What to Do Now About Public Broadcasting

Rescission needs to be followed by innovation, not just restoration

Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (especially its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.

Despite years of warnings that a congressional cut-off of funding for public broadcasting could be coming, and having refused to take the bold steps that might have forestalled it, it still feels to me like too many interested parties were not prepared for it to really take place. Now it will.

However that has happened, this week I want to look forward, to think about what is likely to occur now, and what funders and operators might usefully do about it.

It’s even worse than it looks

The first thing to say is that things seem likely to get worse than many of those closest to the situation expect. They well recognize, of course, the direct impact of the withdrawn funding, and the resulting shortfalls. And loyal station members and other stalwarts may fill some of that gap, especially in the short run.

But it is second- and third-order effects of the federal funding rescission that I think are being underestimated. So, for instance, the likely failure, as soon as later this year, of quite a few public radio and television stations, especially in rural areas, will reduce the support for existing national programming, placing an even greater burden on remaining, mostly larger, urban stations at the very moment their own budgets are facing unprecedented stress. And the lack of rural distribution for that national programming will, advertisers and sponsors will soon recognize, make the remaining platform uncompetitive for truly national marketing plans, eroding another revenue stream.

The likely result is the sort of cutbacks in the quantity and quality of service, and then of listener and viewership, that can produce a downward spiral of the kind our metro newspapers have been suffering for 20 years now.

Transformation beats preservation

I worry especially that too many in and around public broadcasting are reacting to this watershed moment by repeating the critical error made by those metro papers: trying to preserve as much of what has gone before as possible, rather than seizing the moment to reinvent a system, and many of its components, that for far too long had remained unvarying and poorly adapted to a changing media landscape.

The effort, for instance, now well underway, to create a large central philanthropic fund, under the direction of some of those who have led the system to its current predicament, is a perfect example of the difficulty. You would think it obvious that the very public vote of no confidence in an ostensibly quasi-public institution by the people’s elected representatives—no matter how much you or I may disagree with them—would be enough to indicate the need for some new industry leadership.

Perhaps even more important, the imperative need for experimentation and creativity would seem to dictate not a top-down solution, but rather a bottom-up approach, empowering a variety of initiatives that could point the way to a sustainable future in arenas where public broadcasting still makes sense.

That is not everywhere. I am looking forward as much as anyone to the 12 hours of Ken Burns’s American Revolution documentary this Fall, but there is no reason that sort of effort can’t successfully move to a streaming platform. Last year, about 60 offerings on Netflix alone garnered larger audiences than Burns’s last analogous effort, his 2017 series on Vietnam. At least a couple of those Netflix successes were documentaries. Along similar lines, Sesame Street years ago made its own move beyond public television, first to HBO Max and soon to Netflix.

Frontline already has about four times as many followers on YouTube as watch an average broadcast, and its average YouTube audience has begun to approach that on linear TV; NewsHour has about five times as many followers as regular broadcast viewers, but its average YouTube audience is a much smaller fraction of linear. The difference is perhaps indicative of how much each show has adapted to date, and a strong hint of possibly diverging fortunes ahead.

Seize the day

Rather than bemoaning that future, perhaps we should embrace it. As we enter the third decade of the business crisis of the press, those newsrooms that have moved most effectively to adapt are thriving, while those who have not are not. In the commercial world, and even among the newer digital nonprofits, that seems appropriate, even laudable. If the withdrawal of public funding from domestic public broadcasting accelerates the same sort of discipline, that doesn’t seem entirely unfair.

With public radio, similar trends are at play to those with TV. It has been almost 15 years since digital readership of newspapers first exceeded that for print. Publishers (and editors) who continued to fetishize print readership (and display) made a mistake which almost all came eventually to recognize. But many public radio stations, including some of the largest and strongest (in terms of programming content), were much slower to adapt, remaining radio-centric long past the time when audience preferences would have dictated otherwise. Indeed, the emergence of local digital nonprofits is, in many cases, also the story of public radio stations having missed a critical opportunity.

Dr. Johnson famously said that the prospect of hanging in a fortnight concentrates the mind. Unfortunately, by the time the “hanging” of public broadcasting was weeks or even months away, it proved too late to avert the verdict. But we can all hope that minds are now concentrated, albeit belatedly. The moment has come to convert that concentration into creative action and innovation. In some cases, very sadly, it will be too late, but for others, there are opportunities for reinvention ahead. Those are the efforts we should all now move to support.