50 years of effective service by public broadcasting ignored by Congress

By Charles Mitchell

Give Florida credit. There, Gov. Ron DeSantis foreshadowed D.C.’s decision to punish public broadcasting for its left-leaning newscasts when he vetoed 70 percent of Florida’s public broadcast funding last year. The thing is, though, DeSantis, although a super-conservative predicted by many as a likely candidate to succeed President Trump in the White House, was smart enough to keep money flowing to the Florida Public Radio Emergency Network Storm Center. The per cost to Floridians will be 71 cents per person.

In the event of a disaster such as a hurricane, televisions, cell phones, wi-fi and the internet usually become absolutely useless. What works? Transistor radios with good batteries.

Ask any person whose agenda suddenly became basic survival in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Public broadcasting in Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and parts of Florida and Georgia became the pipeline for reliable news and information. It’s no accident that Mississippi Public Broadcasting operates from bunker-style basement studios in Jackson or that its satellite transmitters across the state are as weather-proofed as possible. Inherent to the 1967 creation of public-supported broadcast media was that it be reliable during emergencies.

Before Katrina made landfall on Aug. 29, 2005, and after the storm swept inland, public radio was on the air. Where is water, food, ice available? What hospitals are still standing? Is there space in shelters? Who has medicine? Is dialysis available anywhere? How can I find out whether my friends and family are safe? What roads are being cleared? Anyone have fuel?

Katrina was two decades ago but still has the American record for devastation. As DeSantis knows, Florida is threatened just about every year. Before Katrina and certainly since, there have been many other manmade and natural events where providing reliable information – what roads are best and open to escape wildfires or train derailments – has made the difference for individuals, sometimes an existential difference.

No disrespect to commercial broadcasters. They offer commendable public service, including before and after emergencies. It comes down, though, to scope and purpose. Signals of commercial radio and television are limited to a defined area. Public broadcasting uses an array of equipment usually engineered for statewide reception. Most local broadcasting companies today are subsets of larger corporations. Keeping their federal licenses depends on them being helpful to their communities, but they either make money or close their doors. 

As has widely been reported, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is actively shutting down after President Trump and Congress – after 50 years of annual funding – rescinded its funding and declined to provide a dime in the new budget. It was a spite move, no doubt, with little thought to the value to the public of public broadcasting.

Where and how non-commercial radio and television get money to operate is not widely known. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is not a broadcast entity. It serves as a conduit and a buffer, created to funnel federal money to national, state and local public broadcasters and shield them from political influence. With no federal funds, there’s no need for a CPB.

Its death, however, does not mean public media in the South or anywhere else will cease to exist. As any audience member knows, public broadcasters receive donations from individuals, corporations, foundations, and payments from what they call underwriters who sponsor programs. Most also receive state appropriations. Although there are bills filed almost every year to “defund” Mississippi Public Broadcasting, none have passed. In fact, MPB’s current allocation of $14.6 million ($2.76 per citizen) may be its largest ever due to one-time money including $1.5 million for upgraded equipment and $2.2 million for an innovative distance learning project of MPB and the Department of Education. 

Other state allocations in the South vary from Arkansas at $4.77 per resident to Alabama at $1.86 to Georgia at $1.26. Louisiana is at $2.34 and Kentucky at $3.68.

It may have been Federal Communication Chairman’s Newton Minow’s 1961 description of commercial television as a “vast wasteland” that kindled the push for President Lyndon Johnson to sign an act six years later creating what in the early years was commonly known as “educational television.” Great care was taken to assure that (1) public broadcasting would not become “state TV” as exists in countries run by socialists or tyrants and (2) that rural audiences would be served.

The consensus is that after the last door is locked at CPB headquarters, public broadcasters in major markets – Boston, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco – will be fine. Federal dollars have created a significant but small slice of their budgets because they have healthy levels of private support and the fact that they create and sell programming to others. Rural states without as many donors will take a far more serious hit. Already, Mississippi Public Broadcasting has announced its streaming service of educational programming for children will be canceled. 

So why is this happening? After 50 successful years have the president and Congress decided to save $500 million (less than $2 per American per year) by refusing to fund the CPB? A White House statement explained their motivation was purely political: Public broadcasters “have fueled partisanship and left-wing propaganda with taxpayers’ dollars.” Objectively, that has some merit. National Public Radio is scored as left-of-center along with The New York Times, the Washington Post and all three legacy networks and CNN. These days if you’re not a cheerleader for one side or the other, you’re the enemy. No one should harbor any doubt that if the journalists in public broadcasting would only fawn over Trump their funding would be safe, perhaps tripled.

The money at stake is a trifle. Trump’s golf outings in his first term cost taxpayers $151 million. And given that larger marker public broadcasters have plentiful resources, the odds of ending the “left-wing propaganda” are low. What’s left are the smaller markets and rural areas. Most are not profitable for commercial broadcasters, and are, as it happens, politically conservative. They are also the people most in need of the programming public broadcasters provide, and most in the crosshairs if the removal of funding to small-state broadcasters impairs their work during emergencies.

At least Gov. DeSantis recognized that truth. Like Trump and Congress, he acted to punish dissent, but he realized news reports are only one aspect of public broadcasting. Its founding purpose involved much more. Nothing has changed about that.

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Charles Mitchell is an associate professor in the School of Journalism and New Media at the University of Mississippi and a member of the Overby Center panel of experts.