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6/20/25

6/20/2025

DOES NO NEWS SIGNAL BAD NEWS
IN THE FIGHT TO SAVE NPR & PBS?

CLICK ON the above image to go to the "Protect My Public Media" campaign to save NPR and PBS

WITH TIME RUNNING OUT to protect two of the nation’s most important journalism powerhouses, there’s an alarming lack of news about any meaningful rescue effort.
On June 12, the House moved to take back federal support for NPR (National Public Radio) and TV’s PBS (the Public Broadcasting Service), sending the defunding question to the Senate.
The Senate has until July 18 to act, and you’d expect a fierce battle by public broadcasting advocates to convince the Republican-dominated chamber to reverse the House vote.
But since the House voted – it was close, just a two-vote margin – I haven’t seen any news stories about what’s being done to save the $1.1 billion needed to help fund NPR and PBS.
Now, maybe there’s a fierce lobbying effort aimed at the Republican-controlled Senate, a masterful behind-the-scenes campaign aimed at friendly legislators who will save the day.
But it doesn’t feel like it.
I’m sure broadcasting officials ARE lobbying senators.
And there is an organized campaign – “Protect My Public Media” which urges viewers, listeners and grassroots advocates to contact legislators.
But what’s missing is passion, imagination, urgency and grit.
Every day, I search the Internet for stories about the “battle,” and the silence is chilling, especially given the enormous stakes.
No calls for demonstrations; no sloganeering; no questioning by news outlets – commercial and public – of what Republicans are up to as to when they’ll take up the measure and how.
It’s all too polite. too bloodless and too courteous.

GRANTED, THIS ISN’T AN EASY LIFT, especially for the more than 1,000 NPR affiliated stations and the 330 PBS outlets.
On the one hand, they have a powerful megaphone to raise alarms and rally supporters. But they can’t use the systems to influence a political campaign. I’m sure there are a slew of legal reasons for that. And it’s just plain unfair for them to use their nationwide reach to promote their self interest.
Meanwhile, other news outlets have dropped the ball. How many stories about funds for NPR and PBS can readers of the New York Times or the Washington Post tolerate, when they are wondering whether Donald Trump is going to bomb the bejeezus out of Iran or whether Homeland Security thugs are going to arm wrestle yet another Democratic lawmaker to the floor of a federal building?
Day in and day out, there are a lot more compelling heart-wrenching, life-and-death and an occasional good news yarns for any news organization to serve up, rather than inflicting listeners and viewers with yet another boring battle-of-the-budget snoozer.
Also, federal funds are hardly the only source of support for public broadcasters: the systems are already master fundraisers, extracting donations through periodic, insufferably pompous on-air campaigns pleading for donations.
So, NPR and PBS and its excellent PBS News Hour newscast won’t necessarily go silent immediately if the $1.1 billion for the next two years is lost. But many small stations, especially in rural areas, may go out of business, and the overall public broadcasting effort will be terribly weakened.

