About the Guest:
Victor Pickard is the C. Edwin Baker professor of media policy and political economy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, where he codirects the Media, Inequality & Change (MIC) Center. Before teaching at Penn, he taught at New York University and the University of Virginia and has held visiting appointments at Cornell, Goldsmiths, and the London School of Economics. Previously, he worked on media policy in Washington, DC, as a senior research fellow at New America and as a policy fellow for Rep. Diane Watson. Pickard chairs the Board of Directors for the media reform organization Free Press and codirects the annual Consortium on Media Policy Studies (COMPASS) program in Washington, DC. His research on the politics of media policy, the history and future of journalism, and the role of public media in a democratic society has been published in dozens of scholarly journals and anthologies, and he often writes op-eds and essays for popular venues such as The Guardian, the Washington Post, Columbia Journalism Review, Harvard Business Review, Jacobin, The Nation, and The Atlantic. He has been interviewed widely for media organizations such as NPR, Pacifica, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, the Wall Street Journal, MSNBC, C-SPAN, PBS News Hour, and The New York Times. Pickard has authored or edited six books, including the award-winning monographs Democracy Without Journalism? and America’s Battle for Media Democracy.
Episode Transcript:
Cory Barker: In 1967, President Lyndon B Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act into law establishing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, known as the CPB. It was a monumental step ensuring that educational and public interest news was available to all Americans, free from commercial pressures. Fast forward 50 years, during his first term, President Donald Trump's administration made one of the most aggressive attempts yet to dismantle the CPB, proposing to eliminate federal funding for public broadcasting. The argument that PBS and NPR should stand on their own without taxpayer support. The reaction was swift, with pushback from journalists, educators, and communities who rely on public media for everything, from breaking news to children's programming. Now, the Trump administration is once again calling for the defunding of the CPB, a move that could drastically impact stations across the country. Could NPR and PBS survive another round of cuts? And what happens to journalism and democracy itself if they can't?
Matt Jordan: To explore these questions, we're going to talk with Victor Pickard. Victor's research explores the history and political economy of media institutions, media activism, and media policy. He's especially interested in the future of journalism and the role media plays in democracy. Victor is the C. Edwin Baker, Professor of media policy and political economy at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, where he co-directs the media inequality and change center, known as the mic center. He has written extensively about media reform, public media, and the threats facing independent journalism. His books include "Democracy Without Journalism? Confronting the Misinformation Society" and "America's Battle for Media Democracy: The Triumph of Corporate Libertarianism, and the Future Of Media Reform." Beyond academia, Victor has worked on media policy in Washington, DC and regularly advises journalists, policymakers, and activists on media reform. His insights have been featured in The Washington Post, The Guardian, Columbia Journalism Review, and many other outlets. Victor, welcome to News Over Noise.
Victor Pickard: Thanks so much for having me on the show.
Matt Jordan: We're really happy to talk with you about these issues. Obviously, the last couple of months have been a whirlwind of change. So, I'm going to begin with, what is the history of public media in America? How did we get what we have?
Victor Pickard: Somewhat counterintuitively, I think the history of Public Broadcasting in the United States really should begin at least 90 years ago. And this goes back to the early days of commercial radio when there was an actual debate about what the nature of radio should be in a Democratic society, how it should be structurally designed, whether it should be advertising dependent, for example, or whether it should be publicly supported. And unlike most democratic countries around the world, the US went down a very different path by deciding to develop a predominantly commercial broadcast media system that was so heavily reliant on advertising revenue. But what few people realize is that this was not inevitable. This was not for ordained. It could have easily gone the other way. There was almost a Wagner-Hatfield Amendment to the 1934 Communications Act that would have allocated 25% of all radio frequencies to non-profit programming. So had that gone through our broadcast media and indeed, arguably our entire media system might look much different today. But after decades of advocacy, there were a couple important policy decisions along the way. But I would say the primary pieces of this movement that have ultimately led to our public broadcasting system was this continued pressure from educators and other activist groups, but also the big foundations got involved. The Ford Foundation, for example. Carnegie got involved, and they devoted tremendous resources into incubating this alternative infrastructure that ultimately did develop into the public broadcasting system. It officially came into being with the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 passed by LBJ, and that eventually led to 69 and 70, 1970, when PBS and NPR, respectively, came into being. So not as long of a history as many democratic countries have with their public broadcasting systems. Some key details to fill in yet, but that's the broad sketch of the narrative.
