Even small or remote areas now have Starlink access - and if the previous administration had done anything positive it could have implemented that as a benefit 4 years ago.
Public libraries, YouTube, Khan Academy, etc is a way better solution than sponsoring ossified navel exams by costal elite folks with fake British accents.
Let them start a podcast or Substack or YT channel and serve their niche audience. But not with my taxes.
Keep in mind that much of PBS, like so much cultural work,.is a PMC jobs program that provides subsidized cultural content primarily of interest to the PMC.
The classic example is free admission to the opera. Bubba from the trailer park wouldn't go, if you paid him and told him that the coloratura soprano's prodigious mammariesn put Dolly Parton to shame.
Speaking as a reformed member of the PMC (I must confess!) you are certainly correct about that. And yet in my time I've heard from lots of fairly hardscrabble folks who can't afford streaming or cable who've come out of the woodwork to talk about how meaningful it's been over the years to have documentaries, classic films, etc, freely available via public broadcasting. As an indie Substack journalist who's seen the sausage-making, I scoff at a lot of the PMC conventional wisdom on PBS, but there are many people for whom that's their primary experience of a sensibility that seems bigger and classier than their immediate circumstances. It's no longer meaningful to me but feels meaningful to a lot of viewers, and non-news PBS at its best even now still provides much more than that, I would contend.
I grew up a barn cat, and have since acquired (I think) a reasonable amount of culture. I dodn't know how much role PBS played in that, but libraries and NPR sure did.
And that's the "pro-funding" argument in a nutshell - "if it leads one bubba who just came to the opera to impress his girlfriend and he leaves humming 'A cenar teco', then it has done some good."
Maybe, and I am not unsympathetic. But let's not pretend that cats looking for a spot to get away from the cold and cheap entertainment are the primary beneficiaries, here.
I think the issue is TRUST. While one wishes that a nation could have impartial public broadcasting outlets, ours have shown themselves to be mouthpieces for the DNC, like much of the REST of the legacy media. Why would anyone ever again believe that NPR is impartial? I know _I_ won’t. Besides - like every other government agency, it’s going to have a Leftist slant, because those are the people who believe in using government to achieve their social engineering goals.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts. It’s good to get more insight on how conservative populists feel, especially ones who have worked with PBS.
It would be really good though if you could have explained how CBP and PBS work in terms of funding. For example, the PBS I work at receives approximately 10% of its funding from CBP. The remainder comes from other entities, including local government and donors. Since we are part of our school district, which holds our license, we provide not only on air / streaming tv shows. We provide educational courses, training for teachers, high stakes testing, job certifications, training for people who are jobless or underemployed. We work with students who have been in juvenile detention to support them as they rehabilitate, we also provide local TV programming specifically for our communities that is, at its core, educational. We also provide events that allow people to connect and socialize together around educational and experiential learning.
Let’s also take a look at the value of PBS KIDS programs, which do not have an equal anywhere else on air. We have a children’s writing contest that has absolutely had a positive impact on kids who’ve participated in it. We just interviewed the kids who won this contest in the early 20s and it was very clear that this experience was memorable and impactful.
So PBS stations are much more than tv channels. Many people do not understand this and, if you don’t understand this, then you can’t see their value. It’s important to have hard conversations around fair reporting and representation on tv in this era, but to think they should be dismantled and sold off is ignorant. I’m not saying you argued this, but I am seeing comments that do. I think knowing that the $1.60 amount per person that goes per year to fund these stations is well worth it.
As for NPR, I have never worked there but I do know that they are required to cover news round the clock which isn’t something PBS does.
Very important points, Autumn, thanks for weighing in! I might have emphasized more that CPB pays for only a fraction of PBS stations' budgets -- I do think due to creative accounting it's more than 10% at a lot of stations, but not anywhere near the half or more probably most PBS critics would assume. I don't really consider myself a conservative populist (more a disillusioned center-left person with certain populist sympathies) but I think a lot of them would nonetheless say it's the principle of the thing and the federal government shouldn't be involved in media at all. If we were starting in a vacuum I might be inclined to agree, but PBS has accomplished so much good and is continuing to do so much good that I wholeheartedly feel it should be preserved.
But that being said, as I mention in the piece I do think right-leaning critics have a point, especially when it comes to news coverage. In the same way that many people on the left oppose prayer in school as using government resources to promote a particular religious view, it's not unreasonable for many people on the right to oppose ideologically slanted news programming using government resources to promote a particular political view. To have those shows on night after night, systematically privileging the views of one half of the electorate over the other, has been like poking the right with a stick, and the backlash has been building for decades. Cutting the news programs (hopefully to be picked up by other platforms that are fully independently funded and don't promise to be politically even-handed) would be an important step towards emphasizing that PBS is a valuable resource for all, and hopefully keep the system rolling for many years to come.
My suspicion is that the majority of those who believe this on principle do not watch PBS and aren’t likely interested in the social impact that a local station has on their community.
Government corruption is a concern, but private sector corruption is just as harmful. We are where we are now as a society because billionaire elites on both sides are waging a colossal war against each other that ultimately harms the people who aren’t billionaires.
PBS can’t afford to spin off its news programming. It is a pillar of the brand. We have a local public affairs show that provides much longer form journalism around important local issues. No other local news can offer this. Perhaps in a less polarized society we wouldn’t be in such a precarious situation.
But PBS, as you are likely very aware, has a much bigger issue it’s facing. One of your commenters referred to it as a fossil. The media landscape is in serious trouble and PBS is not immune to this. Apart from PBS KIDS viewership, loyal viewers and donors are much older than you or I are. Whether that is because the Boomer loyalty has been maintained over the years due to a fondness to the PBS brand, or it’s just a brand that viewers age into, has become increasingly a concern.
