NPR and PBS Face a Moment of Truth

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On Wednesday, a mere nine days after President Trump named him chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr sent shock waves through the public media system by opening an investigation into PBS, NPR, and their member stations.

“I am concerned that NPR and PBS broadcasts could be violating federal law by airing commercials,” Carr wrote to NPR’s CEO, Katherine Maher, and PBS’s CEO, Paula A. Kerger. “In particular, it is possible that NPR and PBS member stations are broadcasting underwriting announcements that cross the line into prohibited commercial advertisements.” 

Federal law requires public media stations to operate as “noncommercial educational broadcast stations,” Carr noted. Sponsors and underwriters “may receive on-air acknowledgements [sic],” but only “for identification purposes.” The announcements “should not promote the contributor’s products, services, or businesses, and they may not contain comparative or qualitative descriptions, price information, calls to action, or inducements to buy, sell, rent, or lease.”

Carr ended his two-page letter on an ominous note. “Congress is actively considering whether to stop requiring taxpayers to subsidize NPR and PBS programming,” he wrote. “For my own part, I do not see a reason why Congress should continue sending taxpayer dollars to NPR and PBS given the changes in the media marketplace since the passage of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967.” 

Whatever Carr’s motivations, his investigation into the commercialization of NPR will require supporters of public media to confront inconvenient truths about the structure of our system and adopt a new approach to protect an essential public trust.

Over the past twenty years, the local, for-profit news media in the United States has collapsed, leaving more than 2,000 of the 3,143 counties in the United States with no daily print or digital newspaper. To make informed political choices, citizens in a democracy need access to factual, verified information and news analysis. Yet, in news deserts, residents lack access to high-quality, professionally reported information about what elected representatives are doing and how businesses treat workers and consumers. 

For better or worse, public and government action is needed to ensure the necessary and consistent level of investment in journalism. But the current model for funding public broadcasting is broken.

Our nation’s founders constructed a postal system in part to deliver newspapers, and by the 1830s, 90 percent of postal weight was newspapers, which received subsidies that would have amounted to tens of billions in today’s dollars, according to calculations by communications scholar Robert W. McChesney. The state made similar investments to ensure the creation of the mass media broadcast systems in the middle of the twentieth century and, finally, the creation of dozens of public radio and television stations later in the century. And yet our peer democracies invest twenty times as much as the US in their public media systems. Meanwhile, the United States spends about as much money on public media as we do on military marching bands. This requires public media stations and content producers to raise nearly 70 percent of their funds from donors, corporations, and advertisers. When it comes to the health of our information ecosystems, we get what we pay for. Far from slashing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s $500 million annual budget, Congress should multiply the resources to support public local news by a factor of around twenty, or at least $10 billion a year. That would only amount to slightly more than .01 percent of the federal budget.

In a recent study I prepared for the Center for the Study for Responsive Law, I examined whether American public news media—specifically NPR and its local affiliates—are capable of filling the void left by the commercial press. We concluded that public media’s financial and governance model limits the system’s ability to make up for the decline in for-profit media or to fulfill its congressional mandate “to encourage the development of programming that involves creative risks and that addresses the needs of unserved and underserved audiences, particularly children and minorities.” 

There are three major ways in which public media fails to meet this mission. 

First, public funding is so limited that public media stations are cash-strapped and forced to court an affluent audience—what one NPR “News Audience Profile” described as “a distinguished audience” made up of “educated, business decision makers that are active in their communities.” 

Indeed, while NPR is seen as racially progressive, that image is often at odds with how journalists feel about public media employers. While the mission may be noble, and the content is offered for free, many public media stations end up chasing the largely well-educated, affluent, and white audiences who can afford to pay for news subscriptions or memberships at cultural institutions. 

Often, the governing boards of media stations underrepresent underserved communities because people from these communities are seen as having less capacity to donate or raise significant amounts of money. Stations that are not affiliated with educational institutions are legally required to have community boards to “advise the governing body of the station with respect to whether the programming and other policies…are meeting the specialized educational and cultural needs of the communities,” but often only lip service is paid to this requirement.

Maintaining an affluent audience requires attracting older, whiter, richer listeners. In an anonymous survey of public media workers, several reported structuring public radio content around the emotions of the white audience to the detriment of reporting on systemic issues: “The framing has always been so off. It’s always been in the personal, it’s always been in the cultural, and it’s always actually about the emotions of the white people who are listening. Nine times out of ten, that’s your driveway moment. A moment produced to feel catharsis so that maybe you don’t have to do what you might have to do or give up what you might have to give up.”