Matt Jordan: Who were the—who was the opposition? What forces were driving the anti-public broadcasting narrative?
Victor Pickard: As you probably could guess, the people who or the groups that were most adamantly opposed to more of a public broadcasting system were those people and groups who stood to gain from a commercial broadcasting system. And to be clear, the 1934 Communications Act, which you could say, if you're going to be generous, is a bit of a mixed bag in terms of it established the Federal Communications Commission, it established some normative guidelines, but by and large, what it really did was sanctify this commercial broadcast system. And not only that, but it basically granted the power to a handful of corporations. And the two biggest ones that ended up really dominating the early commercial broadcasting system was NBC and CBS. There was a smaller one, Mutual Broadcasting System, but much smaller than the other two. And almost immediately, despite all this lobbying from the commercial industries and the—I refer to them as corporate libertarians at this time, but despite all of that, media reformers very quickly pushed against this system. And you start to see signs of that by the late 30s and into the 40s, when first, they tried to do some old-fashioned monopoly, trust busting, and antitrust, and they forced NBC to divest itself of one of its two major networks. They basically broke up a big media monopoly. And that's how we got ABC. But you might not be surprised that going from two big players to three big players did not transform the media landscape. So, these battles continue throughout the 40s. On the one side, you had social movement groups, you had public interest defenders, you had new dealers. And on the other side, you had these market libertarians, these lobbyists for the industries who later used red baiting tactics as a way to discredit the reformers. And this is an interesting parallel with some of the things we're seeing today. But that is ultimately how we ended up with—by the end of the 40s, we got the fairness doctrine, which today is often held up as the high-water mark for progressive media policy making. But in fact, it was seen as a consolation prize by media reformers in the 40s. That was after they had lost all these other more structural battles to try to carve out a public sector within our broadcast media system.
Matt Jordan: In your work, you've talked a lot about one of the needs for public broadcasting that emerges from these longer debates about this, is just the idea of public interest journalism. That serving the public interest is just something that the market can't do very well. And you've described this as market failure. So, can you just sketch out what you mean by media or news market failure in terms of our media ecosystem today?
Victor Pickard: Sure. So, to give—first, a little bit of context for this idea of market failure, it comes straight out of neoclassical mainstream economics, although, oftentimes in a standard textbook, it's treated as this weird anomaly. It's like when things glitch a little bit. And it's the one time when government has a legitimate role to intervene into markets to make a few tweaks, so they go back to being presumably self-correcting. What I argue is what I call systemic market failure. It's something that's not a bug, but a feature of a commercial media system that's really baked into the DNA of that system, which is a market. There simply aren't the incentives in place for a market to provide public service journalism, in sufficient quantity or quality that a democracy requires. And so, another way of thinking of market failure is that it's an insufficient allocation of necessary resources. And there are various market failures that can be traced out. But again, there are certain things that a commercial media system or a commercial market in general cannot do well. And one of them in particular is to provide public goods. And I think it's fair to qualify journalism, or at least the news and information produced by journalism, as public goods. Public goods are not like regular commodities. They're not like widgets that are produced in a factory. They are, by their very nature, very difficult to support through commercial market mechanisms. The fancy terms are they're non-rivalrous and non-excludable, which means it's very difficult to prevent free riders, people who may benefit from the service or the good, but they don't pay for it. It's also hard to monetize public goods. So, for these reasons and more, you see this constant market failure in our commercial media systems. And most democratic countries recognize this. It's one of the reasons why they do maintain such robust public broadcasting systems. But our media policies have never really reflected these iron laws of capitalist media system. And I think that's a major problem and one of the main drivers for many of the crises that we're seeing today.
Cory Barker: If you're just joining us, this is News Over Noise. I'm Cory Barker.
Matt Jordan: And I'm Matt Jordan.
Cory Barker: We're talking with media scholar, Victor Pickard, about the role of public media and what may happen to this institution under the Trump administration. Just thinking, more recent history, President Trump tried to cut funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting every year of his first admin. It's back as part of the second administration's agenda, but even scattered polling shows that many Trump supporters are in favor of government funding for public broadcasting. So why then is there this constant focus in the Trump administration in defunding public broadcasting, maybe even in comparison to previous efforts to strip away funding or support for public broadcasting?
