The New Yorker:

Government-backed institutions sometimes stand up more strongly to authoritarianism than their commercial counterparts.

By Jon Allsop

In 1911, voters in Los Angeles founded a newspaper. It was called the Municipal News, and proclaimed itself “Owned by the People.” The backdrop, according to Victor Pickard, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, was growing national dissatisfaction with “commercial excesses such as yellow journalism and propaganda—the ‘clickbait’ and ‘fake news’ ” of the day. (It was also a particularly volatile moment in L.A.: the year before, the L.A. Times building had been blown up by opponents of the publisher’s anti-union activities. Twenty-one people were killed.) The Municipal News could have been a model for something new. It was overseen by citizen volunteers appointed by the mayor, distributed for free, and covered local political issues, such as streetcar fares and tuberculosis testing for cows, in addition to broader topics, like music and fashion. But two years later voters in L.A. opted to get rid of it amid corporate opposition. The L.A. Times cheered its death, writing that it had been “born with pre-natal tendencies to damphoolishness” and become “a convenient dumping ground for the money of the taxpayers.”

Commercialism remained the dominant organizing principle of U.S. media. The Red Scare of the subsequent decades, Pickard once told me, locked in a cultural suspicion of government intervention, in the media industry and beyond. There were experiments with public and educational broadcasting, culminating, in the late sixties and early seventies, with the establishment of NPR and PBS. But they came to rely increasingly on private funding, and they still do today.

Critics of public backing for journalism have often argued that it represents a conflict of interest—a case of officials paying the piper to scrutinize their tune—and is vulnerable to the changing whims of politicians, especially if a tyrant comes along. Donald Trump’s new Administration has seemed determined to prove them right. Shortly after Trump’s Inauguration, Brendan Carr, the new chair of the Federal Communications Commission, suggested that NPR and PBS might illegally be airing commercials, and announced a probe; early last month, Trump signed an executive order bluntly demanding that they be defunded, decrying their supposedly radical coverage of everything from reparations to “queer ducks”; then, this week, the Administration sent a so-called rescissions package to Congress, asking lawmakers to repeal public-media funds that they had already approved. Trump has also sought to gut the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which funds news organizations that broadcast overseas, most notably Voice of America. These are very different entities than NPR and PBS—some have roots in the counter-propaganda operations of the Second World War and the Cold War, and all of them are still seen as tools of U.S. soft power—but they are designed to be editorially independent, and often do produce good journalism.

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