New Jersey lawmakers hear pleas to save public broadcasting

This article was first published by the New Jersey Monitor and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

With NJ PBS set to end operations in July after it lost state and federal funding, media and business leaders met in Trenton Monday to urge legislators to quickly find funding and ensure New Jersey does not lose its only public broadcasting station.

The Senate’s legislative oversight committee heard 90 minutes of pleas from people who warned that losing public news and arts programming would lead to a less-informed citizenry and hurt families who can’t afford to pay for cable TV or streaming services. Corruption, political polarization and misinformation threaten to flourish as the shrinking media industry loses another trusted outlet, they said.

“This is not an option for you to debate. It’s an obligation that you need to fulfill,” said Tom Bracken, president and CEO of the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce and a former NJ PBS board member.

Mike Rispoli is the senior director of journalism and civic information at Free Press Action, a national, nonpartisan nonprofit that advocates for press freedom, civic engagement and expanded funding for public funding. Funding cuts and the decades-long decline of newspapers have created a media environment “where good information is hard to find and people’s news feeds are increasingly filled with hate, clickbait and misinformation,” he told lawmakers.

“The end result is not just the thousands of journalism jobs that have been lost or the dozens of newsrooms that have been closed. It is the countless communities that are left in the dark and don’t know what’s going on in their schools, whether their water is safe to drink, where their tax dollars are going, which local businesses are opening or closing, and how to coordinate with their neighbors to solve problems,” Rispoli said.

Monday’s hearing came nearly five months after legislators passed a $58.8 billion budget that cut NJ PBS’ state allocation from $1 million to $250,000. NJ PBS also lost more than $1.5 million in funding last summer from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting after Republicans in Congress rescinded more than $1 billion in funding federal lawmakers had already approved for the current and next fiscal years.

NJ PBS announced in September it would close by the end of June 2026 because its parent company, the New Jersey Public Broadcasting Authority, and WNET, the New York–based public TV station that operates NJ PBS, couldn’t agree on a contract.

The state’s funding cuts were the elephant in the room during Monday’s hearing, with most speakers tap-dancing to avoid casting too much blame at state legislators for NJ PBS’ plight. The committee’s five members and two more legislators who showed up to testify all voiced support for saving public broadcasting, but five — all Democrats — had voted for the NJ PBS cut by voting for the budget broadly.

Bracken reminded legislators that the state had squandered past opportunities to protect public broadcasting in New Jersey, including in 2017 when the state sold the licenses of two public broadcasting stations for $332 million but then used most of the money to cover budget deficits rather than rebuild local news.

“If you’d treated it like a foundation and used 5% a year, we would have been having some $16.5 million all these years to fund public media,” Bracken said.

“Hindsight is always great,” Sen. John Burzichelli (D-Gloucester) responded. “They were hard times. I mean, we had no money. So the fact that that got absorbed — now, should it have been replenished as you rebuilt the surplus? That’s a discussion for another day.”

Media leaders from Montclair State University and Rowan University offered their facilities, staff and students to ensure public broadcasting continues past June. Advocates and lawmakers alike agreed a new model of public broadcasting should have both a permanent source of funding and opportunities for philanthropy. Bracken told lawmakers he also would press the state’s big businesses to step up financially, and that several major corporations already have pledged to support the effort.

In 2018, the state did act to protect local news by creating the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, a nonprofit that has gotten $16 million in state funding since 2019 to erase news deserts statewide and fund news outlets, according to Chris Daggett, a consortium consultant.

Assemblyman Louis Greenwald (D-Camden), a key supporter in 2017 for the consortium’s creation, testified Monday that public media is a needed antidote to the non-traditional news sources that “reward outrage and echo chambers.”

“The health of our democracy depends on the strength of our local news,” he told his legislative colleagues.

He added: “We cannot rely on New York and Philadelphia media markets to tell New Jersey’s story.”

Sen. Andrew Zwicker (D-Middlesex), the committee’s chair, said lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are committed to figuring out the finances and a governance structure to save public broadcasting.

“We all know we have a difficult budget in front of us,” Zwicker said.

Greenwald responded: “Budgets are always difficult. Budgets are a reflection of our priorities.”