As a lifelong consumer of American media, I am always disappointed when a favorite program, network, or outlet goes off the air or out of business. I was outraged when Northern Exposure was canceled, aggrieved when the Speed channel was shut down, and left mighty lonely in the wee hours of the morning when CBS News’s Up to the Minute was rebranded and denuded of its once-urgent tone.
Unsurprisingly, given my chosen vocation, my chagrin extends to print media. I was certainly dispirited when George, the political magazine founded by John F. Kennedy Jr., ceased publication, when the New Yorker stopped being good, and when Film Comment was converted from a glossy bimonthly magazine into a glum digital-only enterprise.
Yet in none of these cases did I imagine that the federal government owed the canceled or compromised media, shows, or entities a handout, a bailout, or sustained taxpayer-funded support. I would have loved for Northern Exposure to have continued, but I understood that the decision to suspend its production rested with the higher-ups at CBS, not the Clinton administration. By the same token, I did not expect that then-President Barack Obama would intervene to resume round-the-clock race car coverage after Speed ran its course, nor that President Donald Trump, who in his second term has expressed interest in rescuing Hollywood, would take measures to revive the print edition of Film Comment. Heck, I used to write for Film Comment in the late 2000s and early 2010s, so if anyone should have felt aggrieved about its digital diminishment, it should have been me. But I somehow recognized that the decline of my favorite media was my problem, not my country’s.
It is in this light that I read with some amusement the hue and cry over Trump’s May 1 executive order, “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media.” Therein, Trump attempted to bring to an end the federal funding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting provides to National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service. As the robust title of the order suggests, Trump targets above all the partisan news coverage that emanates from these entities in the form of their signature broadcasts, including NPR’s All Things Considered and PBS’s NewsHour (formerly known as The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, which is one indication of its status not so much as “legacy media” but something closer to “antique media”). “Which viewpoints NPR and PBS promote does not matter,” Trump’s order said. “What does matter is that neither entity presents a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens.”
This is inarguably true, but the entities that find their federal dollars at risk have reacted with striking unhappiness. On May 27, NPR, in conjunction with three public radio stations in Colorado, filed a lawsuit that frames Trump’s executive order as an expression of the president’s supposed penchant for retaliation and presents its own mission as nothing short of sacred. “Congress enacted the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 … because it determined that broad access to free, high-quality, independent public radio and television programming produced and aired by private entities for the benefit of all Americans was a public good,” the lawsuit says. PBS filed a lawsuit of its own on May 30.
Let us pause for just a moment to consider the date invoked in this hysterical screed: 1967, the year of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the movies The Graduate and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and, on what was then known as the boob tube, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, Green Acres, and The Newlywed Game. Gilligan’s Island ended its run on ABC that spring. To put it bluntly, the present federally supported public broadcasting scheme dates its roots to a very distant era in American communications. Viewed most charitably, it is possible that, in that earlier environment, federal support for broadcasting could have been justified, primarily because such broadcasting would, in the absence of cable, streaming, and the internet, have a captive audience: There were not too many other options for relatively serious programming. But as you may have noticed, and as Trump points out in the strongest argument in his executive order, we are no longer living in 1967.
“Unlike in 1967, when the CPB was established, today the media landscape is filled with abundant, diverse, and innovative news options,” Trump’s order noted. “Government funding of news media in this environment is not only outdated and unnecessary but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence.”
Today, NPR and PBS’s claim for receiving public dollars is comical in its implicit assumption that the media landscape would be bereft without their presence. Perhaps the “broad access” of public radio and television could be touted if the American population were reduced to those who do not subscribe to Netflix, Disney+, Max, or SiriusXM, or lack any access whatsoever to a smartphone, laptop, or other means to access social media, but if you can find such people in meaningfully large numbers, be sure to let me know. Furthermore, you don’t have to read reports of the carnage in legacy media to know that the long-term trends favor the streamers, the podcasters, and the YouTubers. Even Comcast, owner of NBCUniversal, has concluded that its fortunes will improve if it deposits its once-marquee cable channels, including E! and MSNBC, into an all-new company, briefly coined SpinCo and now known as the slightly less pathetic-sounding Versant. Well, if The Rachel Maddow Show is deemed to be less than a grade-A property, where does that leave its kissing cousin on NPR, All Things Considered? Viewers and listeners are moving on from these shows, even if their makers still consider them to be irreplaceable — essential services, in the parlance of the recent pandemic.