I did a piece recently about how companies and organizations can find themselves at a crossroads where they're struggling and may really need to change to some extent, but any change they can conceivably make threatens to alienate the existing customer base at least as much as it might attract newcomers.
I hear you about the centrality of PBS news to the whole enterprise, it's what most drew me in as I was growing up, but at this moment it's the point of greatest political vulnerability. I've met any number of moderate conservatives who love Masterpiece or some of the other British shows, the documentaries, the sort of educational community work you were talking about etc who don't really have any beef with PBS other than the national news programming. The local public affairs content on my station is quite viable across the political spectrum. I just wonder if it's a question of amputating a limb at this point to have a better shot at saving the patient.
The media environment is so fragmented, as you note, that there's no hope of PBS or any single channel playing the sort of agenda-setting role that it could a few decades back. Almost by definition broadcast or basic cable these days is playing to a poorer and likely older demographic, which makes it more vulnerable politically. But I think there's a tremendous hunger for regional community, especially as local newspapers shut down or just run stories off the wires. Leaning into that sort of content with regional flavor might be the best way to keep PBS stations relevant to new and younger audiences over time, hopefully we'll get a chance to find out.
Idealistic at best. Moyer was not an honorable man but an underhanded propagandist. I still remember how he tried to make Reagan’s modest spending cuts look like some war on the poor.
PBS might have served a purpose 30 years ago. But with all the many options now both over the air and on the internet, it is past time for taxpayer funding to end.
I certainly understand people resenting Bill Moyers, I haven't always agreed with him and do think it's fair to say that sometimes his journalism crossed into advocacy that wasn't appropriate for public broadcasting. What I can say from close personal observation, though, is that he's pretty well always in earnest and trying to do the right thing as he sees it. I would also say that of most of my former colleagues at PBS, even as I've come to think that national news is something PBS has proven itself unable to handle responsibly.
Moyers reminds me quite a bit of my Dad in that they both grew up in grinding poverty and fundamentally credited their opportunities in life to the New Deal legacy and federal technocratic expertise. I think that was such a foundational experience for both of them that neither was really able to let go of that mid-twentieth century confidence in expansive government even as federal corruption and incompetence became more and more clear. To abandon the Great Society would be like asking them to forsake some precious part of themselves.
On balance I agree that PBS serves less purpose today than it did a few decades ago, especially in major cities with a lot of cultural resources. But at its best it still plays an important role, especially for lower-income people, and I believe could do a lot of good in trying to shore up some cultural common ground in our hyperpolarized society.
I could see it if they PBS replaced the board and fired the head staff without golden parachutes and got someone Trump would trust to do the job. I can't see the progressives letting go though.
There are a few very big coastal stations that produce some of the most prominent and sometimes objectionable national content, but PBS is generally too decentralized to have any very many head bums to satisfyingly throw out. Most of the national funding, as opposed to foundation grants, goes to pretty small markets to do pretty admirable things. NPR I can't speak for but PBS I think is salvageable, particularly were it to drop news coverage in favor of more cultural, historical, and local content!
I think the sad fact is that people no longer come to television expecting to be educated. We can lament the imminent loss of public television, but there really is no way to save it in a world where there are no broadcast outlets that can turn a profit by focusing on producing educational content. The government doesn't fund activities that can't survive in the market, unless they're national security related.
I know this is focused on PBS, not NPR, but as a decades-long former NPR listener I have really felt a decline in quality and an increase in elitism and the adoption of identitarian positions, which is bizarrely paired with efforts to be solicitous of Donald Trump and Trump voters.
I guess you can't have a national public media outlet when 40% of the country hates the media. They will not allow their tax dollars to be wasted on educating them and they won't accept a diet of facts, even if we could agree on feeding them only facts and nothing else.
Your point is easy to illustrate. My city now has 170 broadcast television channels now that broadcast TV has gone digital. Practically none of these shows are educational because people would rather be entertained than educated. I can and do buy educational shows from The Great Courses streaming service. So, educational shows are available for those who want them. But, which educational shows I buy is my choice, not that of some PBS station manager who considers himself so much wiser than me that he is entitled to choose what I pay for even if I never watch it.
I wish there was a better word here than education. What I really mean is that the point of a good newscast is that it should provide viewers with information on current events they would not otherwise receive that allows them to make political choices at the ballot box that are grounded in facts and not misinformation.
This is a more fundamental public good, I think, than the ability to watch free online courses of various types. Unless you're taking a civics course, most courses don't provide information on current events that is useful to voters that have to make decisions.
I've called this a public good because it is something that PBS and NPR have provided in the past. But NBC, ABC, and CBS also did this as recently as the 1980s, so it's clear the private sector could also provide this function. Unfortunately, our culture is now broken such that a great many average people resist being told the facts because they've been made to believe that anyone who has the facts is an 'elite,' and elites are always evil and have people's worst interests at heart.
The passive voice is vague because it recounts action without identifying the actor. If a great many average people "have been made to believe" that anyone who has the facts is an 'elite', who convinced them of that? And, why did all those average people believe it?
I offer an alternative explanation. Public distrust of institutions, which really means distrust of the elites who run them, is the natural result of the elites' chronic abuse of the public trust. The list of examples is long but the news media is at the top.
Thanks, I didn't need an explanation on how language works.
The word 'elites' belongs in quotes because it's a grab bag of different groups with different interests and agendas. People who talk about elites doing x are not really saying anything because they're not being specific enough to make an argument that can be proven or refuted.
Are there specific groups of people of middle-class status or higher in the media, government, or academe that the public might be said to trust who have betrayed that trust? Absolutely. We might even agree on what some of those groups are and why their actions were self-centered and wrong.
But when 'elites' are all doing different things for different reasons it doesn't make sense to lump them together and talk about them as a group. It only obscures the real issues.
The public is also right to feel betrayed. But what people do in the face of the betrayal is important. There's a world of difference between lashing out at whole categories of people or 'the system' and attacking specific individuals, businesses, media outlets, or universities that have done particular things.