AND WHY GAMBLE?
NPR and PBS are high quality, professional, seasoned journalistic operations – among the few surviving sources of credible information at a time when the Internet is a cesspool of misinformation, fed by the Trump government's sewer of lies.
Further, the news ecosystem remains weakened. There’s no guarantee that the Washington Post will survive as a robust source of hard-hitting political coverage as readership slumps because of self-inflicted restrictions on its opinion pages.
There’s simply no reason to allow NPR and PBS to be weakened and left to die.
This is the second time I’ve written about this – I had a long-winded post May 3. Which should alert you to the fact that I don’t have the solutions.
But I can imagine a hard-hitting advertising campaign, grassroots-protests, organized phone banking, email and text campaigns, SAVE NPR and PROTECT OUR PUBLIC TV signs at anti-Trump rallies.
Still, the Senate effort is really one in which residents of Republican states will be the most effective boosters. I’m sure that no GOP Senator wants to hear from a Rhode Island/ Blue State resident like me. And I don’t personally know many individuals in Red States I could persuade to take up the cause.
One of the exasperating aspects of the Trump and GOP drive to cripple NPR and PBS is that the lawmakers – from personal experience – know better.
"Don't spend money on stupid things and don't subsidize biased media," Rep. Jim Jordan, a Ohio Republican said during the House debate to kill the funding.
But I’m guessing that Jordan and fellow lawmakers are only too happy to be interviewed by NPR and PBS News Hour reporters, who are invariably civil, fair and certainly not “stupid.”
As to the charge that the public broadcasters are biased, that’s not necessarily the judgement of news consumers.
A YouGov poll earlier this year asked Americans which of 52 news “sources” they considered the most trusted.
PBS came in 3rd in the most-trusted list, and NPR ranked 9th.
Admittedly, surveys like this are problematic. Americans have always had a love-hate relationship with their media outlets. And reporters, especially in fiction, are portrayed as a suspect cast – sneaky, troublesome, opportunistic and unheroic.
So “trust” in media is hard to measure.
In the YouGov poll itself the Number 1 most trusted news “source” was … The Weather Channel!
The Number 2 spot went to the BBC, the British broadcasting behemoth, generally available in the U.S. on NPR and PBS stations, which use BBC segments to fill out their programming schedules.
(If you’re curious, Fox News was the most-watched outlet; but it ranked 39th on the trust list).
I’d like to think this poll does reflect generally high regard that millions of Americans have for their public broadcasters, which are available in every nook and corner of the country.
You’d think politicians would care, if for no more patriotic motives than public stations are credible platforms for themselves, and that they’re popular with their constituents.
But as of today, no news about the crisis facing NPR and PBS means that America is in danger of losing two of its best sources of news and information simply because we didn’t try hard enough.
What I do know is if NPR and PBS disappear, the larger fight to save democracy will be far more difficult: how do we fight Trump hooligans if if we don’t know what they’re doing?
Give it a try. Declare tomorrow your personal No News Day.
No media, period. No social media. No streaming your favorite commentators. No New York Times, No Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Guardian. No Associated Press.
Hands off the remote!
No PBS.
No NPR.

1 Comment

6/10/25

6/10/2025

5 Comments

PROTESTS
NEVER PERFECT; NEVER OPTIONAL

THIS MUCH I KNOW ABOUT GROUPS: I don’t want to belong to one. And I assume that the feeling is mutual, at least on the part of some members of any group I might try to sign onto.
But I also know that in the fight to defend democracy, joining together with other people is not optional. Lone wolves, hermits and soloists simply cannot get the job done.
Here’s the problem: no matter what the group, or how noble its purpose or how vital its mission, there will always be people sure to spoil some of the experience.
In any group, there will be jerks, know-it-alls, weirdos, loud-mouths, hot-heads, odd-balls, people who are too old, too annoying, too loud, too young, too hairy, too short, too meek and, sometimes, too violent.
And it’s possible there will provocateurs: people determined to make trouble, whose presence is meant to undermine the purposes of the group, to give it a bad name. Maybe they’ll have been embedded by the group’s opponents; sometimes they’ll show up as freelance spoilers.

THIS BECOMES IMPORTANT in the still-unfolding demonstrations in Los Angeles, protesting protest detentions of undocumented people or anyone whom the “authorities” decide are not the “right” people.
And nationally, it will be an issue on June 14 for what hopefully will be the thousands of “No Kings” rallies throughout the country, as a counterpoint to Trump’s military parade/birthday celebration in Washington, D.C.
It’s obvious that Trump wants trouble both in L.A., at similar protests, because it gives him the pretext to federalize state National Guards and to call in federal troops.
The obvious counter strategy is for the perfect protest – an absolutely peaceful demonstration in which there is no excuse for police or the military to “restore” order.
The columnist Tom Nichols, who writes for The Atlantic magazine and a former professor at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. envisioned such a tactic in a June 8 piece.
“… the most dramatic public action the residents of Southern California could take right now would be to ensure that Trump’s forces arrive on calm streets,” Nichols wrote.
“Imagine the reactions of the Guard members as they look around and wonder what, exactly, the commander in chief was thinking. Why are they carrying their rifles in the streets of downtown America? What does anyone expect them to do? Put another way: What if the president throws a crackdown and nobody comes?”

