We Need Democratic Media, Not Corporate or State Propaganda
Public broadcasting isn’t the enemy of free speech. Profit-driven media is. Trump’s attack on NPR and PBS distracts from the real path away from censorship and toward viewpoint diversity: a large, democratically controlled, publicly funded media ecosystem.
People participate in a rally to call on Congress to protect funding for the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR) outside the NPR headquarters in Washington, DC, on March 26, 2025. (Saul Loeb / AFP via Getty Images)
In his latest salvo against perceived media enemies, President Donald Trump has set his sights on dismantling America’s public broadcasting outlets. In April, his administration drafted a memo to halt federal funding for National Public Radio (NPR) and Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), while Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene oversaw a subcommittee hearing in which she accused the networks of advancing a “communist agenda” and “grooming and sexualizing children.” Last week, Trump issued an executive order directing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) to cut funding to these media outlets, which Trump described on Truth Social as “RADICAL LEFT ‘MONSTERS’ THAT SO BADLY HURT OUR COUNTRY!”
The Right portrays public broadcasting as a lumbering leviathan likened to state-controlled media in “Communist China,” imagining it as a “dictatorship of the progressive proletariat” and other Cold War-era metaphors meant to send a shiver down a patriot’s spine. The irony of these attacks is that Trump is targeting what is already one of the most underfunded public media systems among developed democracies.
The CPB distributes a remarkably modest $535 million annually to support public broadcasting nationwide — less than 0.01 percent of the federal budget. Most of this money goes to local public television and radio stations, which then use a portion of those funds to pay programming fees to NPR, PBS, and other content providers. While NPR receives only about 1 percent of its funding directly or indirectly from federal sources and PBS about 15 percent, many small-market stations rely on CPB grants for larger shares of their operating budgets.
The Trump administration knows that cutting CPB funding will not financially kneecap NPR and PBS. It also may not be possible to institute the cuts. The purpose of this offensive is to expose and humiliate networks that the administration believes to be biased against Trump and the Republican Party, publicly associating them with “woke” cultural stances that are broadly unpopular with Trump’s base and, in some cases, with average Americans. But while Trump’s order is primarily a symbolic volley in the culture war, there are real stakes: while the national networks will survive, rural people will lose local stations.
Public media is far from a bastion of radicalism. During the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primary, for instance, leftists complained of PBS’s near-total erasure of Bernie Sanders’s campaign. Nevertheless we champion public broadcasting and would like to see funding for it greatly expanded. As for political bias, the content is an ongoing matter of politics. Take the case of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), which inspires impassioned criticism from all sides of the political spectrum — a heated conversation that is part of the democratic process. Little substantive collective deliberation is possible in the case of privately owned, for-profit media.
Expanding public media doesn’t mean building state propaganda machines or censorship bureaus. That right-wing talking point deliberately confuses public funding with government control. We can build a diverse, stimulating, and dynamic media ecosystem through public funding. Free speech is not just vital to this vision; it’s a foundational reason to expand public media in the first place.
How Profit Corrupts Our Media
The crisis in American journalism runs much deeper than the Right’s grievances with NPR’s and PBS’s supposed “woke” excesses. Our media system has been profoundly compromised by decades of corporate consolidation, advertising dependency, and profit-driven decision-making — all of which have systematically undermined its democratic function.
The shortcomings of our corporate media landscape are largely responsible for Trump’s political ascent. As media scholar Victor Pickard summarizes in Democracy Without Journalism? Confronting the Misinformation Society:
TV news outlets lavished far more attention on Trump than all other presidential candidates. During a critical period in the primary season, he received nearly three times more coverage than Hillary Clinton and sixteen times more than Bernie Sanders. Various estimates show that news outlets gifted Trump billions of dollars’ worth of free advertising in the run-up to the election, often allowing him to simply phone in to their popular news shows. . . . Trump coverage is cheap to produce: pundits and panels of experts can simply discuss the President’s latest tweets and outrageous comments. This kind of superficial coverage is irresistible for profit-driven commercial news media but detrimental to democratic discourse.
Over the last eight years of Trump mania, news coverage has become increasingly sensationalist and facile, focusing less on stories that affect ordinary Americans and lively, high-quality debate about pressing issues than on the next outrageous installment in the Trump saga. Even stations that are critical of Trump allow his bombastic provocations to set the parameters of their coverage. American political media is increasingly difficult to distinguish from a Trump reality show — and functionally close to useless for educating citizens, exposing them to thoughtful articulations of new perspectives, and equipping them to participate in democracy.
Under publicly funded media, the commonly articulated fear from the Right is that dictates from above will unduly influence coverage. But the current media’s role in Trump’s rise shows how for-profit media is already subject to tyranny — not from legions of censorship-minded bureaucrats but from relentless and inescapable commercial incentives. Privately owned news media face an existential mandate to generate profit or die. The mechanics are simple and nonnegotiable: provoke emotional reactions that capture and retain attention, and convert them into advertising dollars that generate shareholder value.
The triumph of commercial interests over public good in American media has fueled political polarization while emptying political discourse of substance. Instead of a forum for diverse perspectives and civic engagement, our media landscape resembles an endless sports spectacle: red versus blue teams battling for symbolic victories, interrupted only by relentless advertising. The actual stakes of political decisions fade to background noise, with substantive conversations about issues affecting Americans’ daily lives relegated to the sidelines.