You wrote that "a great many average people resist being told the facts because they've been made to believe that anyone who has the facts is an 'elite' and elites are always evil..." If so, then who made them believe that?
The general public's current refusal to believe in empirical facts and expert opinion is the result of the actions of multiple groups of people on the political left and the right over decades of time. It's Reagan making government the enemy and removing the fairness doctrine in broadcasting. It's broadcasters slowly switching to pure entertainment and the journalists who went along. It's leftist professors advancing postmodernist ideas that question empiricism, while not really producing work the average person sees as useful. It's the general decline in authority caused by the rise of feminism, civil rights, and the overthrow of the traditional WASP patriarchy. One could go on peeling different layers of the onion but it's clear that there's no single elite behind this complex change in societal attitudes.
There's a classic episode of Frasier where Frasier wants to watch Antiques Roadshow but his father insists he needs the TV to watch his game show, and it turns out they both want to watch the same thing. Frasier wants to learn highbrow facts about antiques, while his father wants to see people crestfallen when the object they think is valuable is worthless.
That's something special that PBS provides at its best, a way to offer content to the mass audience that's informative but doesn't feel so much like eating one's vegetables. Intellectually curious people will always seek out knowledge of their own accord, but many other normies are unlikely to be exposed to some of the finer things in cultural life without it being part of the ambient environment. I think it's a social good for highlights from Handel's Messiah to be freely available on broadcast TV on Christmas morning even for people who might never have heard of it, or nature footage, or documentaries et al just to try to help plant some seeds. Controversial news programs, that a lot of people are disenchanted with for good reason, don't seem to be helping with that mission.
I didn't really grow up on NPR and never worked there, my impression is that their bread and butter has long been more polarizing and exclusive than PBS. I'm far less optimistic that they can be salvaged in terms of being appropriate for public funding, and in my experience a lot of their local content may be even more biased than the national programming. Even as someone who believes in public media I just can't justify their funding when there are plenty of wealthy progressive philanthropists who love their content and could easily keep them afloat. Whereas PBS still plays a significant role for people who truly can't afford the alternatives.
That NPR and sometimes PBS rub people the wrong way doesn't necessarily mean there's no market for edifying infotainment, though. Downton Abbey was huge, Ken Burns documentaries are still immensely popular, etc. Part of the problem is that sometimes wannabe highbrow content telegraphs a certain haughty disdain for the audience, or tries to suggest that people are better than their neighbors for happening to tune in, but I think the success of Jeopardy tournaments in primetime, Oppenheimer, etc. indicates there's an unfilled appetite out there for material that informs as it entertains.
Obviously I'm a huge fan of the edifying infotainment you highlight. We should have more of it whenever it sells. But it's entertainment first and of educational value second, if at all, and it doesn't address the problem that over 40% of our society doesn't want news that is fact-based.
I appreciate your insider perspective on PBS and criticisms of NPR. I'd love to see these reformed, but I don't think they will be short of a political revolution where we lose the rule of law and civil society and then have to reconstruct it. Never thought it would come to this.
What I find most baffling is that the perilous situation public broadcasters find themselves in was so easily avoidable. NPR never particularly appealed to me in tone, but they used to have a ton of fans across the political spectrum because they were (correctly) perceived as somewhat left-leaning but also had a lot of credibility for the depth of their reporting. They were enormously influential in shaping the policy conversation. But then with Obama's second term they opted to become almost a parody of themselves and ended up shedding listeners right and left. Even many progressives find much of the NPR lineup all but unlistenable now. I'm sure streaming and media fragmentation would have taken some toll on their ratings regardless, but NPR went out of its way to become less relevant.
There is no justification for the government funding of television, but rather than defund PBS and NPR, there is a much better option: put them up for auction. Then, the money should be applied to the national debt.
Although probably unworkable, it would be great if there were also a way to make those responsible for its nearly-complete partisan leaning to pay back the salaries they've made over the years doing that political work. I'd settle for the auction, however.
I hear you! I tend to think of PBS as akin to public libraries, though, and particularly for pretty hard-up places. But there have indeed been enough examples of bias over the years to really turn off a lot of people to the PBS brand. Still, there's usually not that much political about the classics on Great Performances, the animal footage on Nature, the Jane Austen adaptations, etc. and not necessarily a lot of room for that sort of upper-middlebrow content in terms of broadcast and basic cable that would be broadly accessible to everybody.
For me, the matter is fundamental: is it a proper function of the government to fund any media of any kind? You cannot look at benefits as a way to justify it. The ends do not justify the means. If we use public benefit as the standard of value, then where would it stop?
You are correct in saying that there are many shows which are not political, however, I'd question one of your examples. Anything about "nature" will inevitably have the political version of "climate change" as a matter-of-course.
Shows that are similar to the others you mentioned had been on network television for decades (not as much after cable TV proliferated), so there was access to that type of content. If that programming was really popular, then the networks would have broadcast a lot more of it, but alas, it was only moderately popular.
Even if PBS and NPR were perfectly "balanced" from a political standpoint, it would still not be appropriate for the government to fund them.
One of the original arguments in their creation was that public television/radio would be free of advertising. We all hate commercials, but no one could ever provide a legitimate argument about why we needed commercial-free TV or radio networks, or why it was our right as Americans to have them. No one is entitled to such a thing. But even that was only true in the very beginning. Soon after the creation of PBS and NPR, there were mentions of sponsorships by companies, and then, years later, outright commercials. Add to that the incessant fund-raising interludes, which are a million times worse than commercials!
I'm not sure why no one has publicly mentioned auctioning PBS and NPR, but I'm a nobody, so there is virtually no way for me to suggest the idea to people who matter. Perhaps, if you have connections, you could do so - that is, if you are inclined to think it is better than simply cutting funding.
