Public media stations need stable funding and changes such as a mandate that boards represent their communities in order to address the issues facing local news, a new report says.
The Center for Study of Responsive Law, a public interest group founded by Ralph Nader, released the study Thursday.
“The Public’s Media: The Case for a Democratically Funded and Locally Rooted News Media in an Era of Newsroom Closures” was authored by Michael Swerdlow, a Columbia Law School student and a researcher at the center.
“Public media organizations, such as National Public Radio and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, face financial and governance challenges that leave them unable to fill the void left by the loss of local news reporting in much of the country,” the report said. “This is in large part because Congress has chosen to fund public news media at the lowest rate of any of our peer nations, allocating about as much money to it as the military’s marching bands.”
The report argues that opposition from Republicans and Democrats’ “acquiescence” have kept public media from getting “adequate and stable funding” through discretionary appropriations.
“But Congress has other tools that could provide the necessary funding,” it said. “These monies can be allocated by one Congress and need not be annually reviewed by congressional appropriators.”
The existing setup has led to public media turning to private donations, the report said, citing CPB data from 2019 showing more than 68% of public broadcasting funds came from private donors.
“It is a national embarrassment that our public media institutions are governed like a medieval fiefdom, where the wealthy are given power in exchange for their funding,” the report said.
The report recommends that public media boards represent racial, gender, geographic and economic diversity and that members be selected through a merit-based or democratic process that is not based on someone’s ability to fundraise.
Stations should also find out more about the public’s “informational needs” through research and by creating places for “representative samples of Americans” to provide feedback, the report said. This information should help with story selection, policies and editorial direction.
“Future publicly funded media” should also have to abide by the Freedom of Information Act, with exceptions for journalists, the report said. It calls for published stories and transcripts to also be available to the public for free.
“NPR has a long way to go upward,” Nader said in a news release. “… The founding laws of public broadcasting and their pragmatic visionaries afford a legacy of enablement for their reporting to adopt without further delay.”