Of course, beyond the unyielding pressure of economic incentives, there’s still plenty of direct corporate interference in our media system — some of it so heavy-handed as to resemble censorship in openly authoritarian countries. Last month, veteran journalist Scott Pelley used the closing moments of CBS’s 60 Minutes to call out the show’s corporate owner, Paramount. Pelley claimed that “Paramount began to supervise our content in new ways” as it sought Trump administration approval for a critical merger. Billions of dollars were on the line.
While Pelley bravely spoke out, most journalists face career-ending consequences for such candor. As media consolidation accelerates, placing ever more outlets under fewer corporate umbrellas, such editorial meddling becomes increasingly commonplace — a systemic threat to free speech that no internal ethics policy can overcome.
Media Freedom Through Public Support
While privately owned media is rife with coercion and censorship, public systems face the harshest accusations of ideological conformity and propaganda, with critics readily invoking authoritarian socialist regimes like the Soviet Union. But the problem here lies in authoritarianism itself, not public funding.
The American left today has many anti-authoritarian, pro-free-speech voices who insist on building a media system that is not beset by the same problems as either authoritarian state-run media or capitalist-controlled private media. One leading such thinker was the late Robert McChesney, who mapped out clear plans for news and info systems that work for all. McChesney pushed for what he called “democratic media,” outlets funded by the public but free from both market greed and state meddling. Such a media system would form the backbone of a living, breathing democracy.
McChesney’s most fully realized proposal, created with John Nichols, is the Local Journalism Initiative (LJI), which would distribute federal funding for journalism democratically at the county level. The plan would allocate about 0.15 percent of GDP annually (roughly $34 billion) to this project, amounting to $100 per person in each county. This approach draws inspiration from an American tradition: in the nineteenth century, postal subsidies for newspaper delivery effectively represented 0.21 percent of GDP. We understood then that delivering reliable and accurate information to American citizens was a fundamental component of a functioning democracy and worth pooling our resources to pay for.
The key innovation of the LJI plan is that citizens themselves would determine how funds are distributed. Every three years, adults would receive three votes to allocate among qualified nonprofit news organizations in their county. This multivote system would deliberately encourage media diversity, as no single outlet could receive more than 25 percent of a county’s funding. To qualify, organizations must be locally based nonprofits, operating for at least six months, producing original content regularly, and maintaining independence from larger entities.
Administered by the US Postal Service, the LJI would establish no government editorial oversight — the only controls would be basic qualification requirements and citizen voting. All content produced using these funds would be freely available online. The system would revive competition in local journalism, replacing the “one newspaper town” model that dominated the late twentieth century with multiple independent voices in each community.
Pickard offers complementary proposals that address media reform at a more structural level. He envisions a “public option” for journalism. At the funding layer, he proposes a national trust fund of approximately $30 billion annually, supported through multiple revenue streams including taxes on communication oligopolies, proceeds from spectrum sales, and levies on platform monopolies like Facebook and Google.
Pickard’s vision extends beyond funding to governance, insisting that newsrooms must “reflect the diverse audiences they serve” through democratic ownership and community control. He advocates for an ascertainment process where local communities determine their own information needs rather than having them dictated by market forces or distant media executives. His model is envisioned as a plan to liberate journalists from commercial constraints that hamper substantive reporting on issues affecting working-class communities and marginalized populations.
Particularly relevant to the current debate over NPR and PBS is Pickard’s idea that a public media system would allow journalists to “practice the craft that led them to the profession in the first place.” He calls for worker-run cooperatives and collective ownership models, strengthened by robust unions that democratize newsrooms from within. In his view, “public media means public ownership of media institutions” — a fundamental shift from our current system where even “public broadcasting” remains structurally dependent on corporate underwriting and wealthy donors.
An Expanded Media Horizon
If we’re worried about biased information, we have bigger fish to fry than liberal bias at NPR and PBS. Our current media system is riddled with bias. Sudden newsroom layoffs cow journalists into submission while billionaire owners determine which perspectives reach the public. Media institutions that live or die on ratings resort to sensationalism for survival. They frame politics as a team sport, thus draining it of context and meaning, and reduce complex problems to partisan spectacle, fueling division for profit. Stories relevant to average people’s lives are sidelined for celebrity gossip and superficial partisan bickering, while substantive policy debates are distorted and distilled into ten-second sound bites.
With a little political imagination, we can envision expanding public funding and democratic governance of media simultaneously. Communities would have a say in which issues deserve coverage and which outlets are doing a good job covering them. Reporters at those outlets could pursue complex investigations without fear of advertiser backlash, and people could easily get information on local school-board decisions, environmental hazards, or corporate labor practices. Rural Americans wouldn’t lose access to news when profit margins dictate closures, and national conversations would expand beyond the narrow ideological parameters currently set by corporate executives.
PBS and NPR, whatever their flaws, represent a modest, net-good experiment with public broadcasting. Likewise, while the CPB’s $535 million budget may be a drop in the federal bucket, it remains a vital lifeline for rural and small-market stations that connect communities to essential information and cultural programming. Yet merely preserving funding for existing quasi-public broadcasting institutions isn’t ambitious enough. We can build a media we recognize ourselves in — one that regards us as democratic participants rather than passive consumers of superficial elite controversy.