is still the primary feeder in terms of original reporting and news and information for our entire media ecosystem. So, this really is a devastating crisis. And I do think it helps us make the argument for why, arguably, public broadcasting is more necessary today than ever before.

Matt Jordan: I think it's that—I can't agree with that enough. I mean, Pennsylvania has been particularly badly hurt by this. About a 26% decline in the number of newspapers per year in Pennsylvania. The ones that do, are still around, tend to be bought out. So, they're what we would call ghost newspapers. They don't really—it's the same shop. I mean, I was thinking about in like York County Pennsylvania. There are four newspapers—The Dillsburg Banner, The Evening Sun, The York Daily Record, The York Dispatch. Three out of the four of those are actually out of the same shop, all owned by Gannett. Right? So, there's been this venture capitalist mode of doing the newspaper business where it's about buying up, concentrating, and liquidating. And they're not thinking about the public interest at all. They're thinking about returning equity capital to their investors. And so, you have these enormous counties. Medill just did a study that looked at how people that live in news deserts, and by that, we mean one newspaper or less in a county, how they voted in the last election. And it wouldn't surprise anybody that they voted 91% for Trump in the last election. Now, again, there are all sorts of other factors involved in this like the fact that radio has been cornered by the right-wing for 40 years in America and that all these other things. So, it's not exactly the newspaper desert per se. But there's nobody locally that people trust. There's nobody—they're not talking about communities where people live and feel a sense of belonging to. They're not debates about local school boards and city governance that people identify with. And since nature abhors a vacuum, into that vacuum pours partisan media. And the more there isn't good public-serving media, the more these partisan, hyper-partisan news orgs thrive. And I think this is, like you're saying, this is the reason why now, more than ever, we need something that is going to serve as an alternative to that hyper-partisan media ecosystem.

Victor Pickard: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I mean, sometimes those outlets are referred to as pink slime journalism, which is very evocative. And I mean, they're essentially propagandistic outlets and typically of the right-wing variety. But again, these are these kinds of symptoms. Even the vulture capitalists, they're these kind of opportunistic parasites that are settling into the carcass and to use some horrific metaphors. But this is what happens when the only entities that see any kind of profit-making potential left in local journalism are these hedge funds and private equity firms. And so, you have the Alden Global Capitals. And Alden is now the second largest newspaper owner in the country, I believe, after Gannett. So, this is deeply troubling. But what all these symptoms are showing us is that there is simply no commercial future for local journalism. There's no profit-making potential. So, the capitalists are largely removing themselves from the field, except for these very unsavory kind. And they will eventually leave to after they eke out the last bit of profit from these dying local media institutions. So that, again, underscores the need for a systemic alternative. We need structural alternatives to the failing commercial model. And we could—there are certain types of media that we could argue over this. But I feel like with local journalism it is so glaringly evident. And going back to the trust thing that was mentioned earlier, not only do Americans have higher levels of trust towards public media institutions, but just local media institutions in general. And I do think that this is a potential leverage point. It's a bipartisan consensus, I think, that we actually need local media. Even among people who might hate the media, when it comes to their local media institutions, they tend to have warm fuzzy feelings towards those kinds of organizations. So, I really think we need to capitalize on that, as it were, and try to find non-market means of support for the kind of local media that democracy needs.

Matt Jordan: Yeah, I mean, it used to be that people knew their beat reporters. They knew the people because their kids played little league together. They went to school board meetings together. So, it wasn't as abstract. And I think the trouble with our media environment today is it's so abstract, right? We talked to a guy from WITF last year. That is a really interesting media org down in Lebanon, Harrisburg area that now has a kind of a wing of nonprofits that were donated by the Steinman Foundation. And one of the things that they're doing the most is trust building exercises. So, they go down into different versions of the state. They do this thing called News and Brews, where they kind of hang out with local folks and ask them about what they want to hear coverage about. And what the thing that they talked to us last year about was that what everybody talks about are the partisan national issues. So, there was a Chambersburg election for mayor. And they were doing these kind of fact-finding trust building things. And they were like, why is the mayor talking about the border? And the reason is, of course, is that's the agenda setting of partisan national media. Whereas again, the local, lived stuff that people can agree on no matter what their party is, that tends to break down partisan rancor and partisan identification. So again, I think you're right to say that this is exactly what the country needs. We should stop saying we're deeply divided and start thinking about why we're so deeply divided.

