Why America’s Public Media Can’t Do Its Job

PBS headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. melanie.phung/flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

Christopher Chávez
University of Oregon

When the Trump administration released its proposed budget in March, it suggested eliminating federal funding for the Corporation of Public Broadcasting (CPB).

“Can we really continue to ask a coal miner in West Virginia or a single mom in Detroit to pay for these programs?” Trump’s Office of Management and Budget director, Mick Mulvaney, said in defense of the cuts.

Mulvaney seemed to argue that public media was a luxury for the educated few, rather than a truly public resource. Indeed, since the CPB was first established, the degree to which public media reflects the diversity of the nation has the subject of much debate.

But it’s not as simple as Mulvaney makes it out to be. Though the proposed cuts seem unlikely to go through this year, public media will continue to be at the mercy of political and economic factors that have hampered its ability to fulfill its mission and achieve its goals.

A mirror for the nation

When Congress passed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 to establish a national, publicly funded media system, there were two clear mandates: to cultivate a more engaged citizen and to affirm the nation’s diversity.

In the network’s original mission statement, NPR architect Bill Siemering described public media as a “necessity for citizens in a democratic society to be enlightened participants.” Unbeholden to the demands of the marketplace, public media would ideally be able to reach audiences that might not be targeted by commercial broadcast networks and their advertisers. This included communities traditionally left out of civic discourse: the uneducated, the poor, the housebound, ethnic minorities and those living in rural areas.

“We try to mirror ALL of the country – perhaps the hardest thing of all,” NPR’s former deputy director Rick Lewis said in 1970, describing his vision for “Morning Edition.”

To tackle this challenge, the CPB decided its subsidiaries, National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), would have a national reach. Meanwhile, they would cultivate member stations rooted in a diverse range of communities across the country. NPR affiliates based in Fresno, California; Mobile, Alabama; or Erie, Pennsylvania might all carry national programs, but they are also tasked with pursuing local stories.

A precarious funding model

Nonetheless, speaking to the country’s extraordinarily diverse populations through a single media system has proven tricky. And over the years, public media has ended up tailoring its programs to an almost exclusively upscale audience of baby boomers.

The decision to focus on college-educated listeners and viewers is certainly a function of the CPB’s own economic realities. As communications professor Robert McChensney argued in his book “The Political Economy of Media,” American public media has been severely handicapped since its inception.

Unlike the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) – which citizens subsidize by paying an annual television license fee – American public media receives relatively little federal funding, denying it a stable source of income. With federal funding in a constant state of flux, public media has come to rely on income from private sources such as pledge drives and corporate underwriting accounts. For example, in 2015 NPR member stations received about 14 percent of their revenues from federal, state and local entities, while 20 percent came from corporations and 37 percent from private donations.

To be economically viable, therefore, public media must focus on affluent, educated listeners. The result is a media system that can, at times, seem woefully out of the touch with nation it purports to represent.

Just as the country is becoming more ethnically, religiously and linguistically diverse (a recent Pew study showed that the U.S. electorate in 2016 was the most diverse in the nation’s history), consumers of national public media remain disproportionately white.

NPR has ambitious aspirations, but its audience still skews old and white. David/flickr, CC BY

According to a 2012 report, the audience for NPR’s member station news programs was 5 percent African-American, 6 percent Latino and 5 percent Asian-American. This disparity is also reflected at the leadership level. In an essay, Joseph Tovares, the senior vice president and chief content officer for the CPB, admitted that the inclusion of African-Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans and Native Americans at the general manager level are almost nonexistent at NPR and PBS member stations.

We see these disparities in the programming itself. Like other national media institutions, public media has traditionally struggled to find a way to include the voices of ethnic and racial minorities. While there are some bright spots – including PBS’s children’s programming and NPR’s Latino USA, the overall diversity efforts seem tepid. In a forum organized by NPR to address public radio’s diversity challenges, sociologist Michael Schudson effectively captured the dilemma:

“No doubt the staff makes an effort to cover issues of special importance to minorities and women, but you suspect that it is a mission and not a habit, and that it feels like a kind of foreign correspondence. You know it can be done well or poorly but, in either case, it is done with the handicap of a largely monochromatic newsroom.”

A wavering commitment to diversity?