Victor Pickard: Yeah, that's a great question. And to your last point, I do think we can see, even beginning with the early implementation of NPR and PBS, from the very beginning, political conservatives, many Republicans and Republican administrations have viciously attacked public broadcasting. So, it was pretty much attacked from its beginning, almost. And so, I think in many ways, what we're seeing today is just a continuity of those attacks. So, I wouldn't say that it's entirely unprecedented, although at the same time, I think you could say there's a qualitative difference in the aggressive nature. And there's also such an irony in the rationale for many of their attacks right now. And to be specific, the FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, is saying that it's because public broadcasting is relying on commercials, and that is the pretense for why these investigations are being launched with the implication that maybe what federal money they do receive is going to be phased out. And the irony is that from the very beginning, public broadcasting was set up in a way that it was economically and politically weak and vulnerable to these attacks. And from the beginning, LBJ had promised that within a year they would find a more permanent way of funding public broadcasting, and there were various attempts to do this, but essentially, they never found a permanent and reliable funding mechanism for public broadcasting. So, it's always been reliant on the appropriations process, which annually throws out a pittance of funding towards public broadcasting and forcing them to seek out alternative means of support. And indeed, beginning in the late 70s, but really taking off during the Reagan administration, there were these rule changes that allowed public broadcasting to air more identifiable commercials on the air, euphemistically referred to as enhanced underwriting. But they're basically just commercials and advertisements by another name. And that, of course, blurs the distinction between public broadcasting and commercial broadcasting. But the key point here is that they were forced to do this, and we've seen an uptick over the years to the point now where NPR gets more than a third of its funding from corporate sponsorships. So, it is a problem that we should be debating. But it really—the way that the Trump administration is going after public broadcasting right now really obscures the root cause of it, which is we've never sufficiently funded our public broadcasting, especially according to global norms. But those are just a few data points. There's, of course, much more to say on all this.
Matt Jordan: Well, if you think about the global norms, I mean, corporations, and public broadcasting gets $1.39 every year per capita whereas most of the robust democracies in the world get between $50 and $100 per head. And if you look at the indexes and the correlations of these, it's pretty obvious that countries that spend that much, they have greater trust in democracy, they have more informed voters, and we have the idea of public broadcasting but don't really have public broadcasting. But that disciplined by the market, public broadcasting is what we have. We have a public broadcasting system that requires donors, and it's heavily disciplined because of that, and in a way, can't really serve the public interest in the same way that a fully funded public broadcasting system would.
Victor Pickard: Yeah, that's absolutely right. And just to add a few more details to what you said, even to call our system a public broadcasting system is a bit of a misnomer since the vast majority of its support comes from private capital, comes from individual donors, foundations, and again, from corporate sponsorship. So that's the first problem. And to tease it out a little bit more, just in global comparison, and some of your listeners may have seen these charts, but the US is almost literally off the chart for how little we allocate towards our public broadcasting system at the federal level. It's now inched up just a little bit. It's now just a little bit over $1.50 at the federal level. And then if you throw in local and State subsidies, you might get a little bit over $3 per person per year. But compare that to the Brits who spend roughly around $100 per year for the BBC and some of the Nordic countries get well above that. And as you note, there's a strong correlation between having a robust public broadcasting system and a healthy democratic society. There's a study that Timothy Neff and I did a few years ago where we used some of that data from the democracy index that The Economist Magazine puts out. Again, it shows that the strongest democracies on the planet also have the strongest public broadcasting systems. And again, you don't want to conflate correlation and causation, but we make the argument that there's a virtuous cycle that strong public broadcasting encourages a strong democracy which encourages a strong public broadcasting, so they rise and fall together. And at the very least, it shows that public subsidies for a media system does not lead to a slippery slope towards totalitarianism. And that's often a knee-jerk reaction here in the US that, God forbid, the government ever gets involved in our media system, ever funds media. Well, media subsidies are as American as apple pie going back to the postal system when we had subsidies that in today's currency would translate to tens of billions of dollars for the dissemination of newspapers. So, it's never a question of whether government should be involved. Government is always involved. The question is, how should it be involved? And as you note, the Trump administration wants to make sure that government is not involved in ways that might actually help the public interest in many ways. But this idea, even it's euphemistic to say, disciplined by the market because that obscures was actually happening. I mean, you're absolutely right. They're using that language also in describing how they're going after universities right now. They want these institutions to be disciplined by the market, but we know what happens. If it's disciplined by the market, ultimately over time, that's going to serve wealthier members of society more, and it's going to harm the vast majority of members of society. So, I feel like that should be part of our framing, as well.