I respect where you're coming from! My hometown has a really nice zoo, one of the better ones in the country, that is taxpayer funded so free to visit except for special exhibits. People from the area grumble a bit that visitors from out of town don't have to pay admission, but ultimately I think it's an egalitarian good that kids can see the animals and learn to care about nature regardless of how much money their parents have, plus it helps attract more tourists at a time when the city has a battered reputation. Most of our museums are free, too. I see the best of PBS like that, or a public library, or an event a municipality might put on in a public park to try to bring people together. I don't have quite the same philosophical objection to that being a legitimate role of government at times.
You make a fair point that a nature show is likely to mention climate change in terms that have a bit of a political valence. In general public media is probably inherently a somewhat left-leaning culture in the same way that the military organically leans somewhat conservative. I'd say that's a problem that can be corrected for and managed on PBS other than the news programming, but I certainly understand how someone might disagree.
Thank you for your thoughtful replies. We disagree about some things, but we've conducted our discussion with respect, and I appreciate that very much.
As an aside, I'm a History professor at Empire State University and am deeply interested/concerned about the state of higher-ed. I have been reading your articles perhaps since you started, and find them completely fascinating. I've long believed that when you get a glimpse behind the scenes, you find out how things really work and it is usually really bad. Your writing has confirmed some of my strongest suspicions.
There is a lot of greatness in higher-ed, however, at present it is mostly a sham. But I will add that for the first time since I began in this profession, I am cautiously optimistic about its future. Take care!
Thanks for reading! There's so much rot in higher ed, but also those pockets of greatness. Demystifying some fancy reputations should help with quality control, I hope!
Lyndon Johnson said, "I want real loyalty. I want a man who can kiss my ass in Macy's window and tell me it smells like roses." So he hired Bill Moyers.
I do think Bill Moyers is a fiercely loyal person -- to the extent that I feel a little bad airing even mild criticism, since he was so good to me. And I think Bill felt that LBJ had plucked him from obscurity, and was owed a great deal, but my understanding is that they weren't on the greatest of terms when Bill resigned.
That old status quo, whether it was pushing progressive, technocratic, or apolitical values, was sustainable. The finances were not the problem, and we should reject the idea that we can't afford things that we've afforded for decades and which other countries manage fine. We're not a poor country.
When I argue that the status quo can't continue, I'm not necessarily saying that America literally can't afford some of the less defensible sinecures and programs that DOGE is targeting (presuming we can keep kicking the can of national debt down the road), but that those programs are increasingly corrupting the federal government and wrecking its perceived legitimacy. Without explicit public buy-in, the U.S. taxpayer should not be subsidizing social justice arts programs in South America, for instance, whether we can afford to or not. There are plenty of private foundations that can subsidize that sort of project if they wish, just as there are plenty of philanthropists who could keep the NewsHour and Frontline going with their pocket change. Sloshing public money around, especially to promote social views rejected by much of the electorate, increases cynicism and polarization even as the funds get flushed away.
I don't think it's right to say that DOGE is targeting anything; they seem to be just doing blanket cuts everywhere, wrecking the entire government. The research cuts are leading a lot of my fellow academes to look at doing their research elsewhere as the US isn't going to be a good place to do research anymore, and the cuts to medical research and programs are going to damage public health. The cuts to foreign aid will reduce US prominence and agenda-setting capabilities across the world, leaving the field wide open to Chinese and Russian influence.
Any damage to programs that actually should be cut seems incidental given everything else. I'm not a progressive, and I'm not a fan of progressive social values (although I'm not on the right either; don't get the wrong idea). Policy shifts to get rid of progressive social values creeping into everything would be great, done in a sensible and gradualist/moderate way. That's not what this is, and compared with appointing mostly the worst people available to every position and an air of belligerence to nations that share our values while cozying up to hostile powers like Russia and Hungary is the US throwing itself on its own blade, guaranteeing the end of its soft-power empire.
I tend to agree that a lot of DOGE cuts are exhilarating to populists in the short term but will have quite a hangover both in terms of damage to serious life-saving research and a ton of people who are cheering right now eventually having their oxen gored when they lose their jobs or services or whatever. As someone who studied public policy, I would prefer a more measured, methodical approach--but as someone who's worked in some fancy institutions, I am skeptical that they retain capacity to institute serious reforms in a gradualist/moderate way.
For many influential people who consider themselves enlightened global meritocrats and have the degrees and titles to back that up, the notion of they and their friends spearheading therapeutic technocracy is so appealing that they truly don't think of spending that the electorate would find insane as in any way inappropriate. Nobody at Frontline thinks they're being less than 1000% fair. Unfortunately, wacky identitarian woo has become so intertwined with legitimate work that it's almost like spinal cancer, there's no way to battle the one without inflicting serious damage on the other. So I'm awfully ambivalent, as with PBS, on how to balance the certain amount of shock and awe that might be indispensable with not throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Radicalism is as bad on the left as on the right; I don't see this project of gutting everything as remotely acceptable, even if it were done right. The gradualism in policy shifts should be a firm commitment in governance; the harms of anything else are too great to be worth whatever part of these reforms might be healthy. Pair it with the degree of authoritarianism, disregard for constitutional checks and balances, and threats to invade allies and it's even uncertain if the Republic will survive.
My come to Jesus moment with public broadcasting came when I got slagged, on air, for saying that Bigfoot isn't real. I got hundreds of angry emails an hour for days.
Sorry, I don’t believe the entity is salvageable.
Even small or remote areas now have Starlink access - and if the previous administration had done anything positive it could have implemented that as a benefit 4 years ago.
Public libraries, YouTube, Khan Academy, etc is a way better solution than sponsoring ossified navel exams by costal elite folks with fake British accents.
Let them start a podcast or Substack or YT channel and serve their niche audience. But not with my taxes.
