To save local journalism, update the Public Broadcasting Act

Thomas Jefferson as U.S. Ambassador to France I have written “If I had to choose between a government without a newspaper and a newspaper without a government, I would choose the latter without a moment’s hesitation.”

Jefferson would be disappointed with today’s trends. Increasingly, governments do not have newspapers, especially at the local level, where newspapers are essential to informing the public.

Since 2005, approximately 2,900 newspapers have closed down. According to recently released statistics, The State of Local News Project Northwestern University Medill School of Journalisman additional 2.5 of the remaining 6,000 are closed each week.

The term “news desert” has become both common and accurate.

There are growing concerns about the business model and quality of local journalism. Just recently, this issue was brought to light by staff at the Baltimore Sun, whose new owners David Smith and Armstrong Williams have turned what was once H.L. This was expressed in the form of concerns that the government would end up with a combination of -it-leads” organ. Meanwhile, in Baltimore, you might be lucky to get some news coverage.

That’s why it’s important to recognize and support the ever-growing oases in the middle of these deserts: public radio station newsgathering.

In a role not anticipated by the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, public radio has emerged as a major source of local news, at least in major metropolitan areas. From New York’s WNYC to Los Angeles’ he to KPCC, Boston’s he to WBUR and WGBH to Chicago’s he to WBEZ, public radio ended up hiring a staff of reporters from reading the news. Ta. NPR reports that he employs 3,000 journalists (including reporters, managers, and talk show hosts) in 393 local stations. Each of the 50 companies employs 15 or more journalists. Eight of these stations, including Washington’s WAMU, reach more than 400,000 listeners each week.

Additionally, these nonprofit news organizations go far beyond radio and maintain robust online “newspapers.” They also produce videos, and their pages blur the lines between print, radio, and television. In fact, many companies produce popular podcasts, whose origins can be traced back to public radio. In Chicago, a local public radio station actually acquired and merged with a major newspaper company.

“All Things Thoughted” alone attracts approximately 11.9 million listeners each week, while households that tune in to the PBS News Hour (which often includes interviews with NPR correspondents) each night That’s less than 1 million households.

For public radio journalism to continue to thrive and expand further to the approximately 1,000 public broadcasting licensees across the country, the laws that created public broadcasting in the first place need important updates.

A provision of the law requires the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which allocates approximately $574 million in federal aid to the public media system, to appropriate “75 percent of that amount for distribution to licensees and licensees of public television stations.” is required.

In 2024, radio will be worth $128 million, compared to $383 million for television. In 1967, there were still only three major television networks and radio was considered a dying medium, so focusing on television might have made sense. But that no longer makes sense now that public radio has enthusiastically embraced local journalism while public television has struggled to find a role among the wealth of creative streaming services. In other words, federal assistance should be agnostic as to which media a licensee uses to distribute news and information.

After increasing reporter hiring by 44 percent from 2011 to 2020, public radio stations were recently forced to cut investment in their newsrooms, putting the growth of these oasis in the news desert at risk. This is especially true becauseby Pew Research Center, “The 129 news local public radio licensees spent $480.2 million on programming in 2021, compared to $539.4 million in 2020.” They need more help from the federal government at a time when they need more.

Additionally, television support continues an operational mission that has already been replaced by technology. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is mandated to support free terrestrial broadcasting, and both public television and public radio programming can now be viewed “over-the-top” on smartphones. If broadcasting was essential in 1967, broadband access is essential today.

So far, the Biden administration has taken no action to change this status quo. It is as if the government is keen to build new railway lines through the CPB, just as air travel is becoming more popular.

It’s time to move on.

This isn’t to say that public radio can’t get any better. Because of story choices and other factors, this work does not reach a wide swath of the American public. surely, pew research foundation report that “consistent liberals are more than twice as likely to cite NPR as their top source for political news than web-using adults overall (13 percent vs. 5 percent).” I am. Additionally, it exists primarily in the “blue cities” of the East and West Coasts, where public radio’s local journalism is strongest and most popular.

Of course, media companies are free to cultivate specific audiences (see: Fox News), but not necessarily at taxpayer expense. NPR and its local affiliates should continue to strive to reach a much wider audience geographically, politically, and culturally to demonstrate that they are deserving of subsidies.

Conservatives may be reluctant to expand public radio. What they need to understand is that more support for public radio stations means more local journalism in small cities and towns, and in red states, so they can cover what’s happening there. This means that political diversity will increase as a simple function of doing so.

It is also important to understand that federal aid does not cover nearly the entire cost of field operations. Licensees must rely on financial support from local audiences. That’s one of the reasons public radio moved into local newsgathering in the first place. If local news leans too much in one political direction, it risks losing support from viewers. In other words, public broadcasting is not immune to market testing.

It’s been 56 years since Lyndon Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act, and little has changed in that time. It was long ago that it was brought into the modern media age to help the news desert thrive.

Howard Husock, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, served on the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting from 2013 to 2018. His work on Boston’s public broadcaster WGBH-TV won him the National News and Documentary Emmy Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for coverage of underprivileged people.