The Trump administration’s proposal to defund public media had two main points. The first was that the media landscape today “is filled with abundant, diverse, and innovative news options,” and the second, that the media currently benefiting from government funding is biased.
There have been opponents to government funding for media in this country since the beginning. In the late 60s, when the Public Broadcasting Act passed, the biggest concern was that it would lead to political sway — that the media would be too favorable to the party in power. But as early as the 70s, when Nixon was president, public media was accused of having liberal bias. And arguments about it being “obsolete and redundant” because of the “endless variety of high-quality channels” go back at least as far as 1999, like in this report published by the Heritage Foundation.
Putting aside the question of bias for now, in a world where information is so overwhelmingly available, does public media still have a role to play?
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Over the past five decades, the primary argument in favor of government funding for public media has centered around its educational value. In 1969, Fred Rogers testified against Nixon’s proposed cuts, arguing that his show offered a kind of education to kids (and their parents) that they couldn’t get elsewhere. The senator presiding over the hearing famously said, “looks like you just earned the 20 million dollars.”
That sentiment has been echoed over the years, with PBS even calling itself “America’s Largest Classroom.” But, before there was PBS or NPR, before the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, there were national education networks for radio and television. And if you want to know how that got started, well, I would say it was at the very, very beginning.
When broadcasting technology was in its earliest stages, educators saw the potential in it. Many of the first broadcast licenses in the US were snapped up by universities and school districts (like KALW's). In 1919, when the US lifted the ban on civilian stations after World War I, 9XM (now WHA), an experimental station operating out of the University of Wisconsin became the first* to have regularly scheduled programming. They aired weather reports… in Morse code. It wasn’t until 1921 that they started broadcasting spoken word audio for the first time. News, weather, university lectures, and even music made it onto the airwaves. And the University of Wisconsin wasn’t the only one. Union College in New York, Tufts in Massachusetts, Ohio State University, and others, had professors lecturing on the air. Eventually, commercial radio saw the value in what they were doing, and within a decade, CBS began producing “The American School of the Air.” It ran for two decades.
So, even back then, those experimental not-for-profit spaces, operating on the local level, were pipelines for mainstream, national networks. Educational broadcasters didn’t just aim to make information more widely accessible, but also easily digestible. WHA’s first program director, William H. Lightly pushed for broadcasts with general human interest while interpreting “the true spirit” and work of the university. They hosted discussions and debates on issues of public concern and offered candidates running for office all airtime — equally. They believed that a more engaged community would create a stronger democracy.
Those ideas, which some see as part of a larger movement that came out of Wisconsin, still fuel so much of what public media, and journalism in general, does today.
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The other week, I learned about Grace Lee Boggs for the first time when someone shared a famous quote of hers with me: “Movements are born of critical connections rather than critical mass.” It resonated because, having worked in public media for the past decade, I thought, hey, that’s what we’re trying to do. Create critical connections in an ocean of content.
Our media landscape is so oversaturated right now, it’s almost as hard to tune in as it is to tune out. Keeping up with swiftly changing technology and platforms doesn’t make it any easier. Just two decades ago, Facebook had just gotten started, having Wi-Fi readily available was not ubiquitous, and the iPhone was just coming into existence. Podcasting was so new, most people hadn’t heard of it. Now, Americans spend more than ten hours a day in front of a screen — about half of that time browsing and the other half watching videos.
Public media, from the beginning, was about creating a space to use mass communication technology for civic engagement. It was, and still is, part of what it means to have a robust, competitive, and healthy media ecosystem.
Two influential reports were published ahead of the Public Broadcasting Act, one looking at educational TV stations and one looking at educational radio. The benefits and challenges they identified still feel relevant today. Both reports found local stations were responsive to community needs, and benefited from being part of an integrated system of broadcasters, but suffered from severe lack of funds. They recommended funding at federal, state, and local levels to maintain their infrastructure and equipment, and to support their programming. The report on educational television envisioned a network of “vigorous and independent local stations” that would be “individually responsive to the needs of the local communities and collectively strong enough to meet the needs of a national audience.” It suggested that non-commercial broadcasters should be “free to experiment” and “sponsor research centers where persons of high talent can engage in experimentation.” They recommended creating a system that would help distribute funds across the network more fairly, creating stronger connections between stations, while also allowing them to maintain their independence.
At KALW, that all holds true. We're responsive to our community in some pretty specific ways. We saw a need for a space for training and experimentation and we built the Audio Academy. And we found that we could also adapt that model to serve people who have historically been kept out of the conversation, like with our Uncuffed training program and podcast. Having public affairs programming like Your Call with Rose Aguilar, State of the Bay, and Your Legal Rights allows us to hear directly from audiences on national and local issues. And as part of a national network we can carry national and international news, and tailor it for our local audiences, with segments like Crosscurrents, Sights + Sounds, and Dispatches from Kolkata.
As I’m writing this, I’m looking at a wall of photographs that were taken over the last decade-plus, looking at people whose lives intersected with KALW. People who make up who we are and who we, hopefully, offered something to that felt more like a critical connection than a scroll, a like, or a comment on a web page. And, we will continue to do our work in the spirit of our roots. Our new community hub in downtown San Francisco will be one part of that. We’ll also deepen our commitment to training and education. And we’ll experiment with new technologies to reach people across channels, sharing stories and conversations that capture the essence of the Bay Area.
*Many early radio stations claim to have been the first to have regular broadcast service, but 9XM, now WHA, is the longest continuously running non-commercial station.
**You can read more about the roots of public media and the "Wisconsin Idea" in this essay by Jack Mitchell, NPR's first employee and a former professor with the University of Wisconsin.