Yes, but how else are we supposed to recognize our betters if we aren't trained to spot the accent?
Here is a great start on DIY culture exposure and appreciation: https://x.com/historiesdaily/status/1895934380599627867?s=46&t=Z05T1FE-sryVgz51u-lPPA
Keep in mind that much of PBS, like so much cultural work,.is a PMC jobs program that provides subsidized cultural content primarily of interest to the PMC.
The classic example is free admission to the opera. Bubba from the trailer park wouldn't go, if you paid him and told him that the coloratura soprano's prodigious mammariesn put Dolly Parton to shame.
Speaking as a reformed member of the PMC (I must confess!) you are certainly correct about that. And yet in my time I've heard from lots of fairly hardscrabble folks who can't afford streaming or cable who've come out of the woodwork to talk about how meaningful it's been over the years to have documentaries, classic films, etc, freely available via public broadcasting. As an indie Substack journalist who's seen the sausage-making, I scoff at a lot of the PMC conventional wisdom on PBS, but there are many people for whom that's their primary experience of a sensibility that seems bigger and classier than their immediate circumstances. It's no longer meaningful to me but feels meaningful to a lot of viewers, and non-news PBS at its best even now still provides much more than that, I would contend.
I grew up a barn cat, and have since acquired (I think) a reasonable amount of culture. I dodn't know how much role PBS played in that, but libraries and NPR sure did.
And that's the "pro-funding" argument in a nutshell - "if it leads one bubba who just came to the opera to impress his girlfriend and he leaves humming 'A cenar teco', then it has done some good."
Maybe, and I am not unsympathetic. But let's not pretend that cats looking for a spot to get away from the cold and cheap entertainment are the primary beneficiaries, here.
I think the issue is TRUST. While one wishes that a nation could have impartial public broadcasting outlets, ours have shown themselves to be mouthpieces for the DNC, like much of the REST of the legacy media. Why would anyone ever again believe that NPR is impartial? I know _I_ won’t. Besides - like every other government agency, it’s going to have a Leftist slant, because those are the people who believe in using government to achieve their social engineering goals.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts. It’s good to get more insight on how conservative populists feel, especially ones who have worked with PBS.
It would be really good though if you could have explained how CBP and PBS work in terms of funding. For example, the PBS I work at receives approximately 10% of its funding from CBP. The remainder comes from other entities, including local government and donors. Since we are part of our school district, which holds our license, we provide not only on air / streaming tv shows. We provide educational courses, training for teachers, high stakes testing, job certifications, training for people who are jobless or underemployed. We work with students who have been in juvenile detention to support them as they rehabilitate, we also provide local TV programming specifically for our communities that is, at its core, educational. We also provide events that allow people to connect and socialize together around educational and experiential learning.
Let’s also take a look at the value of PBS KIDS programs, which do not have an equal anywhere else on air. We have a children’s writing contest that has absolutely had a positive impact on kids who’ve participated in it. We just interviewed the kids who won this contest in the early 20s and it was very clear that this experience was memorable and impactful.
So PBS stations are much more than tv channels. Many people do not understand this and, if you don’t understand this, then you can’t see their value. It’s important to have hard conversations around fair reporting and representation on tv in this era, but to think they should be dismantled and sold off is ignorant. I’m not saying you argued this, but I am seeing comments that do. I think knowing that the $1.60 amount per person that goes per year to fund these stations is well worth it.
As for NPR, I have never worked there but I do know that they are required to cover news round the clock which isn’t something PBS does.
Very important points, Autumn, thanks for weighing in! I might have emphasized more that CPB pays for only a fraction of PBS stations' budgets -- I do think due to creative accounting it's more than 10% at a lot of stations, but not anywhere near the half or more probably most PBS critics would assume. I don't really consider myself a conservative populist (more a disillusioned center-left person with certain populist sympathies) but I think a lot of them would nonetheless say it's the principle of the thing and the federal government shouldn't be involved in media at all. If we were starting in a vacuum I might be inclined to agree, but PBS has accomplished so much good and is continuing to do so much good that I wholeheartedly feel it should be preserved.
But that being said, as I mention in the piece I do think right-leaning critics have a point, especially when it comes to news coverage. In the same way that many people on the left oppose prayer in school as using government resources to promote a particular religious view, it's not unreasonable for many people on the right to oppose ideologically slanted news programming using government resources to promote a particular political view. To have those shows on night after night, systematically privileging the views of one half of the electorate over the other, has been like poking the right with a stick, and the backlash has been building for decades. Cutting the news programs (hopefully to be picked up by other platforms that are fully independently funded and don't promise to be politically even-handed) would be an important step towards emphasizing that PBS is a valuable resource for all, and hopefully keep the system rolling for many years to come.
My suspicion is that the majority of those who believe this on principle do not watch PBS and aren’t likely interested in the social impact that a local station has on their community.
Government corruption is a concern, but private sector corruption is just as harmful. We are where we are now as a society because billionaire elites on both sides are waging a colossal war against each other that ultimately harms the people who aren’t billionaires.
PBS can’t afford to spin off its news programming. It is a pillar of the brand. We have a local public affairs show that provides much longer form journalism around important local issues. No other local news can offer this. Perhaps in a less polarized society we wouldn’t be in such a precarious situation.
But PBS, as you are likely very aware, has a much bigger issue it’s facing. One of your commenters referred to it as a fossil. The media landscape is in serious trouble and PBS is not immune to this. Apart from PBS KIDS viewership, loyal viewers and donors are much older than you or I are. Whether that is because the Boomer loyalty has been maintained over the years due to a fondness to the PBS brand, or it’s just a brand that viewers age into, has become increasingly a concern.
