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Subscribers to NPR’s newsletters this week got an urgent appeal, but it wasn’t related to money.
“Take action to save public media,” the email said, warning, “This could be the end of public media as we know it.”
The pitch was designed to elicit support for NPR, PBS and local affiliates as Congress prepares to vote on President Donald Trump’s request to clawback money that has already been appropriated for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
“If approved, American taxpayers get little-to-no savings — and at incredible cost," the email said. “Communities with stations unable to survive these budget cuts would lose access to local news, national reporting, jazz and classical stations, local culture shows, food programs, coverage of local sports games, and crucial emergency alerting."
Problem is, ending public media “as we know it” is something that millions of Americans apparently would cheer.
According to research from Pew, about a quarter of Americans want to end federal funding for NPR and PBS, a number that rises to 44% among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents. And when you factor in people who say they don’t know how they feel about the issue, there are more Americans who oppose funding or don’t know, than those who fully support this use of tax money.
When the survey takes a more granular look at who is actually consuming public media, the percentages get even smaller. About 20% say they get news from NPR; about 21% from PBS; those numbers drop by half when you look at just Republicans.
You can appreciate “All Things Considered,” “Antiques Roadshow” and “Work It Out Wombats!” and still wonder why advertiser dollars can’t support these programs, instead of the dollars of taxpayers whose media of choice is Fox News and SiriusXM.
It’s not that bullfrog eradication in Yosemite National Park doesn’t interest me and my fellow Americans, but that there is a breathtaking number of news outlets and websites that can report on this polarizing news. (Are turtles more valuable than bullfrogs? The frog lobby thinks not.)
Still, there is unique local programming that serves a community good, such as the PBS Utah affiliate that supports “The Hinckley Report with Jason Perry.” Journalists (including many from the Deseret News) as well as politicians and political observers participate in this program designed to offer weekly insight to news specific to Utah and its congressional delegation. It’s the kind of service not driven by profit, similar to “Utah Insight,” “Contact with Mary Dickson” and “Modern Gardener.”
So is change really needed?
Trump said in his executive order, entitled “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media,” that in 1967, when the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was established, there were relatively few media options while “today the media landscape is filled with abundant, diverse, and innovative news options.”
And he is right, too, that “At the very least, Americans have the right to expect that if their tax dollars fund public broadcasting at all, they fund only fair, accurate, unbiased, and nonpartisan news coverage.”
There is evidence that this hasn’t always been the case, most recently in the article published in the Free Press last year by a longtime NPR staffer, Uri Berliner, who argued that a once great news organization had lost its way as it became increasingly partisan. (For the record, although he resigned, Berliner still didn’t think NPR should be defunded.)
In light of all this, NPR’s appeal for support is surprisingly backward looking (and grammatically tortuous): “If you’ve ever had a relationship to, memories of, or faith in NPR - we urge you to take a stand.”
There’s no acknowledgement of trust issues that dog all forms of legacy media today, no promise to do better or be more representative of all Americans, just a link to a form letter people can send to their legislators asking them to protect the “essential service” that public media provides.
The Weather Channel can bring us together
What might help the Corporation for Public Broadcasting more than a flood of form letters is a recent YouGov survey that showed PBS third among trusted news sources, higher than The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, CBS, NBC, Time magazine and even C-Span.
The most interesting thing about the survey, however, is what media outlet Americans trust most. It’s the Weather Channel, by a wide margin. The Weather Channel was more than 20 points ahead of the No. 2 most trusted, which was the BBC. And it’s held that spot for four years now.
Why is the Weather Channel so trusted? Maybe it’s the forecasts, which are said to be the most accurate around. Or maybe it’s the photos it posts on social media.
Whatever the reason, The Weather Channel gets no federal funding, and so far as I know, doesn’t have fundraising drives.
Maybe the solution to America’s polarization is for The Weather Channel to start reporting the news.
Recommended Reading
Deseret Opinion Editor Jay Evensen traveled to Bangladesh, where he spoke with Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, entrepreneurs, politicians and even revolutionaries seeking change in that country. Here’s the first of his important five-part series.
What is the price of freedom? We went to Bangladesh to find out
Naomi Schafer Riley takes a hard look at whether descendants of Native Americans who suffered at government boarding schools are owed apologies and reparations. Yes, the conditions were terrible, she says, but that was true at other schools, as well.
“It is, of course, worth discussing the abuse that many of these children endured, which was widespread and severe. But it’s also worth understanding the context. I know this sounds insensitive, but none of us today would ever send our kids to any kind of school, let alone boarding school, under the conditions deemed acceptable in the 19th century.”
Apologies won’t help Native American communities, and neither will reparations
Kevin Lind talked with Sam Tanenhaus, the author of the new biography of William F. Buckley Jr., which was released last week.
According to Tanenhaus, “What Buckley’s great contribution was, the pioneering brilliant insight is, these are not fights about policy and politics. They’re fights about culture. Who owns America? Who belongs in America? What does it mean to be an American? That’s what the fights were about then, and it’s what they are about now.”
Endnotes
The news cycle moves so quickly under Trump 2.0 that the president’s breakup with Elon Musk seems like it happened last year, not last week. But it’s not just Trump and Musk, but a lot of other Republicans that seem to be feuding these days. Here’s my take.
From Trump v. Musk to Carlson v. Levin, are Republicans losing sight of the mission?
And finally, ABC announced Tuesday that the network will not be renewing the contract of the recently suspended Terry Moran.
It was a shocking turn of events, given that in April, Moran nabbed a sit-down interview in the Oval Office to mark Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office, and the next month he covered the selection of the new pope in Rome. Shortly after midnight this past Sunday morning, however, Moran was rage-tweeting about the president and his deputy chief of staff, which is what earned him the suspension. If you missed the story, here’s what happened:
6 months after settling with Trump, ABC suspends journalist Terry Moran for late-night tweet
As always, thank you for reading and being part of the Right to the Point community. You can email me at Jgraham@deseretnews.com, or send me a DM on X, @grahamtoday, where I promise I will never tweet after 9 p.m., no matter how angry I am about the unfair persecution of bullfrogs.