Victor Pickard: Yeah, that's spot on. I'm so glad you mentioned WITF because I trot them out as an exemplar for a number of reasons. I love the News and Brews thing that they do that usually gets a few laughs. But what they're identifying is that our local media institutions were always so much more than simply providing information. And I think that's become a little bit of a red herring in some of these debates. I've noticed a lot of my academic friends will pounce on some of my arguments to say, you're just pretending that it's just about information and that misinformation is the root cause of all of our problems, and so forth. But we have to be clear that it was always much more than that. It was about building community, building solidarity. And like for all the problems that we're grappling with as a planet, whether we're talking about the climate crisis or we're talking about things a little bit closer to home, like mass incarceration, all these problems that we deal with, these are collective action problems. They're going to require building solidarity for us as a society to really confront them. And that, I feel like that is a necessary role for local media. Another interesting thing about WITF is that where many of these partnerships are occurring, and I do think this is one of the brighter glimmers of hope in an otherwise very dismal media landscape, are these growing number of partnerships between public broadcasting outlets and local print media outlets. And we have one here in Philadelphia with Billy Penn and WHYY. But WITF is in a rural area. I mean, it's basically Trump country. And they've been able to do this and really trying to build community around their newsgathering practices as well. So, I do I think it's an important model to look at.

Matt Jordan: You mentioned him a little bit earlier. But I did want to talk a bit about the new FCC chair, Brendan Carr. In a recent Hollywood Reporter story about him, you were quoted. And you described him as "off the leash." Can you talk a little bit more about that quote and what you mean by that?

Victor Pickard: Sure. So, an interesting anecdote connected to that. And I won't go into any great detail. But that was an example. And I thought that story was very well done. I thought a lot of research went into that story. So, I don't mean to criticize it by any means. But those words were kind of put into my mouth by the interviewer. He was like, would you say that off the leash is a good way of describing it? And I think I said right back to them, yeah, off the leash is a great way of describing it. So, there wasn't—that's not exactly how because I don't think he's really off the leash. I think he's still on the leash. But he's definitely Trump's attack dog. He's an apparatchik who is basically carrying out this broader political agenda. And I think when Mike Copps and other former FCC chairman say things like, this is the most politicized FCC chair they've ever seen in history. And someone who studies the history of the FCC, I think that is a very legitimate thing to say about Chairman Carr. I don't think anyone has weaponized the tools and rhetoric of the FCC to the extent that he's doing. And just whether we're talking about these investigations, these kind of very specious—on specious grounds, that they're going after public broadcasting, it's incredibly disingenuous on its face. But they're also going after NBC and CBS, and again, for almost laughable reasons. I mean, 60 Minutes has been charged with, like, incorrectly editing Kamala Harris's interview. I mean, just things that are really far-fetched but clearly all point to this broader political agenda. So much of my work before would describe the FCC in terms of regulatory capture. That's where the agency internalizes the logics and values of the industries it's meant to regulate. And I think that would have described former FCC chairman Ajit Pai. But under Brendan Carr, this is a new kind of capture. And I'm struggling to find new vocabulary to really capture what's happening here. But yeah, I do think, as much as historians like to trace out continuities, and I think usually that's the way we should be thinking of this. But in some way, every once in a while, you have a bit of a disjuncture. And I think we're also seeing that happening at the FCC right now as well.