Here, it must be stressed that by their own accounts, public radio and TV in America does not derive most of its funding from the federal government — just listen, if you can bear it, to local stations’ annual pledge drives that attempt to gin up donations from the general public — but even if Trump’s attempted stripping of funding proved, by their lights, apocalyptic, would it, in fact, be the apocalypse? I say no: We can do without public broadcasting as presently constituted.
Watching my own local PBS station, and its sister stations, is like entering a parallel universe. To start with, it involves turning on the TV. As for the content, the rest of the world may have moved on to Joe Rogan, Theo Von, and Jordan Peterson, but on a PBS member station, Sesame Street, Antiques Roadshow, and Ask This Old House often still reign supreme. Rick Steves, Jacques Pepin, and Bob Ross remain its all-stars, and Finding Your Roots and Frontline are its anchor tenants — like those huge department stores that used to justify the existence of sprawling shopping malls. Yet as those malls have now become dead malls, PBS continues to roll along as though the media environment in which it was created was a permanent thing. Could any circumstance dislodge this arrangement? Before the issuance of Trump’s executive order, even the New York Times’s David Brooks, a regular commentator on NewsHour, acknowledged the distinctive audience drawn to his show. “We have a wonderful audience — somewhat seasoned,” Brooks said in a talk to the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. “So if a 93-year-old lady comes up to me at the airport, I know what she’s going to say: ‘I don’t watch your program, but my mother loves it.’”
In fact, public radio and TV stations do not appeal to the masses, as is their alleged mandate, but, like all media outlets, to their own slices of the demographic pie: the now-50-ish hipsters who thrill to the sound of Ira Glass on This American Life, the 60-ish retirees who study their newspaper in the hope that they will guess all the right answers on Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!, the 70-ish grandmas who scour their attic for trinkets that might make the cut on Antiques Roadshow, and, as referenced by Brooks, the centenarians who believe that news isn’t news unless it is enunciated by, in the old days, Jim Lehrer or, in more recent times, Judy Woodruff or Jeffrey Brown. Contrary to its claims for itself, public broadcasting in this country is not a public service such as electricity, gas, or trash pickup but a brand: a specific kind of content that has adopted bland imperiousness as a mantra, a style, a manner of being and speaking — as was perceived by the Saturday Night Live writers who cooked up that public radio parody with Molly Shannon and Ana Gasteyer, Delicious Dish. Yes, Trump is right that the news shows on NPR and PBS are beyond hope in their partisanship, but what is worse is how boring they are: Frontline, American Experience, and American Masters — it’s as if these shows are created and curated by museum docents and those proud suburban homeowners with those “In This House, We Believe…” signs in their front yards.
Now, if NPR and PBS were to disappear tomorrow, many of their signature shows would surely migrate to other nonpublic networks or platforms. The best programming, such as Ken Burns’s engaging, elegantly done documentaries on American history, would likely reach new highs in viewership if freed from PBS stations and permitted to flourish on, say, Netflix. The weakest, such as reruns of cooking shows from years or decades ago, would rightly be lost to the sands of time. This would, in fact, be a good thing. The ultimate test of a show’s worth is whether or not it can survive on a commercial platform — which is, in fact, the test given to every nonpublic-supported show in existence. Life is tough: If The Rachel Maddow Show doesn’t bring in enough viewers, off it goes to SpinCo. The free market would step in if NPR and PBS bit the dust: One can listen to classical music, learn to quilt, and even go on tours of Europe on YouTube — sorry, Mr. Steves.
Continuing with this nightmare scenario, undoubtedly, there would be a period of mourning if, in making a public-to-private transition, The Best of Car Talk or Live from Lincoln Center failed to retain their original audiences or build new ones. We all have our favorite things. I felt bad when Northern Exposure went off the air and when George mailed its last issue. I managed to get over both because I realized that while I enjoyed watching that show and reading that magazine, neither was essential to my life nor sufficiently important to draw funds from the government.
AREA HISTORIAN WRITES ACCOUNT OF ONCE-FUNNY SATIRICAL NEWSPAPER THE ONION
Of course, the reality is probably far less grave or dramatic: Given the niche audience to which they appeal, any shortfall from missing CPB dollars to NPR, PBS, and their member stations could probably be made up by appealing to the Never Trumper instincts of individual donors during the next pledge season.
No matter the fate of NPR and PBS, Trump’s executive order is a reminder of one of life’s most elementary truths: Nothing can or should last forever — not even federal support for public broadcasting.
Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.