| State of Public Media in the US: Nowhere To Go But Up
Pictures being worth 1000 words:
Taken from a comprehensive study on media consolidation by the Canadian Senate (normally rather useless, but actually a half-decent think-tank). It's a pretty crowded graph, and no help for you if you're colour-blind, so I highlighted the US and UK rankings. The UK is a pretty good point of comparison, a majority Anglo nation with many cultural similarities to the US as well as experience running a global empire. Hell, they invented capitalism. If they can have a well funded public media, the US should be able to do so.
To put some actual figures down, the endowment to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (parent of PBS and NPR) by Congress was $412M in 2007. In Canada, the CBC got about C$1B (US $800M) from the government, Australia's ABC got A$850M (US $550M) and the BBC got around £3.4B (US $5B). All these countries are of course significantly smaller than the US yet fund their public broadcasters at a higher absolute amount, never mind even per-capita figures. It's hard to make exact comparisons, since each nation funds and runs public media differently but the % of GDP or per-capita comparisons do show that the US is last by any metric. For a further sense of this, both the CBC and BBC have multiple TV networks, including quality 24-hour news channels.
Going by per-capita, my calculations say the US spends about $1.40 per citizen on public broadcasting compared to Canada at $27 and the UK with $80. $27 per person would mean $8B for public broadcasting in the US annually. Yet another large progressive feedback mechanism that could be created for less than the cost of a week in Iraq.
NPR and PBS do have other sources of revenue (as do most public broadcasters) but if you take all revenue, PBS pulls $600M/annually and NPR $215M. So they basically manage to double the money Congress gives them, and still have far less funding than the Canadian Broadcasting Corp's US $1.2B with all revenue counted.
It will also have the nice benefit of making US public broadcasters less at risk to undue influence by the various foundations and corporate sponsors that provide roughly half their funding. For anyone who has detected a sad slide to the right by PBS and NPR, the obvious part of that story is the constant attacks by the right but the less obvious one is who came to their "rescue" as government funding became more difficult and their overt and subtle influence on the politics of the organizations.
The other disadvantage of having to rely on charity, is that when times get rough, the money dries up:
Over the past few months, we have all witnessed the deterioration of the national economy. NPR is not immune to this severe downturn, and our revenue sources will be affected. A sharp drop in our current and projected corporate underwriting has compelled us to reduce expenses immediately. This memo describes our plan to ensure that NPR will weather this economic crisis.
Hopefully this is just driving home the obvious point that you cannot really run a proper broadcasting system on individual charity and foundation bequests. It is time to put the CPB on stable long term footing at a level which can provide at least some of what is being lost in the declining newspaper business.
Are Public Broadcasters Any Good at Journalism?
In a word, yes. First off, public broadcasters tend to be highly popular with their nations' citizens. PBS is already the most trusted name in news (sorry CNN). Also, Americans want it better funded. PBS and NPR got high marks for objectivity. CBC gets high marks, and Aussies want more funding for the ABC.
Of course, public broadcasters have much broader mandates than journalism and news. They are supposed to "to make the good popular, and the popular good" as the BBC's Huw Weldon said. I don't want to downplay the importance of having a non-profit media outlet around to do the cultural and artistic stuff that the profit seeking ones won't, but I am primarily concerned with the practice of news gathering here.
From PBS' Frontline, we have seen excellent work on diverse topics from the Iraq War, to credit cards, to the Mormons. BBC has Panorama which has won awards for stories on Darfur, and corruption in Britain's government security contracts (sound familiar?). CBC has the Fifth Estate which recently cracked a long unsolved civil rights era murder in the US, and even won an Oscar once.
Aside from these sorts of 60 Minutes sort of shows, public broadcasters are plenty capable of more routine investigative journalism, such as CBC commissioning tests on tasers which found an alarming percentage of units deliver a much higher shock than they are supposedly capable of. The story only aired December 5th, and already several large police forces, including the Mounties have pulled tasers from the line until they are tested. This is exactly the sort of thing one should hope to see from a news organization - stories that examine items of public interest, and with tangible results. Not every good investigative story has to require secretive insiders handing out manila envelopes in unlit parking garages.
As far as local journalism goes as opposed to investigative, public broadcasters are often the only option, since private enterprise is unwilling to provide much service to smaller communities (hate radio doesn't really count). Besides, local journalism is a little easier than running investigations into all sorts of nefarious characters and organizations. Even having someone around to report on what local government is openly doing is valuable.
It turns out that non-profit organizations are actually more likely to be good at journalism, since the objectives of journalism are ideally not profit related. Eliminating the profit motive removes the incentive to prioritize prurient and glitzy stories over ones ultimately more useful to the public interest (as opposed perhaps to "interesting to the public").
Public Broadcasters Force the Private Ones To Compete
A private study into multiple public broadcasters commissioned by BBC noticed that they have positive effects on their competition:
Public broadcasters influence the quality of other broadcasters. Some public service broadcasters have maintained their influence on the overall development of television by inducing their commercial competitors to offer equally distinctive programs. In effect, public service broadcasters can and do act as regulators of the television industry as a whole. In the words of Michael Grade, former managing director of Channel 4 in the UK "The BBC keeps us all honest." There is one proviso: The public service broadcaster must begin from a position of strength. With regard to the US Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), McKinsey reports, with an audience share of only three percent today, PBS is hardly a significant rival to commercial operators and can't meaningfully shape their approaches to programming.
(Emphasis mine). Amazingly, it seems having competition that doesn't eagerly race to the bottom helps the CNN's and MSNBC's of the world avoid the temptation to outfox Fox. Viewers are more likely to notice how shallow and empty one network is if they see another one that is insightful and intelligent. Or perhaps the executives at the networks have some amount of residual shame that can be rekindled if the comparison is stark enough. The fix for Fox running 4-hour COPS marathons is not 4-hours of Prison life documentaries, instead better programming would leave Fox isolated. Actually, come to think of this, when I was in the UK, I did find Murdock's network there, Sky, was nowhere near Fox levels of bias and general stupidity. Could it be that competing with the BBC kept Murdoch at bay? What would Fox, CNN and MSNBC look like if they faced off against a 24-hour cable news version of PBS?
Further, if this tendency held up on news and journalism, having public networks that do lots of real journalism gives the private ones additional reason not to gut their newsrooms. It may have a multiplier effect where every journalist hired by the public organizations results in several hired by the for-profit entities.
There are a lot of good reasons to give PBS and NPR a shot in the arm, but the demise of conventional journalism should move the subject several notches up the agenda. The value-for-money proposition is just too good.
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