Matt Jordan: That framing for free-marketism almost invariably doesn't serve the public interest when it's doing that. It serves commercial interests when it's doing that, which is how you get something like we have today, which is the attention economy where you're not going to get a whole lot of stuff that's going to help people and the attention economy, you're going to get what gets clicks and ratings. And so that's I think why you and others have said that we need an option that is out there, a public option if you were, that is going to be serving different imperatives than that free market corporate libertarian imperative.
Victor Pickard: That's right. That's absolutely right. I mean, I feel like if you peel back the layers a little bit, we're really grappling with symptoms of deeper structural pathologies. And the main one that you're putting your finger on is this underlying logic that treats our media as commodities, not public goods, that sees our media as primary value is how much it fetches on the so-called free market. Of course, free market is another one of these great misnomers.
There's typically very little competition involved, whatsoever. And it's really about these monopolists and rich individuals, like Elon Musk, making as much money or at least exerting as much power as they can and democracy be damned. So, you can trace it out historically that every time the FCC really made an attempt to operationalize what the public interest should look like, should mean, industry pounced on them in various ways. And to convince Americans that the American way that American media was this market-driven, advertising dependent system, very monopolistic, that took a tremendous amount of ideological work. That's not how most Americans felt early on, and we can find throughout history all kinds of moments and examples of where people push back against this system. But of course, over time, it becomes naturalized. We basically are socialized to believe that there is no alternative to this hyper capitalistic media system. And that, again, is I think, one of the main reasons why we're dealing with many of these problems today.
Matt Jordan: So, I want to talk a little bit about who's impacted by these potential changes in allocations or full-on cuts. I mean, to me, it seems like rural stations or smaller stations would be ones that receive more federal support because the bigger stations are going to receive more of that corporate or mixed support. So, aren't they most likely to be harmed by any major shifts in funding? And wouldn't that create a similar situation to what we've seen in the newspaper industry potentially creating even larger, wider news deserts in the process?
Victor Pickard: Yeah, unfortunately. While it is true that public broadcasting in general gets relatively small percentage of its funding from public investments from the government, it disproportionately would harm these smaller, more rural-based public broadcasting stations that do depend, sometimes as much as 25 or more percent, of their funding comes from government—stations and places like Alaska and Wyoming where it really is the last institution standing that's providing any semblance of local news and information. They also often serve as the emergency broadcast system of last resort. And I know part of the rationale is often that it's almost anachronistic to have a public broadcasting system. Do we even need it anymore? We have access to the internet. Well, tens of millions of Americans don't have access to broadband internet services, and many of them live in these so-called news deserts. So there really is no local news media left whatsoever. And we're seeing almost on a monthly basis now a new major report or study comes out showing all the social harms that occur when communities lose access to local news media. This really is a devastating crisis, and I do think it helps us make the argument for why arguably public broadcasting is more necessary today than ever before.
Matt Jordan: I can't agree with that enough. And since nature abhors a vacuum, into that vacuum pours partisan media, and the more there isn't good public serving media, the more these partisan, hyper-partisan news orgs thrive. And I think this is like you're saying, this is the reason why, now more than ever, we need something that is going to serve as an alternative to that hyper-partisan media ecosystem.
Victor Pickard: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I mean, sometimes those outlets are referred to as pink slime journalism. I mean, they're essentially propagandistic outlets and typically of the right-wing variety. But again, these are these kinds of symptoms. This is what happens when the only entities that see any profit-making potential left in local journalism are these hedge funds and private equity firms. This is deeply troubling. But what all these symptoms are showing us is that there is simply no commercial future for local journalism. There's no profit-making potential. So, the capitalists are largely removing themselves from the field, except for these very unsavory kind, and they will eventually leave too after they eke out the last bit of profit from these dying local media institutions. So that, again, underscores the need for a systemic alternative. We need structural alternatives to the failing commercial model. And we could—there are certain types of media that we could argue over this, but I feel like with local journalism, it is so glaringly evident. And going back to the trust thing that was mentioned earlier, not only do Americans have higher levels of trust towards public media institutions, but just local media institutions in general. And I do think that this is a potential leverage point. It's a bipartisan consensus. I think that we actually need local media, even among people who might hate the media, when it comes to their local media institutions, they tend to have warm, fuzzy feelings towards those organizations. So, I really think we need to capitalize on that and try to find non-market means of support for the local media that democracy needs.