Matt Jordan: Yeah, that same story he quoted a piece where Carr wrote personally to Bob Iger and said, you are part of the reason, or your news organizations are part of the reason that Americans don't trust the news. In the Hollywood Reporter article kind of suggests, this is part, obviously, of a big ideological project to prop up more right-wing news organizations and even right-wing sort of news influencers. Is that all it is? I mean, obviously we can make that connection between potentially defunding or limiting support for public media and then going after, quote-unquote, mainstream news for any potential critiques under the guise of you're the problem for why people don't trust the news. And then, here's our solution over here is this far more partisan news? I mean, is that all that's happening here? Or can you contextualize it even more for us?

Victor Pickard: Yeah, I think the one piece here to add, and this actually slightly contradicts what I was saying earlier, because again, going after public broadcasting or even going after the so-called liberal media is a long often-used page from the Republican playbook, at least from the late '60s during the Nixon administration when they really started—where almost became a meme, the so-called liberal media. So, in some ways, it is a continuity of that. But I think where it's different, qualitatively different, is the extent to which this is meant to simply undercut dissent of any kind. Like, sure, it's going out. It's trying to punish Trump's perceived enemies. But it really is trying to chill all media, so they remain very meek and don't challenge the Trump administration's agenda, not offer any voices of dissent. And I don't think we've gone all the way there. But certainly, we've been seeing signs of this. We've been seeing this anticipatory obedience from many of our media organizations. And unfortunately, I think we're going to be seeing even more of this. It's just a way, even with Public Broadcasting, I think they're really trying to get the public broadcasting's journalists to really kind rein in anything that might be seen as remotely critical of the Trump administration. I think that is the broader agenda here.

Matt Jordan: Well, you know, as with everything, there's almost always a historical precedent to this. And the thing about moments of overreach, like this, and I think we could say that what we're seeing is an incredible overreach by the Trump administration, is that there are often backlashes. I was thinking about this in relation to say the postmaster, Burleson in the '20s, who kind of just put the kibosh on any kind of radical press, Right which the radical press had emerged to counter the kind of Gilded Age control of the media environment. But they just put their thumb on the scale. But there was a backlash in the Progressive Era after that moved us toward the conversation that you brought up at the very beginning here, this kind of 1930s conversation about why it is that we need to carve out a tranche of the media landscape and give it over to the public to do public interest. So, I wanted to say, if that is the case, and we might see a potential for a kind of a reemergence of that type of public debate. What would you say as some of the things that we should be thinking about in terms of alternatives? What would a good way to, say, fund or manage a public option in our media environment be?

Victor Pickard: Yeah, that's such an excellent question that, again, we probably need another hour to go through all that. But very, very quickly, I would say that number one, much of this is not going to happen anytime soon, right? This needs to be seen as a long-term project. And certainly, during the Trump administration, we're very limited in what we can do. However—especially at the federal level. Where I think we should be trying to do things right now is, of course, at the state and local level, especially in more progressive states. But in many cases, not even, I think there's potential here even in the so-called red states, where we try to find ways to create these public investments for local journalism. And some of the exemplars have already been around for a while. New Jersey, the Civic Information Consortium is kind of the first and, in many ways, best exemplar of where government can fund various kinds of local media initiatives but do so in a very grassroots way. And that's always something I try to bring out in my work, where I'm advocating for federally guaranteed resources to fund public media that's truly public, that's actually publicly owned and controlled by local communities. So I think that is something that we at least should put on our long-term political horizons. I've been working on a Project 2050 for media reform. And I think that is—we need to have the—other more conservative constituencies have done a much better job looking towards the long term. Having these plans that they know won't be actualized anytime soon. And I think that's how we have to approach media reform. But again, I think—keep coming back to it. But we have to find ways to publicly finance the news and information that democracy requires. We can't leave it up to the market. We're seeing a lot of positive signs coming from the philanthropy sector. But that also alone is not enough to fund an entirely a systemic overhaul that we're going to need to see if we're going to have, I would say, any semblance of Democratic society in the future. So, we need to keep working towards. And I could bore your listeners to tears some of the wonky details and how we could find local media institutions. But just in broad strokes, I think it has to be locally owned and controlled and federally guaranteed.