Public media realizes that the status quo is a losing strategy. The demographic realities are too sobering. NPR projects that by 2020, its stations’ audience of people younger than 45 will be around 30 percent – half of what that audience accounted for in 1985.

To its credit, the CPB has made broadening its appeal a core part of its current strategy, which includes what it calls the “three D’s”: digital, diversity and dialogue.

However, their own strategic documents provide some insight into just how elastic their definition of inclusion is. For example, NPR’s target audiences still include the “Affluent Business Leader” who is “a c-level employee, has an investment portfolio of $150,000 or more, and holds a leadership position in a club or organization.” Then there’s the “Cultural Connoisseur” who has a postgraduate degree, is more likely to buy tickets for classical music, ballet and opera, and takes more than three vacations a year. For its part, PBS touts the “Power Mom,” who enjoys outdoor activities and spends a significant amount of time online searching for information on museums and concerts.

In other words, these are not the disenfranchised communities whom the original architects of NPR believed would be served by public media.

As journalism professor Ralph Engelman writes in his book “Public Radio and Television in America,” today’s public media was born out of the desire to achieve a more democratic version of German philosopher Jürgen Habermas’ public sphere. Habermas’ notion of what “public” means was criticized as being reserved for propertied, educated males at the exclusion of the poor and disenfranchised. But by serving those already inclined to participate in civic life, it appears that today’s public media extends – rather than disrupts – this pattern.

Just as we’re witnessing unprecedented attacks on the country’s most disenfranchised communities, this seems like an institutional failure. Legislators are advancing policies designed to restrict the movements of Latinos and Muslims. Gains made by the LGBTQ community are being scaled back. There are active efforts to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, eliminate entitlement programs and defund early education programs like Head Start, all of which undermine working-class communities.

Now more than ever, it seems necessary to include the voices – and reach the people – most impacted by these policies. It seems that only by unhitching its funding model from private interests can public media truly fulfill its mission of serving the public at large. But this would require a federal government that’s willing to boost – rather than slash – its funds.

Christopher Chávez, Assistant Professor of Communications, University of Oregon

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

 

Does Nonpartisan Journalism Have A Future

Justin Buchler, Case Western Reserve University

The nonpartisan model of journalism is built around the norm of covering politics as though both parties are equally guilty of all offenses. The 2016 campaign stressed that model to the breaking point with one candidate – Donald Trump – who lied at an astonishing level. PolitiFact rates 51 percent of his statements as “false” or “pants on fire,” with another 18 percent rated as “mostly false.” His presidency will continue to make nonpartisan journalistic norms difficult to follow.

As a political scientist focused on game theory, I approach the media from the perspective of strategic choice. Media outlets make decisions about how to position themselves within a market and how to signal to news consumers what kinds outlets they are in ideological terms. But they also interact strategically with politicians, who use journalists’ ideological leanings and accusations of leanings to undermine the credibility of even the most valid criticisms.

While Republican politicians have decried liberal media bias for decades, none has done so as vehemently as Trump, who polarizes the media in a way that may not leave an escape.

The development of a nonpartisan press

In the 20th and 21st centuries, news outlets have made their money through subscriptions, sales and advertisements. However, before these economic models developed, newspapers had a tough time turning a profit.

In the 19th century, many newspapers were produced and distributed by institutions that weren’t in it for the money. Political parties, therefore, were a primary source of news. Horace Greeley’s Jeffersonian – an outlet for the Whig Party – had a decidedly partisan point of view. Others, like The Bay State Democrat, had names that told you exactly what they were doing. When Henry Raymond founded The New York Times in 1851 as a somewhat more independent outlet despite his Whig and Republican affiliations, it was an anomaly. Nonetheless, partisan newspapers, for economic and political reasons, were common throughout the 19th century, particularly during the early 19th century.

The information in partisan newspapers was hardly unbiased. But nobody expected anything else because the concept of a neutral press didn’t really exist. The development of a neutral press on a large scale required both a different economic production and distribution model and the recognition that there was a market for it.

The muckraking era that began in the early 20th century brought such journalism into the forefront. Muckraking, the forebear of investigative journalism, traces back to Upton Sinclair and fellow writers who uncovered corruption and scandal. Its success demonstrated demand for papers that weren’t partisan, and production and distribution models developed that allowed more nonpartisan papers to turn a profit by filling a gap within the market.

