This morning we woke to our local NPR affiliate, WAMU, reporting a story about how the public media network it belongs to is on the brink of losing funding, per a party-line vote in the U.S. Senate last night.
The public media portion of the claw-back is 1.1 billion – the amount Congress previously approved to fund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which distributes funds to NPR, PBS and over 1500 local radio and TV stations that serve communities around the U.S. The deadline for the House to seal the deal is tomorrow – July 18.
I’m not sure people understand the effect this could have on democracy, local accountability, even our sanity as a nation. Millions of Americans rely on public media for their news – and while they may not realize it, to stay safe. When we watched PBS shows as kids, we came to expect the “test of the public broadcasting network” that included a long tone and rainbow bars on the screen. As we read about how the lack of a warning system affected the flood response in Texas, it’s hard to fathom how 51 sitting Senators, many who represent rural and disaster-prone areas, can rationalize defunding that system.
Geographically, our public media system is the most expansive we have, and they’re all nonprofits – free from corporate or wealthy owner agendas. NPR’s programming is accessible to 98.5% of the U.S. population. Here’s a map:
There are over 1000 NPR Member Station signals broadcasting across the United States NPR
If you’re a fan of lean operations, look no further than your local public media affiliate. Last fall we had a reporter from WITF, Jordan Wilkie, speak at a workshop in Chambersburg, PA. WITF covers nine Pennsylvania counties, he said, with a total of five staff.
Public media is also crucial to our model of self-governance. 2022 researchers Timothy Neff and Victor Packard of the University of Pennsylvania looked at the link between public media funding and democratic health in over 30 countries and found that strong public media systems positively correlated with healthy democracies. They also found the U.S. public media system to be grossly underfunded: At the time, Germany was spending $142.42 per capita on public media, Japan $53.15, Botswana $18.38 and the U.S., just $3.16. Note also that we’re not alone: Countries from Canada to Lithuania – 33 in this particular study -- have public media networks (For more analysis, see this NeimanLab piece).
No argument for “American exceptionalism” justifies dismantling networks that are clear pillars of democratic governance in developed countries globally, and for which our spending is relatively low anyway.
Attacking public media isn’t new, but this is the first time it’s been backed by a years-long effort to discredit the traditional media sector, rich with claims that entities are inherently biased, failing, “the enemy of the American people” – choose your catch-phrase, you’ve heard them all. In April 2024, NPR business editor Uri Berliner threw in against his own employer in an op ed in Bari Weiss’s Free Press newsletter (where he is now a contributing writer) with bias claims that were exhaustively covered then shown to be largely inaccurate when analyzed by Washington Post’s Eric Wemple.
No entity that’s comprised of humans is bias-free; in fact, having worked with numerous experts on bias, I’ve noticed that these claims often come from speakers that display strong biases themselves. What we should look for is whether a media outlet works to mitigate bias, discloses ownership, avoids publishing falsehoods and corrects mistakes (see NewsGuard’s rating system for an example). Shows like PBS Newshour, which has got to be the least biased news show on prime-time television and is our family’s favorite, comply with these metrics as a matter of course.
Let’s be clear: The communities that will suffer most from this funding cut are those with fewer resources to begin with. That includes rural communities, Tribal nations and smaller towns whose stations rely more heavily on federal funding and have few information sources overall. When a station goes under, people turn to polarizing national sources of news, random YouTubers and whatever their friends share on social media. Media’s watchdog role goes away.
As we ponder the “why” here, we think of the stated intent of the MAGA movement to leverage low-information voters. Or perhaps the aim is for public stations to switch formats -- like WNKN in central Ohio, which was bought by Catholic broadcaster Relevant Radio in 2023 and now runs
religious programming. That’s the hometown station of Vice President Vance, who cast the tie-breaking vote to defund public media on the Senate floor last night.
As we imagine the effect this could have on future elections and the spread of false information, our societal stress grows. Which seems to be the point: To create constant instability and confusion so a certain team’s messages can break through even more effectively than they are today.
Barring some miracle on the House floor, the hope for more fragile U.S. public media stations is with private philanthropy now, and with everyday Americans who are fed up with this nonsense. You can notice if you have a “meh” or cynical reaction to this news, take a break then once again, pay attention. You can, right now, follow your local public media affiliates on the social media platforms you use. Engage with their posts and thank the reporters. Look up your NPR affiliate if you’re not sure. It’s so easy, and it really matters. Donate, and follow protectyourpublicmedia.org as the story evolves.
Do it for those who aren’t reading this piece. We owe them one.Deanna Troust is the founder and president of Truth in Common, a nonpartisan nonprofit that works to restore fact-based decision-making and respectful discourse through community-based workshops, professional development, and advisory services for mission-driving organizations. Learn more at truthincommon.org.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.