White House Falsely Calls NPR, PBS A “Grift,” Moves To Cut Already Modest Funding In Latest Attack On Journalism And Informed Consensus

Authoritarians don’t much like journalism, education, or informed consensus for what should be obvious reasons. But the far right has long had a particular animosity for publicly-funded broadcasting. In part, because when done right, public broadcasting is free of the kind of perverse financial incentives that results in the kind of feckless, truth-averse, “both sides” journalism we all saw last election season.

Of course in the U.S. we don’t really do public broadcasting particularly well. In a good piece over at The Nation, University of Pennsylvania professor Victor Pickard notes how the generational demonization of public media by the right routinely starves it of funding. That forces it to lean more heavily on commercial funding, which then results in journalism that looks a lot like the rest of our feckless, corporatized mush:

“By any measure, US government support for public media is paltry. The $535 million that Congress currently allocates to the CPB covers roughly 1 percent of NPR’s and 15 percent of PBS’s budget. To even call this a public system is a misnomer; most funding for public media comes from private sources in the form of individual donations, philanthropic grants, and corporate sponsorships.”

So the U.S. version of “public broadcasting” is decidedly half assed. Yet it still gets endlessly demonized by the right wing as some sort of extremist concept. That happened again this week when the White House issued a statement full of lies about public broadcasting, calling NPR and PBS a “grift”:

“For years, American taxpayers have been on the hook for subsidizing National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as “news.” As President Trump has stated, taxpayer funding of NPR’s and PBS’s biased content is a waste.”

White House budget director Russ Vought has drafted a so-far-unpublished memo for a rescission plan that will eliminate funding already approved by Congress, including $1.1 billion for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB).

The far right doesn’t want reformers untethering journalism and media from commercial interests because they know that model is eminently exploitable, something that hasn’t been subtle the last few years. Looking for major merger approvals, tax cuts, and mindless deregulation, consolidated U.S. media companies have demonstrated they’re more than willing to throw the truth under the bus for financial gain. You see it absolutely everywhere you look. Again: not remotely subtle.

Running journalism as a traditional business has been positively fatal for informed consensus in the U.S. The country is awash with news deserts where the only news people get are either AM radio (dominated by right wing propaganda), broadcast news (dominated by right wing propagandists at Sinclair and Fox), or national cable news (dominated by right wing propagandists at Fox News).

When election season comes, and huge swaths of the electorate vote in favor of their own fucking immolation, political and polling experts then stand around with a stupid look on their face wondering why the public appears to have heads full of peddles and pudding. Democrats who could be pushing for media reforms or consolidation limits have instead often chosen to ignore the problem, and here we are.

Pickard’s research at UPenn has shown that publicly-funded journalism can result in healthier democracies overall for this very reason. If you strip away the problems caused by chasing ad engagement or coddling power for quarterly financial gain, journalism is more incentivized to tell people the actual truth and less incentivized to pull punches.

Not only has the right wing constantly starved public broadcasting of funding forcing them to embrace more traditional commercialization, Trump’s earlobe nibbler over at the FCC, Brendan Carr, is now launching sham investigations into public broadcasting’s reliance on commercials. Carr claims, without evidence, PBS and NPR are violating on-air sponsorship or “underwriting” rules.

Again, this has nothing to do with government efficiency or saving taxpayers money. It has everything to do with authoritarians controlling the flow of information and the shape of modern media, which they prefer to be a combination of right wing propaganda and feckless, obedient, oligarch controlled consolidated media giants too afraid to do their fucking jobs.