WHICH WILL NEVER HAPPEN.
I wish it were otherwise.
But Nichols’ fantasy is simply asking too much
Indeed, as I write this, there’s been enough “trouble” – cars set afire, highways blocked, things thrown at police – to give the thuggish administration an excuse to militarize policing of dissent.
The news reports I’ve seen so far as that the “disorderly” aspects of the LA demonstration have been the work of a minority of protesters – most have been peaceful.
But powerful emotions are at work. The federal roundup of undocumented persons have been brutal, frightening, infuriating and unfair. How can large-scale protests be as carefully executed as envisioned by Nichols and others for whom Trump’s opportunistic motives are so clear?
It just seems to me impossible. There are simply too many people, coming from too many perspectives, to assure the rest of us that the protests will be calm, orderly and precisely executed.
But the alternative is likewise unacceptable – to have no protests, to call off demonstrations, to cancel the only way millions of people have to voice their concerns for fear they will be misconstrued and abused.

IT’S THE NATURE OF DEMOCRACY that none of us can find a group of people with whom we are completely compatible. Democracy demands that we learn to get along with all sorts of people and not be overly choosy; we cannot demand everyone agree with us on every point; it’s hard to find common ground as to our personal beliefs and our guess about which tactics are effective.
Sometimes, the group simply blunders. I’m thinking back to the Black Lives Matter protests in which a devastatingly wrong-headed slogan took hold – “Defund the Police.”
You could understand the reasoning – police power was abusive, so starve its budget and redirect some of the money into non-lethal responses to mental health and other crises that didn’t need a police response.
But it seems to me that you rarely reform a government agency by reducing its income. Usually in effective reform, you have spend more money for more resources, new approaches, higher caliber people, etc.
And that’s my problem with “belonging” to a group – that I fear being associated with particular approaches, platforms and slogans with which I disagree, even though I support the group’s overall goals.
When it comes to genuinely bad actors, the people who elect violence and other counterproductive approaches, I do think the majority of us we have an obligation to call them out and somehow stop their destructive actions.
We also don’t have to join or remain in groups that turn out to be inherently violent and lawless or which violate our key moral and ethical standards.

LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE IN THE DEMOCRATIC PROCESS, there’s no simple solution to the dilemma of blending our individual standards with those of a group or a movement.
We have to accept that no group is made up of people just like us, people with whom we agree with on every point and with whom we would be pals if we didn’t have to.
Having said that, I’ve found most of the folks I’ve come across in the effort to preserve democracy since Trump declared war on American traditions are inspiring, both as individuals and as members of communities devoted to a cause that’s both noble and essential.
The worst thing that could happen at this time of great peril in America, is that we fail to come together, fail to stick together and fail to fight together to rescue our country.
We can try hard to do things right – in my case, I believe that nonviolence is both a strategic as well as a moral superpower.
But I have to acknowledge that there is no such thing as a perfect protest, and that the greater danger is that – seeking perfection – we decide to do nothing at all.

5 Comments

6/20/25

DOES NO NEWS SIGNAL BAD NEWSIN THE FIGHT TO SAVE NPR & PBS?

6/10/25

PROTESTSNEVER PERFECT; NEVER OPTIONAL

Categories

DOES NO NEWS SIGNAL BAD NEWS
IN THE FIGHT TO SAVE NPR & PBS?

PROTESTS
NEVER PERFECT; NEVER OPTIONAL