Employees of color are sometimes expected to perform fundraising “diversity work” even if that is not one of their professional duties: “On the level of direct donor engagement, these employees are expected to participate in pledge drives, donor events, and other interpersonal exchanges with donors, who often match the modal ‘listener member’ description. Through these direct interactions…they are reminded of ‘who public radio serves.’” 

Second, the structure of public media reinforces the nation’s regional and geographic imbalances. 

Most local public media stations lack the resources to systematically gather and report local news. By contrast, a handful of urban stations, mostly in the Northeast, produce daily news programs that are nationally syndicated by NPR. In between those extremes, a dozen or so stations across the country maintain robust local newsrooms. Still, public media stations within news deserts typically cannot afford to produce their own daily local news programs or pay for a dedicated local news team. Instead, they mostly play music and rebroadcast programming created outside of their local community, such as from the BBC and NPR. 

Thus, most local stations cannot structure their programming to meet the distinctive needs of each community’s unserved and underserved citizens because they must purchase—instead of producing—most of their news programming. This structure extends the influence of NPR and top Northeastern and mid-Atlantic stations like WNYC and WAMU—and their corporate-dominated boards—across the country. The leadership decisions these stations make affect the news received by millions of Americans. At the same time, stations may only have enough funding to produce news programming because they maintain corporate majorities on their governing boards.

Third, commercial considerations enable corporate and donor influence. 

Public media organizations maintain a “firewall” between their news and business departments such that corporate donors have no role in newsroom processes. We don’t doubt the firewall exists, but the pressure to please donors often takes more subtle forms. 

We heard from one former public media journalist that “if you get any prominence at a local station, you’re going to run into board members, you’re going to be put at the table with them, they’re going to send you notes.” This journalist added: “It doesn’t happen a lot. But you know who the board members are. If you’re at a local station, the CEO is chosen by the board, and in that way, what they think and who they are directly influences who they choose to be the person who is the head of content.” 

Public media journalists have been expected to attend fundraisers for the station where they are seated with donors who run the businesses those journalists cover. In some instances, advertisers have even sent gifts to producers so that hosts can endorse products during public media podcasts. An NPR spokeswoman, Isabel Lara, said that NPR’s news hosts cannot and do not accept gifts from sponsors.

Stations have begun to dabble in sponsored content. In 2022, Houston Public Media “partnered with” Chevron for a ten-part series about climate change called “CounterACT.” Arguing that “much of the energy sector is working toward a lower-carbon future,” the series promised to “explore several ways the energy sector can address the climate crisis and help lead the way on a global energy transition.” After being widely panned, the series was taken down. “These are not news programs,” Houston Public Media’s general manager, Lisa Trapani Shumate, said in response. “They air in programming breaks and appear on our digital platforms.… Chevron sponsored the series but had no editorial oversight of the content.” (In October, Shumate announced that she was stepping down after thirteen years in the role.) 

Unfortunately, Houston Public Media is not alone. One of NPR’s flagship stations, WBUR in Boston, began producing sponsored podcasts in 2021. Eight years earlier, however, WBUR had published an article, titled “Why Sponsored Content Is Bad for Journalism,” warning that mixing advertising and journalism into a “seamless stream of content” made audiences more likely to “devalue all the content.”

NPR itself has featured sponsored content. One piece declared that Chevrolet is “Breaking Down Barriers to Help Make EVs More Accessible” without mentioning General Motors’ role in funding climate disinformation and its decades-long lobbying campaign against decarbonization. Moreover, many of these sponsored posts imitate the style and format of legitimate news stories. 

The piece mimicked NPR’s style, featuring Chevrolet employees as if they were subjects in a radio story: “When it comes to innovative driving technologies, Vehicle Chief Engineer Jeremy Short and his team wanted to make sure the Bolt EUV offered consumers a new kind of driving experience.” 

And even with the firewall, our study found inconsistently applied labeling to ensure, for example, that every story about Amazon discloses the company’s financial support for NPR, which is supposed to be the policy. “Donors are disclosed on our website as well as in our annual report,” an NPR spokesperson told me. “Additionally, our newsroom includes disclosure language whenever NPR covers a story about a funder or sponsor.”

In these stories, we found that information or perspectives from management were presented to the NPR audience far more often than information or perspectives from workers or unions. 

This is a troubling pattern across NPR’s coverage. ​​Disinformation about public health or the political process is clearly called out; disinformation from corporate or other official sources is covered as a “he said, she said” dispute, with little independent analysis to help working people make sense of the world.

Edith Chapin, NPR’s senior vice president, whose responsibilities extended to strategic coverage priorities including disinformation and climate change, told us that she cannot recall the terms disinformation or misinformation ever being attributed to a CEO or PR executive at a major American company: “I don’t know.… I can’t say never, but it’s just not something that rings a bell because it’s just not a very large part of our focus day-to-day.” 

