from the good-egg dept
Not that long ago, John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight did a good bit on why public broadcasting is important. The segment features a lot of insight from Penn State media professor Victor Pickard, whose work on the (many) problems with modern consolidated U.S. corporate media has always been essential reading:
But Oliver also walked the talk. Oliver and his staff subsequently held an auction for all sorts of notable items from the show’s history, including a Bob Ross painting, a prop replica of former Trump FCC boss Ajit Pai’s goofy giant coffee mug, Russell Crowe’s jock strap, a bidet signed by a member of GWAR, and a giant gold-plated re-creation of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s balls:
“All told, the auction raised nearly $1.54 million for the Public Media Bridge Fund, which is assisting local public broadcasters in temporarily finding new funds in the wake of the CPB closure.”
After the White House falsely deemed NPR and PBS a “grift” last April, Republicans successfully pushed for a Senate vote that eliminated the CPB’s entire budget in July. That vote rescinded the $1.1 billion that Congress had allocated to CPB to fund public broadcasting during 2026 and 2027, throwing the already shaky U.S. public broadcasting system into complete existential collapse.
As we’ve noted previously, authoritarians loathe journalism. But they really loathe public broadcasting because, in its ideal form, it untethers journalism from the often perverse financial incentives inherent in our consolidated, billionaire-owned, ad-engagement based corporate media.
A corporate media that is easily bullied, cowed, and manipulated by bad actors looking to normalize, downplay, or validate no limit of terrible corruption and bullshit (see: CBS, Washington Post, the New York Times, the LA Times, and countless others). A media that has increasingly stopped serving the public interest in loyal dedication to our increasingly unhinged extraction class.
One of the real harms of the cuts has been to already struggling local U.S. broadcasting stations. While NPR doesn’t really take all that much money from the public anymore (roughly 1% of NPR’s annual budget comes from the government), the CPB distributed over 70 percent of its funding to about 1,500 public radio and TV stations.
Many of those news stations operated in places where quality, local news is difficult if not impossible to find. Local papers have usually either closed or been purchased by soulless hedge funds that are buying papers, stripping them for parts, and hollowing out and homogenizing their coverage. Most U.S. “local news” is dominated by right wing propaganda pseudo-journalism broadcasters like Sinclair Broadcasting.
U.S. “public broadcasting” was already a shadow of the true concept after years of being demonized and defunded by the right wing, so even calling hybrid organizations like NPR “public” is a misnomer. Still, the underlying concept remains an ideological enemy of authoritarian zealots and corporations alike, because they’re very aware that if implemented properly, public media often provides a challenge to their well-funded war on informed consensus, as Pickard has long explained.
DC lawmakers and regulators (including Democrats) have been an absolute embarrassment on building and maintaining any sort of coherent media reform strategy. The evidence of that apathy has never been less subtle. So a hearty thank you to John Oliver for giving a shit.
Filed Under: authoritarianism, consolidation, john oliver, journalism, media, public broadcasting
Companies: cpb, npr, pbs