I did a piece recently about how companies and organizations can find themselves at a crossroads where they're struggling and may really need to change to some extent, but any change they can conceivably make threatens to alienate the existing customer base at least as much as it might attract newcomers.
https://ivyexile.substack.com/p/the-new-coke-revisited
I hear you about the centrality of PBS news to the whole enterprise, it's what most drew me in as I was growing up, but at this moment it's the point of greatest political vulnerability. I've met any number of moderate conservatives who love Masterpiece or some of the other British shows, the documentaries, the sort of educational community work you were talking about etc who don't really have any beef with PBS other than the national news programming. The local public affairs content on my station is quite viable across the political spectrum. I just wonder if it's a question of amputating a limb at this point to have a better shot at saving the patient.
The media environment is so fragmented, as you note, that there's no hope of PBS or any single channel playing the sort of agenda-setting role that it could a few decades back. Almost by definition broadcast or basic cable these days is playing to a poorer and likely older demographic, which makes it more vulnerable politically. But I think there's a tremendous hunger for regional community, especially as local newspapers shut down or just run stories off the wires. Leaning into that sort of content with regional flavor might be the best way to keep PBS stations relevant to new and younger audiences over time, hopefully we'll get a chance to find out.
Idealistic at best. Moyer was not an honorable man but an underhanded propagandist. I still remember how he tried to make Reagan’s modest spending cuts look like some war on the poor.
PBS might have served a purpose 30 years ago. But with all the many options now both over the air and on the internet, it is past time for taxpayer funding to end.
I certainly understand people resenting Bill Moyers, I haven't always agreed with him and do think it's fair to say that sometimes his journalism crossed into advocacy that wasn't appropriate for public broadcasting. What I can say from close personal observation, though, is that he's pretty well always in earnest and trying to do the right thing as he sees it. I would also say that of most of my former colleagues at PBS, even as I've come to think that national news is something PBS has proven itself unable to handle responsibly.
Moyers reminds me quite a bit of my Dad in that they both grew up in grinding poverty and fundamentally credited their opportunities in life to the New Deal legacy and federal technocratic expertise. I think that was such a foundational experience for both of them that neither was really able to let go of that mid-twentieth century confidence in expansive government even as federal corruption and incompetence became more and more clear. To abandon the Great Society would be like asking them to forsake some precious part of themselves.
On balance I agree that PBS serves less purpose today than it did a few decades ago, especially in major cities with a lot of cultural resources. But at its best it still plays an important role, especially for lower-income people, and I believe could do a lot of good in trying to shore up some cultural common ground in our hyperpolarized society.
I could see it if they PBS replaced the board and fired the head staff without golden parachutes and got someone Trump would trust to do the job. I can't see the progressives letting go though.
There are a few very big coastal stations that produce some of the most prominent and sometimes objectionable national content, but PBS is generally too decentralized to have any very many head bums to satisfyingly throw out. Most of the national funding, as opposed to foundation grants, goes to pretty small markets to do pretty admirable things. NPR I can't speak for but PBS I think is salvageable, particularly were it to drop news coverage in favor of more cultural, historical, and local content!
Yes, I think it was NPR's head I was thinking of. With Trump
priding himself on his TV acumen, I wonder if there is a way to sell that to him.
I think the sad fact is that people no longer come to television expecting to be educated. We can lament the imminent loss of public television, but there really is no way to save it in a world where there are no broadcast outlets that can turn a profit by focusing on producing educational content. The government doesn't fund activities that can't survive in the market, unless they're national security related.
I know this is focused on PBS, not NPR, but as a decades-long former NPR listener I have really felt a decline in quality and an increase in elitism and the adoption of identitarian positions, which is bizarrely paired with efforts to be solicitous of Donald Trump and Trump voters.
I guess you can't have a national public media outlet when 40% of the country hates the media. They will not allow their tax dollars to be wasted on educating them and they won't accept a diet of facts, even if we could agree on feeding them only facts and nothing else.
Your point is easy to illustrate. My city now has 170 broadcast television channels now that broadcast TV has gone digital. Practically none of these shows are educational because people would rather be entertained than educated. I can and do buy educational shows from The Great Courses streaming service. So, educational shows are available for those who want them. But, which educational shows I buy is my choice, not that of some PBS station manager who considers himself so much wiser than me that he is entitled to choose what I pay for even if I never watch it.
I wish there was a better word here than education. What I really mean is that the point of a good newscast is that it should provide viewers with information on current events they would not otherwise receive that allows them to make political choices at the ballot box that are grounded in facts and not misinformation.
This is a more fundamental public good, I think, than the ability to watch free online courses of various types. Unless you're taking a civics course, most courses don't provide information on current events that is useful to voters that have to make decisions.
I've called this a public good because it is something that PBS and NPR have provided in the past. But NBC, ABC, and CBS also did this as recently as the 1980s, so it's clear the private sector could also provide this function. Unfortunately, our culture is now broken such that a great many average people resist being told the facts because they've been made to believe that anyone who has the facts is an 'elite,' and elites are always evil and have people's worst interests at heart.
The passive voice is vague because it recounts action without identifying the actor. If a great many average people "have been made to believe" that anyone who has the facts is an 'elite', who convinced them of that? And, why did all those average people believe it?
I offer an alternative explanation. Public distrust of institutions, which really means distrust of the elites who run them, is the natural result of the elites' chronic abuse of the public trust. The list of examples is long but the news media is at the top.
Thanks, I didn't need an explanation on how language works.
The word 'elites' belongs in quotes because it's a grab bag of different groups with different interests and agendas. People who talk about elites doing x are not really saying anything because they're not being specific enough to make an argument that can be proven or refuted.
Are there specific groups of people of middle-class status or higher in the media, government, or academe that the public might be said to trust who have betrayed that trust? Absolutely. We might even agree on what some of those groups are and why their actions were self-centered and wrong.
But when 'elites' are all doing different things for different reasons it doesn't make sense to lump them together and talk about them as a group. It only obscures the real issues.