The economic principles at work are always the same. There is a balancing act between the costs of entry and the size of the audience that can be reached which determines when new media outlets can form, just as in any other market. The trick is that costs and benefits change over time.

Neutrality norms in a complex media environment

Just as market incentives supported the development of a neutral press, market incentives, combined with technology, have allowed institutions like Fox News and MSNBC to provide news coverage from decidedly conservative and liberal perspectives, with internet sources further fragmenting the media environment into narrow ideological niches.

These media outlets, though, muddy the signals: A nonpartisan journalist strives to levy valid criticism, but a partisan journalist will always criticize the opposing party. Thus a weakly informed voter will have a difficult time distinguishing between, say, a valid accusation from a nonpartisan journalist that a Republican is lying and partisan bias from a left-wing journalist who fails to acknowledge that bias.

The current media landscape is a hybrid, combining opinion-based outlets that resemble the party-affiliated newspapers of the 19th century and journalistic outlets that attempt to follow the muckraking model that developed in the 20th century. The way the latter attempt to distinguish themselves from the former is by following norms of neutrality and asserting that both parties are equally guilty of all political sins. This model breaks down when the parties are no longer equally guilty.

Consider the first presidential debate of 2016. Hillary Clinton mentioned Trump’s 2012 claim that global warming was a Chinese hoax. Trump interrupted to deny having made the claim. Not only had Trump engaged in an outlandish conspiracy theory, but he also lied during a debate about having done so.

“Both sides do it” is not a valid response to this level of dishonesty because both sides do not always engage in this level of dishonesty. Yet it was relatively normal behavior for Trump, who rose to the top of the Republican Party by gradually taking leadership of the “birther” movement and eventually even tried to switch the blame for that to Clinton.

The strategic problem in this type of situation is more complex than it appears, and it is what I call “the journalist’s dilemma.” The nonpartisan press can let the lie go unremarked. But to do so is to enable Trump’s lies. On the other hand, if they point out how much he lies, Trump can respond with accusations of liberal media bias. Trump, in fact, goes further than past Republicans, even directing crowd hostility toward specific journalists at rallies.

The media landscape, though, is populated by outlets with liberal leanings, like MSNBC, so uninformed news consumers who lack the time to do thorough investigations of every Trump and Clinton claim must decide: If a media outlet says that Trump lies more than Clinton, does that mean he is more dishonest or that the media outlet is a liberal one? The rational inference, given the media landscape, is actually the latter, making it self-defeating for the nonpartisan press to attempt to call out Trump’s lies. This might explain why a plurality of voters thought that Trump was more honest than Clinton, despite a record of more dishonesty from Trump at fact-checking sites like PolitiFact.

Nonpartisan journalism in a Trump presidency?

Is there a way for the neutral press to point out when Trump lies and not have that information get discounted as partisan bias?

The basic problem is that the norms that have guided the nonpartisan press are built around the assumption that the parties are mirror images of each other. They may disagree on policy, but they abide by the same rules. The nonpartisan press as we know it, then, cannot function when one party systematically stops abiding those norms.

The 2016 campaign was an example of what happens when the parties are out of balance. Trump simply lied far more than Clinton, but the nonpartisan press was unable to convey that information to the public because even trying to point that out violates the “both sides do it” journalistic norm, thereby signaling bias to a weakly informed but rational audience, which invalidates the criticism.

Unfortunately, then, the nonpartisan press is essentially stuck, at least until Donald Trump is out of office. While there is no longer a “he said, she said” campaign, the fact that Trump is not only the president but the head of the Republican Party makes his statements informal positions of the Republican Party. For the press to attack those statements as lies is to place themselves in opposition to the Republican Party, making them de facto Democratic partisans.

Because Trump is an entertainer rather than a policymaker, it is difficult for the press to even interview him as a normal political figure since he does not respond to facts in conventional ways. Each time he lies, any media outlet that aspires to objectivity must decide whether to point it out – which would make it indistinguishable from the Democratic-aligned press – or to allow the lie to go unremarked, thereby remaining complicit in the lie, tacitly aiding the Republican Party. Neither is likely to inform anyone in any meaningful way, which renders the model of the neutral press nearly inoperable.

Justin Buchler, Associate Professor of Political Science, Case Western Reserve University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.