Matt Jordan: To turn it to the listeners then, one of the things we try to do is give our listeners some potential strategies or tools to take into their lives based on the topic of the episode. So, in this case, where should our listeners put their energy? Do you recommend them continuing to support public media financially in the way that they've been doing? Should they be talking more about these long-term goals? What do people do who want to support public media and want even more of it but feel kind of trapped by the current system that we do have?

Cory Barker: Yeah, so that's always a great and also, of course, daunting question, because many of these problems are so structural and systemic. And it's not—as individuals, we're somewhat limited in our agency. That said, many of the things you just said, I do think that we do need to be supporting local media in any way that we can, especially our public broadcasting, but also our local newspapers, for those of us who still live in areas that have local newspapers. And I think talking about these issues, a big problem that media reformers have always wrestled with is that we—especially living in the United States, we often have a somewhat impoverished notion of what policy does, why policy is important, and why we should try to have a voice in those debates. And to really see that the way our media is designed is, at base, a political decision. These are political decisions to let our local media wither away or to fund them. So, whenever we can, whether we're talking to friends or family members or random people on the street, we really should be trying to raise awareness that we do have a say in this. And we really do need to restructure our media, as abstract as that sounds. But I do think, as you note in the everyday, just something that we all could be doing, we should be throwing a few bucks towards our local media institutions. I think especially now, they're a bastion of democratic practice and of civil society. And we need to defend them and support them however we can.

Matt Jordan: Well, Victor, that sounds like a great place for us to stop. And listeners out there, take Victor's advice and throw a couple of bucks to our local public broadcasting. And, Victor, Thank you so much for talking with us and sharing your wisdom about this situation.

Victor Pickard: Thank you all so much. Thoroughly enjoyed the conversation.

Matt Jordan: That was a fascinating conversation. And you know, Victor is somebody who works on this and thinks about this and has worked on the policy level as well as the advocacy level. So, it's great to hear some of the details of stuff that we're aware of. So, what are your thoughts about the way forward?

Cory Barker: I mean, I feel like Victor positioned this in such a fascinating and eloquent way. But it's hard to walk away from this conversation without thinking about the chilling effects of this administration and even the FCC being so specific about their attacks of, not just public media, but what we consider very sort of mainstream broadcast news institutions. There is a sense that on all sides of things, the news industry is really under fire.

Matt Jordan: I find myself thinking the more that the administration is showing its cards how anti-competitive it is, right? So really, what we're talking about when we're talking about public media is a public alternative that would compete with the media system. And by competition, we would see a better product. And that seems so threatening, like, the idea of something serving the public interest. Why this would be so threatening is beyond me. But that always strikes me as is it almost seems desperate that the attempt to silence whatever small little sliver of public media exists out there. So, it should probably make us feel good that whatever it is that public media is doing is so threatening to the powers that be that they're willing to overreach in relation to it.

Cory Barker: Yeah, and I think it underlines something that Victor said today and has said other times in his work, just this idea that, American capitalism and a news infrastructure that really serves the public don't go together. Right? And don't go together effectively. He talks so much about the market failure of this. But beyond the economic issues, obviously, it creates a lot of challenges for how people learn about the world. As we talked at the end of the conversation today, how they sort connect and locate themselves within a community? I mean, there's so many clear challenges with capitalism and the kind of news that we need that we're just not getting. And we don't have a vision for where that could go under the current environment.

Matt Jordan: That's it for this episode of News Over Noise. Our guest was Victor Pickard, the C. Edwin Baker Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. To learn more, visit newsovernoise.org. I'm Matt Jordan.

Cory Barker: And I'm Cory Barker.

Matt Jordan: Until next time, stay well and well informed. News Over Noise is produced by the Penn State Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications and WPSU. This program has been funded by the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost at Penn State and is part of the Penn State News Literacy Initiative.[END OF TRANSCRIPT]