When Public Media Is Under Attack, People Fight Back

For “Protect Public Media Day,” I joined dozens of activists and our allies from Our Revolution, the ACLU and the Communications Workers of America outside NPR headquarters to protest attacks on public media from Congress, the Federal Communications Commission and the Trump administration.

A vibrant, independent public-media system is essential to a healthy democracy. So it’s no wonder that Donald Trump and Elon Musk hate public media.

This is how authoritarians operate. They attack the media, squeeze the media, starve the media and weaponize the government against the media. They don’t want us to know what they’re doing or what they’re stealing. They don’t want democracy.

NPR and the censorship czar

NPR sits just down the street from the headquarters of the FCC, where Chairman Brendan Carr is busy weaponizing the agency against free speech. He’s attacking press freedom. He’s declared war on public media, too.

When Donald Trump doesn’t like how 60 Minutes edited an interview, for example, along comes Brendan Carr, the censorship czar, to launch investigations or threaten to take away broadcast licenses or block their mergers — unless they first pay off Donald Trump, who is suing CBS for $20 billion. It’s a shakedown.

When Elon Musk tweets that he wants to defund NPR, here comes Brendan Carr, the censorship czar, with a trumped-up investigation into the underwriting practices at NPR and PBS — telling Congress it should completely cut off funding for public media.

Trump, Musk and Carr are targeting NPR and PBS because they want journalists to stay timid and think twice about asking hard questions. They want to weaken the system and keep NPR and PBS stations begging for table scraps.

The billionaires are the problem

In the United States, we spend less than $2 a year per capita to fund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. And the rest of the world is confused when they look at us. Healthy democracies spend 20, 50 or 100 times as much on public media. And public media is incredibly popular in those countries; it’s a source of national pride.

See, our problem isn’t that we spend too much on public media. It’s that we spend too much on billionaires.

If the multibillionaires in this country paid their fair share, we’d have plenty of money for public media and local journalism. We could put thousands of reporters on the ground, uncovering corruption and painting a true picture of our diverse communities.

We could probably have all of this if we could just get Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the other multibillionaires to pay their own taxes.

Public media’s leaders need to fight back

It was heartening to see so many people show up to Protect Public Media Day to support the hard-working journalists, producers, engineers and workers at NPR. Their leaders and executives need to fight for them, too.

This is not the time for NPR’s leadership to go into hiding, to close their eyes and hope the Trump administration will go away. As I told the crowd: “You can’t show up with a tote bag to a knife fight!”

Now is the time to loudly defend NPR’s work and the journalists working to hold this administration accountable. (Our protest even made a cameo on Jimmy Kimmel Live.) Remember this: The enemies of public media have tried to crush it many, many times before — and they always lose.

So, yes, we must protect and defend public media from these attacks. But we also need to improve, reinvent and build public media into the kind of system that a democracy and its people deserve.

Help Free Press keep fighting to protect public media: Donate today.