Matt Jordan: You mentioned him a little bit earlier, but I did want to talk a bit about the new FCC chair, Brendan Carr. In a recent Hollywood reporter story about him, suggests this is part, obviously, of a big ideological project to prop up more right-wing news organizations and even right-wing news influencers. Is that all it is? I mean, is that all that's happening here?
Victor Pickard: I think the one piece here to add going after public broadcasting or even going after the so-called liberal media, is an often-used page from the Republican playbook. So, in some ways, it is a continuity of that. But I think where it's qualitatively different is the extent to which this is meant to simply undercut dissent of any kind. It really is trying to chill all media. So, they remain very meek and don't challenge the Trump administration's agenda, not offer any voices of dissent. And I don't think we've gone all the way there. But certainly, we've been seeing signs of this. And unfortunately, I think we're going to be seeing even more of this. It's just a way, even with public broadcasting, I think they're really trying to rein in anything that might be seen as remotely critical of the Trump administration. I think that is the broader agenda here.
Matt Jordan: The thing about moments of overreach like this, and I think we could say that what we're seeing is an incredible overreach by the Trump administration, is that they're often backlashes. So, I wanted to say, if that is the case, what would you say as an alternative? What would a good way to say, fund or manage a public option in our media environment be?
Victor Pickard: Yeah, that's such an excellent question that again, we probably need another hour to go through all that. But very, very quickly, I would say that number one, much of this is not going to happen anytime soon. This needs to be seen as a long-term project, especially at the federal level. Where I think we should be trying to do things right now is, of course, at the state and local levels where we try to find ways to create these public investments for local journalism. And that's always something I try to bring out in my work where I'm advocating for federally guaranteed resources to fund public media that's truly public, that's actually publicly owned and controlled by local communities. So, I think that is something that we at least should put on our long-term political horizons. I think keep coming back to it, but we have to find ways to publicly finance the news and information that democracy requires. We can't leave it up to the market. We're seeing, a lot of positive signs coming from the philanthropy sector. But that also alone is not enough to fund an entirely a systemic overhaul that we're going to need to see if we're going to have, I would say, any semblance of Democratic society in the future. But just in broad strokes, I think it has to be locally owned and controlled and federally guaranteed.
Matt Jordan: We try to give our listeners some potential strategies or tools to take into their lives based on the topic of the episode. So, in this case, what do people do who want to support public media and want even more of it but feel trapped by the current system that we do have?
Victor Pickard: Yeah. So that's always a great and also, of course, daunting question because many of these problems are so structural and systemic. That said, I do think that we do need to be supporting local media in any way that we can, especially our public broadcasting, but also our local newspapers for those of us who still live in areas that have local newspapers. And I think talking about these issues and to really see that the way our media is designed is, at base, a political decision. These are political decisions to let our local media wither away or to fund them. So, we really should be trying to raise awareness that we do have a say in this, but I do think it's something that we all could be doing. We should be throwing a few bucks towards our local media institutions. I think especially now, they're a bastion of democratic practice and of civil society, and we need to defend them and support them however we can.
Matt Jordan: Well, Victor, that sounds like a great place for us to stop. And listeners out there take Victor's advice and throw a couple of bucks to our local public broadcasting. And, Victor, thank you so much for talking with us and sharing your wisdom about this situation.
Victor Pickard: Thank you all so much. Thoroughly enjoyed the conversation.
Matt Jordan: That's it for this episode of News Over Noise. Our guest was Victor Pickard, the see Edwin Baker professor of Media Policy and Political Economy at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. To hear the full interview, including extended content, listen wherever you get your podcasts or newsovernoise.org. I'm Matt Jordan.
Cory Barker: And I'm Cory Barker.
Matt Jordan: Until next time, stay well and well informed. News Over Noise is produced by the Penn State Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications and WPSU. This program has been funded by the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost at Penn State and is part of the Penn State News Literacy Initiative.
[END OF TRANSCRIPT]
Episode Credits:
Producer: Lindsey Whissel Fenton
Audio Engineers: Mickey Klein, Scott Gros, Clint Yoder
News Over Noise is a co-production of WPSU and Penn State’s Bellisario College of Communications. This program has been funded by the office of the Executive Vice President and Provost at Penn State and is part of the Penn State News Literacy Initiative.