The public is also right to feel betrayed. But what people do in the face of the betrayal is important. There's a world of difference between lashing out at whole categories of people or 'the system' and attacking specific individuals, businesses, media outlets, or universities that have done particular things.
You wrote that "a great many average people resist being told the facts because they've been made to believe that anyone who has the facts is an 'elite' and elites are always evil..." If so, then who made them believe that?
The general public's current refusal to believe in empirical facts and expert opinion is the result of the actions of multiple groups of people on the political left and the right over decades of time. It's Reagan making government the enemy and removing the fairness doctrine in broadcasting. It's broadcasters slowly switching to pure entertainment and the journalists who went along. It's leftist professors advancing postmodernist ideas that question empiricism, while not really producing work the average person sees as useful. It's the general decline in authority caused by the rise of feminism, civil rights, and the overthrow of the traditional WASP patriarchy. One could go on peeling different layers of the onion but it's clear that there's no single elite behind this complex change in societal attitudes.
There's a classic episode of Frasier where Frasier wants to watch Antiques Roadshow but his father insists he needs the TV to watch his game show, and it turns out they both want to watch the same thing. Frasier wants to learn highbrow facts about antiques, while his father wants to see people crestfallen when the object they think is valuable is worthless.
That's something special that PBS provides at its best, a way to offer content to the mass audience that's informative but doesn't feel so much like eating one's vegetables. Intellectually curious people will always seek out knowledge of their own accord, but many other normies are unlikely to be exposed to some of the finer things in cultural life without it being part of the ambient environment. I think it's a social good for highlights from Handel's Messiah to be freely available on broadcast TV on Christmas morning even for people who might never have heard of it, or nature footage, or documentaries et al just to try to help plant some seeds. Controversial news programs, that a lot of people are disenchanted with for good reason, don't seem to be helping with that mission.
I didn't really grow up on NPR and never worked there, my impression is that their bread and butter has long been more polarizing and exclusive than PBS. I'm far less optimistic that they can be salvaged in terms of being appropriate for public funding, and in my experience a lot of their local content may be even more biased than the national programming. Even as someone who believes in public media I just can't justify their funding when there are plenty of wealthy progressive philanthropists who love their content and could easily keep them afloat. Whereas PBS still plays a significant role for people who truly can't afford the alternatives.
That NPR and sometimes PBS rub people the wrong way doesn't necessarily mean there's no market for edifying infotainment, though. Downton Abbey was huge, Ken Burns documentaries are still immensely popular, etc. Part of the problem is that sometimes wannabe highbrow content telegraphs a certain haughty disdain for the audience, or tries to suggest that people are better than their neighbors for happening to tune in, but I think the success of Jeopardy tournaments in primetime, Oppenheimer, etc. indicates there's an unfilled appetite out there for material that informs as it entertains.
Obviously I'm a huge fan of the edifying infotainment you highlight. We should have more of it whenever it sells. But it's entertainment first and of educational value second, if at all, and it doesn't address the problem that over 40% of our society doesn't want news that is fact-based.
I appreciate your insider perspective on PBS and criticisms of NPR. I'd love to see these reformed, but I don't think they will be short of a political revolution where we lose the rule of law and civil society and then have to reconstruct it. Never thought it would come to this.
What I find most baffling is that the perilous situation public broadcasters find themselves in was so easily avoidable. NPR never particularly appealed to me in tone, but they used to have a ton of fans across the political spectrum because they were (correctly) perceived as somewhat left-leaning but also had a lot of credibility for the depth of their reporting. They were enormously influential in shaping the policy conversation. But then with Obama's second term they opted to become almost a parody of themselves and ended up shedding listeners right and left. Even many progressives find much of the NPR lineup all but unlistenable now. I'm sure streaming and media fragmentation would have taken some toll on their ratings regardless, but NPR went out of its way to become less relevant.
There is no justification for the government funding of television, but rather than defund PBS and NPR, there is a much better option: put them up for auction. Then, the money should be applied to the national debt.
Although probably unworkable, it would be great if there were also a way to make those responsible for its nearly-complete partisan leaning to pay back the salaries they've made over the years doing that political work. I'd settle for the auction, however.
I hear you! I tend to think of PBS as akin to public libraries, though, and particularly for pretty hard-up places. But there have indeed been enough examples of bias over the years to really turn off a lot of people to the PBS brand. Still, there's usually not that much political about the classics on Great Performances, the animal footage on Nature, the Jane Austen adaptations, etc. and not necessarily a lot of room for that sort of upper-middlebrow content in terms of broadcast and basic cable that would be broadly accessible to everybody.
For me, the matter is fundamental: is it a proper function of the government to fund any media of any kind? You cannot look at benefits as a way to justify it. The ends do not justify the means. If we use public benefit as the standard of value, then where would it stop?
You are correct in saying that there are many shows which are not political, however, I'd question one of your examples. Anything about "nature" will inevitably have the political version of "climate change" as a matter-of-course.
Shows that are similar to the others you mentioned had been on network television for decades (not as much after cable TV proliferated), so there was access to that type of content. If that programming was really popular, then the networks would have broadcast a lot more of it, but alas, it was only moderately popular.
Even if PBS and NPR were perfectly "balanced" from a political standpoint, it would still not be appropriate for the government to fund them.
One of the original arguments in their creation was that public television/radio would be free of advertising. We all hate commercials, but no one could ever provide a legitimate argument about why we needed commercial-free TV or radio networks, or why it was our right as Americans to have them. No one is entitled to such a thing. But even that was only true in the very beginning. Soon after the creation of PBS and NPR, there were mentions of sponsorships by companies, and then, years later, outright commercials. Add to that the incessant fund-raising interludes, which are a million times worse than commercials!
