We Need Public Broadcasting

The Right has finally managed to gut public broadcasting. Our already anemic access to news, education, and culture has taken a massive blow.

National Public Radio’s headquarters in Washington, DC, on July 17, 2025. (Al Drago / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

With so much else on the chopping block, it was inevitable that Donald Trump’s axe would come for Big Bird. The rescission bill that passed Congress on July 18, now bound for Trump’s desk, accomplishes something conservatives have been attempting for more than fifty years: the effective end to federally funded public broadcasting as we’ve known it. Another link in America’s already threadbare social safety net has snapped.

Public broadcasting isn’t usually seen as part of the safety net, but it should: a key component in any society that has the remotest concern for its inhabitants’ well-being. Trump has long made a bugbear out of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and its most recognizable affiliated projects, National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). CPB’s funding comes almost entirely from congressional appropriations. On October 1, its funding will cease.

It will not be PBS or NPR that will feel real pain from the $1.1 billion being rescinded. The vast majority of their funding comes from donations and foundation grants. No, most at risk will be the hundreds of small, local TV and radio stations that broadcast their programs, particularly in poor and rural areas.

“Without federal funding, many local public radio and television stations will be forced to shut down,” argued the CPB in a press statement.

Parents will have fewer high quality learning resources available for their children. Millions of Americans will have less trustworthy information about their communities, states, country, and world with which to make decisions about the quality of their lives. Cutting federal funding could also put Americans at risk of losing national and local emergency alerts that serve as a lifeline to many Americans in times of severe need.

Those stations that survive will feel pressure to make do with less, retrenching and potentially isolating themselves from their communities. “The problem isn’t just the loss of money,” writes Scott Finn in Current, the public media trade publication. “The danger is that the system will fracture. Stations and networks will go into survival mode, trying to preserve what they have and ignoring everyone else — or even cannibalizing them.”

Contemporary opponents of public broadcasting always point to the internet and social media rendering the format unnecessary. Leaving aside the well-known drawbacks of the modern online world — its disinformation, its cesspools of toxicity and conspiracy theories — and even setting aside the fact that the internet should itself be treated as a public good rather than a commodity, this line of reasoning completely ignores the “digital divide.” A quarter of the way into the twenty-first century, 22 percent of low-income households have no reliable home internet access. With living costs continuing to climb, there’s a good chance that number will too. In the context of a generalized dissolution of American social cohesion, the defunding of public media hobbles a necessary source of news, education, and culture.

To be sure, funding for public broadcasting has been anemic for some time. Decades of what former Federal Communications chair Newton Minow called a “vast wasteland” of formulaic comedies, game shows, and cheap spectacle have left the format embattled. Nonetheless, NPR and PBS have managed to nurture programming whose cultural value cannot be denied. Much as we on the Left might be annoyed with the false pretense of impartiality in NPR’s news programming, the world is a better place thanks to programs like Nova, Tiny Desk, Mountain Stage, Austin City Limits, and yes, Sesame Street. While most of these have their own various sources of funding, their ability to reach diverse, disparate audiences is to a great degree reliant on local stations. The more far-flung and underfunded a station is, the more likely a viewer might not otherwise be exposed to its content.

Moreover, creative and informational spaces need to be shielded from the influence of commerce. Whether a certain viewpoint or expression is “marketable” has nothing to do with how vital it may be, or whether it deserves a place to take root, grow, and find an audience. This was the stated impetus behind the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, which created the CPB: “Do what commercial media will not. Serve communities being ignored by others. Take creative risks.”

Needless to say, there is nothing inherently anti-capitalist or even intrinsically democratic in the model of public broadcasting tout court. As Tom Mills writes in Socialist Register,

Public service broadcasting is not a coherent blueprint for democratic broadcasting, but rather a loose set of ideas associated with a historically contingent set of institutional arrangements which have in fact never been particularly democratic. What it has offered is an institutional space outside of capitalist control, which in the absence of much in the way of formal mechanisms of accountability can be regarded as more or less democratic depending on how closely the interests of the broadcasting professionals and bureaucrats, and the institutional structures within which they operate, align with those of the public.

The lens of democracy explains a lot about public broadcasting. The Right thrives when people are atomized, their narratives and knowledge fractured and confused. Conservative opposition to public broadcasting is less about the kind of information viewers receive than it is mitigating the potential for democratic access to culture.

This isn’t to say liberals are particularly adept at preserving public media, particularly as they have moved further to the center. It was Ronald Reagan who forced massive cuts on public broadcasting in the 1980s, but it was Bill Clinton who failed to restore that funding during his administration. Decades of funding attrition have taken their toll. When it comes to streaming, many PBS shows are already reliant on private services like Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime.

Despite its public funding, the problem with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is that it is run like, well, a corporation. There is a different potential model, however — one that sees access to education and culture more as a right than anything else, a need provided out of solidarity.

As part of the New Deal in the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration’s (WPA) Federal Music Project (FMP) did what it could to make sure no local radio station went without programming. The FMP recorded thousands of public musical performances on transcription discs and provided them to hundreds of local stations around the country. These came to include a wide diversity of genres and voices, including African American choirs, folk, jazz, children’s choruses, and classical, including from artists who may not have otherwise found an audience. Arts and education talk programs were also produced and distributed with WPA funds. Departments of the WPA such as the Federal Theatre Project and the Tennessee Valley Authority produced entertainment and informational programming.

Though the WPA stopped short of founding its own, government-funded network of radio stations, it provided resources to build and rehabilitate commercial and noncommercial stations across the country, most notably WNYC in New York. With the Depression making listener donations scarce, this government contribution was essential for keeping many of these stations afloat.

It was hardly revolutionary, but it pointed to a more robust public intervention into culture, the creation of a shared narrative. One wonders what might be possible if this approach converged with that of PBS and NPR; if they could be scaled up, made more comprehensive. Or what could come of dedicated, consistent, thorough outreach to working-class communities by local stations, inviting democratic input on programming, giving residents and listeners a sense of investment and ownership over the media they engage with.

This kind of thing, naturally, gives the Right heartburn, prompting the likes of Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas to declare there are better ways to spend government money than “socialist radio stations.” No such stations exist. At least not on the scale Marshall thinks. Wouldn’t it be nice if they did, though?

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Contributors

Alexander Billet is a writer and critic based in Los Angeles. He is the author of Shake the City: Experiments In Space and Time, Music and Crisis and has contributed to Los Angeles Review of Books, Salvage, Protean, Chicago Review, and other outlets. Read more of his work at alexanderbillet.com.

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