If you hadn’t noticed, consolidated corporate media hasn’t been meeting the challenges of the current moment very well.
There’s generally two reasons: one, these media outlets tend to reflect the interests of generally white, older, male, right wing ownership, which broadly thinks authoritarianism is a fair price to pay for some tax cuts, deregulation, and taking a hatchet to the knees of regulators.
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Two, the ad-engagement model results in companies that are generally truth averse. They’re afraid of upsetting sources, advertisers, ad-clicking readership, and event sponsors, so they tend to sand all the rough edges off their journalism out of fear the truth (or responses to the truth) might impact overall engagement.
Both combined result in a sort of pseudo-journalistic mush that traffics in feckless “he said, she said” false equivalency journalism and has trouble accurately informing readers of the truth. This, in turn, is easily exploited by corporations, authoritarians and white supremacists, whose shitty, unpopular views tend to be sanitized and normalized by the weak-kneed corporate press.
One potential solution for this is more publicly-funded journalism. Studies generally show publicly-funded journalism tends to result in healthier democracies for the reasons outlined above. Making journalism a publicly-funded public good (and not a business) has great potential. But the right wing generally sees it as a threat because it’s not as prone to soften its criticism of corporatism or authoritarianism.
But after a generation of demonization of the idea, it’s basically a non-starter in the U.S. And the few partially publicly-funded news organizations we do have are already seeing relentless harassment by the Trump administration. NPR (which only gets about 1% of its money from the public) and PBS are already facing sham investigations by Trump earlobe nibbler and FCC boss Brendan Carr.
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Now Carr is taking aim at smaller public broadcasters as well. Carr recently sent a letter to WBEZ and twelve other local public broadcasters to inform them they were under investigation for on-air sponsorships, commonly referred to as “underwriting.” Carr is pretending to be concerned that the stations aren’t following FCC rules restricting them from airing traditional commercials:
“I am concerned that NPR and PBS broadcasts could be violating federal law by airing commercials. It is possible that NPR and PBS member stations are broadcasting underwriting announcements that cross the line into prohibited commercial advertisements.”
About 4.6% (1.6%) of WEBZ’s operating revenue comes from public funding. Publicly-funded broadcasters are restricted from running traditional commercials. So instead, they generally run corporate underwriting spots acknowledging corporate support. WEBZ and the other companies all say they’ve consistently adhered to the rules. Carr has offered no evidence of actual violations.
Carr, a guy who historically lets giant telecom monopolies run endlessly roughshod over U.S. consumers and the market, couldn’t actually care less about these rules or whether these companies are actually violating them (and they likely aren’t). He’s simply looking for something to harass public journalism over.
GOP policies are broadly unpopular. That’s why a cornerstone of the modern radical right involves mercilessly attacking education, academia, journalism, and informed consensus. And another key cornerstone has been to build a vast right wing propaganda machine across AM radio, broadcast TV, cable TV, and the internet that tells right wingers what they want to hear 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Public broadcasting (what very little the U.S. has) challenges this paradigm, so it’s an obvious early target for Carr. America has been so consistently conditioned to view publicly-funded journalism as “radical socialism,” and media policy deemed so unimportant, that it’s likely the public and politicians won’t put up much of a fight as what few publicly-funded stations we have are snuffed out by weird zealots.
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