I'm not sure why no one has publicly mentioned auctioning PBS and NPR, but I'm a nobody, so there is virtually no way for me to suggest the idea to people who matter. Perhaps, if you have connections, you could do so - that is, if you are inclined to think it is better than simply cutting funding.
I respect where you're coming from! My hometown has a really nice zoo, one of the better ones in the country, that is taxpayer funded so free to visit except for special exhibits. People from the area grumble a bit that visitors from out of town don't have to pay admission, but ultimately I think it's an egalitarian good that kids can see the animals and learn to care about nature regardless of how much money their parents have, plus it helps attract more tourists at a time when the city has a battered reputation. Most of our museums are free, too. I see the best of PBS like that, or a public library, or an event a municipality might put on in a public park to try to bring people together. I don't have quite the same philosophical objection to that being a legitimate role of government at times.
You make a fair point that a nature show is likely to mention climate change in terms that have a bit of a political valence. In general public media is probably inherently a somewhat left-leaning culture in the same way that the military organically leans somewhat conservative. I'd say that's a problem that can be corrected for and managed on PBS other than the news programming, but I certainly understand how someone might disagree.
Thank you for your thoughtful replies. We disagree about some things, but we've conducted our discussion with respect, and I appreciate that very much.
As an aside, I'm a History professor at Empire State University and am deeply interested/concerned about the state of higher-ed. I have been reading your articles perhaps since you started, and find them completely fascinating. I've long believed that when you get a glimpse behind the scenes, you find out how things really work and it is usually really bad. Your writing has confirmed some of my strongest suspicions.
There is a lot of greatness in higher-ed, however, at present it is mostly a sham. But I will add that for the first time since I began in this profession, I am cautiously optimistic about its future. Take care!
Thanks for reading! There's so much rot in higher ed, but also those pockets of greatness. Demystifying some fancy reputations should help with quality control, I hope!
Lyndon Johnson said, "I want real loyalty. I want a man who can kiss my ass in Macy's window and tell me it smells like roses." So he hired Bill Moyers.
I do think Bill Moyers is a fiercely loyal person -- to the extent that I feel a little bad airing even mild criticism, since he was so good to me. And I think Bill felt that LBJ had plucked him from obscurity, and was owed a great deal, but my understanding is that they weren't on the greatest of terms when Bill resigned.
I liked Mathnet. ^_^
That old status quo, whether it was pushing progressive, technocratic, or apolitical values, was sustainable. The finances were not the problem, and we should reject the idea that we can't afford things that we've afforded for decades and which other countries manage fine. We're not a poor country.
I can afford anything I want as long as I am spending other people's money.
Nice libertarian fringe politics slogan, but not relevant to the point being made
When I argue that the status quo can't continue, I'm not necessarily saying that America literally can't afford some of the less defensible sinecures and programs that DOGE is targeting (presuming we can keep kicking the can of national debt down the road), but that those programs are increasingly corrupting the federal government and wrecking its perceived legitimacy. Without explicit public buy-in, the U.S. taxpayer should not be subsidizing social justice arts programs in South America, for instance, whether we can afford to or not. There are plenty of private foundations that can subsidize that sort of project if they wish, just as there are plenty of philanthropists who could keep the NewsHour and Frontline going with their pocket change. Sloshing public money around, especially to promote social views rejected by much of the electorate, increases cynicism and polarization even as the funds get flushed away.
I don't think it's right to say that DOGE is targeting anything; they seem to be just doing blanket cuts everywhere, wrecking the entire government. The research cuts are leading a lot of my fellow academes to look at doing their research elsewhere as the US isn't going to be a good place to do research anymore, and the cuts to medical research and programs are going to damage public health. The cuts to foreign aid will reduce US prominence and agenda-setting capabilities across the world, leaving the field wide open to Chinese and Russian influence.
Any damage to programs that actually should be cut seems incidental given everything else. I'm not a progressive, and I'm not a fan of progressive social values (although I'm not on the right either; don't get the wrong idea). Policy shifts to get rid of progressive social values creeping into everything would be great, done in a sensible and gradualist/moderate way. That's not what this is, and compared with appointing mostly the worst people available to every position and an air of belligerence to nations that share our values while cozying up to hostile powers like Russia and Hungary is the US throwing itself on its own blade, guaranteeing the end of its soft-power empire.
I tend to agree that a lot of DOGE cuts are exhilarating to populists in the short term but will have quite a hangover both in terms of damage to serious life-saving research and a ton of people who are cheering right now eventually having their oxen gored when they lose their jobs or services or whatever. As someone who studied public policy, I would prefer a more measured, methodical approach--but as someone who's worked in some fancy institutions, I am skeptical that they retain capacity to institute serious reforms in a gradualist/moderate way.
For many influential people who consider themselves enlightened global meritocrats and have the degrees and titles to back that up, the notion of they and their friends spearheading therapeutic technocracy is so appealing that they truly don't think of spending that the electorate would find insane as in any way inappropriate. Nobody at Frontline thinks they're being less than 1000% fair. Unfortunately, wacky identitarian woo has become so intertwined with legitimate work that it's almost like spinal cancer, there's no way to battle the one without inflicting serious damage on the other. So I'm awfully ambivalent, as with PBS, on how to balance the certain amount of shock and awe that might be indispensable with not throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Radicalism is as bad on the left as on the right; I don't see this project of gutting everything as remotely acceptable, even if it were done right. The gradualism in policy shifts should be a firm commitment in governance; the harms of anything else are too great to be worth whatever part of these reforms might be healthy. Pair it with the degree of authoritarianism, disregard for constitutional checks and balances, and threats to invade allies and it's even uncertain if the Republic will survive.
My come to Jesus moment with public broadcasting came when I got slagged, on air, for saying that Bigfoot isn't real. I got hundreds of angry emails an hour for days.
Yeah, some of my duties for the Moyers show included answering the phone and handling viewer mail, sometimes that could get pretty wild!