Recently, a former NPR business editor, Uri Berliner, alleged that NPR catered its content to “the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the US population.” He charged that content is geared toward the interests and views of liberal white Americans in coastal cities. Our report did not attempt to measure any cultural biases in NPR’s programming, but a progressive approach to cultural issues is not incompatible with corporate influence. In fact, large corporations often present themselves as exemplars of progressive values.

Facing pressure from an aging, less diverse audience on the one hand, and from sharper right-wing attacks on the other, how is public media going to respond? 

First of all, NPR and its affiliates should redouble their attention to news. One of public media’s founding moments was the Watergate hearings, when the commercial TV and radio stations didn’t want to cover the hearings in full because they would lose advertiser revenue from regularly scheduled programming. To fill this void, the fledgling public news media seized the opportunity and covered every minute of the story for fifty-one days and repeated those broadcasts every night for audience members who worked during the day. 

Every broadcast was ad-free and ended with as much as twenty minutes of commentary and analysis from experts on that single news story. Liberated from commercial pressures, the fledgling public television system was able to devote all of its efforts to a single story that the commercial press had little incentive to cover fully. Could our public news media system afford to challenge power like this today? Could they afford to risk the advertiser revenue? Would such an experiment risk alienating affluent audiences and corporate donors?

With Carr breathing down the necks of NPR and PBS, and with a new Republican-controlled Congress interested in cutting regulations and spending, it might seem like an odd moment to call for more investment in media. And yet a growing awareness of the disappearance of local news, and a growing awareness that we need news and programming from beyond the coasts and the largest cities, just might create an opening for such an argument. 

Fifteen peer democracies spend an average of $70 per person on public media. In this country, we spend a measly $3 per person. We could correct this imbalance by mandating that just 0.1 percent of the federal budget be spent on local news. 

Even without Congress, the public can secure stable, long-term journalism funding from our local and state governments. We can seek journalism funding through ballot initiatives, city councils, or state legislatures. Voters can demand multidecade bonds to pay for local journalism and insist that all revenue from the bonds go into a fund that politicians cannot touch. 

Legislatures might also consider allowing each citizen to allocate tax dollars to a local news outlet of their choosing. This way, newsroom funding would be insulated from electoral politics and newsrooms would be incentivized to compete for subscriptions from all members of their communities equally. Washington, DC, and Seattle are both considering versions of this proposal.

To be eligible for funding, newsrooms could be required to be physically rooted within their communities; to maintain a governing board that represents the community’s geographic and economic diversity; to provide all community members with access to content regardless of income; to commit to providing high-quality local news coverage; and to have every employee make at least a living wage. These content-neutral requirements would ensure that those who receive funding are actually making journalism for their communities without infringing on the freedom of the press.

Alternatively, publicly funded news could embrace the American tradition of deliberative local democracy. Instead of public news subscriptions, every local area could host its own citizens’ assembly where a set number of randomly selected citizens would deliberate and vote to fund independent local newsrooms to serve their community for a set number of years. This quasi-representative sample of the community would deliberate on how well their local news system is functioning, hear funding requests from local newsrooms, and vote on which outlets to fund. The group could also produce a report for all journalists to better understand the informational needs of their community. Similar deliberative democratic processes have been used for tasks as disparate as local government budgeting and national nuclear energy policy. These deliberative democratic processes have been shown to bring polarized US voters toward consensus.

Public action to ensure the existence of a free local press is now a democratic necessity. To ensure that the press truly serves local communities, any public intervention must be designed to insulate the press from donors, corporations, and politicians. To accomplish this goal, funding should be authorized over a long time horizon to limit opportunities for political interference, and members of the public alone must be trusted to decide which local newsrooms receive public funding so that newsrooms are incentivized to put their communities first. 

Expanding the pool of public funding while ensuring its equitable distribution across American communities—including underserved rural areas and urban neighborhoods with common problems such as poor infrastructure and lack of broadband—is the kind of broad-based public investment that could attract support from across the political spectrum while refocusing spending on the areas that need it most. 

This is not a novel proposal. It is a compilation of many proposed plans for a publicly funded free press that would bring us in line with many other democracies. A professional, publicly funded free press is not a pipe dream. In fact, it is a reality in nearly all high-functioning democracies.

More than ever, we need challenging, feet-to-the-fire journalism that makes politicians deliver for their constituents in every local community. Public media stations cannot do this if they must rely on the same donors and corporations as our politicians. Our choice is simple: spend 0.1 percent of our public budgets to maintain a free press and root institutions within the communities that they serve, or watch as our democracy continues to wither away.

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Michael Swerdlow is a student at Columbia Law School and a former researcher at the Center for the Study of Responsive Law, founded by Ralph Nader in 1968.