The Challenge
The Challenge
This vision of public service media in the digital landscape resonates with the aspirations more than 40 years ago that led to the transformation of educational television and radio into a national public broadcasting service. In a 1966 letter to the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television, E.B. White wrote, “It should be our Lyceum, our Chautauqua, our Minsky’s, and our Camelot. It should restate and clarify the social dilemma and the political pickle. Once in a while it does, and you get a quick glimpse of its potential.”6
Growing out of the Carnegie Commission’s recommendations, the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act created the independent, non-profit Corporation for Public Broadcasting and authorized federal funding to support existing stations. The act calls for services that will “be responsive to the interests of people both in particular localities and throughout the United States, and will constitute an expression of diversity and excellence….” Specifying a role for the federal government, the act said that “it is necessary and appropriate for the Federal government to complement, assist and support a national policy that will most effectively make public telecommunications services available to all citizens of the United States.”7
Three years after the act became law, the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio came into existence to provide national organizations for educational television and radio stations.
Public broadcasting remains decentralized, with individual stations at the core. A decentralized public broadcasting has been able to survive occasional intrusive political pressure, but has been less successful in adopting a unified strategy. “The structure of U.S. public broadcasting cripples any kind of coherent national planning,” said Pat Aufderheide and Jessica Clark of the Center for Social Media. “It has provided remarkable stability over the years, but this stability at a time of rapid change is itself becoming a liability.”8
A total of 365 television stations are members of PBS. About 800 of 900 public radio stations, operated by about 400 entities, are members of NPR. According to the CPB-PBS-NPR filing in the Federal Communications Commission’s Future of Media inquiry, these stations can be accessed by more than 98 percent of the U.S. population.9 Public television says it has 61 million viewers weekly as of May 2010 and public radio says it has 30 million listeners.10
But the audiences for public television and public radio are on opposite trajectories. While public television has lost viewers, public radio’s audience continues to grow. Arbitron figures provided by NPR show the total audience for NPR member stations has grown 176 percent over 20 years, and by 9 percent in the past five years.11
News programming has spurred public radio’s audience growth. Anchored by the two daily NPR news magazines, Morning Edition and All Things Considered, radio stations also acquire news and information programming from two other national services, American Public Media and Public Radio International. Between spring 2005 and spring 2008, overall public radio listening grew by 2.3 percent, but listening to news programming grew by 6 percent, according to “Grow the Audience,” a report on public radio produced by the Station Resources Group for CPB.12
The strong performance of nationally produced news programming has enabled public radio stations to establish identities in their communities as news and information sources even though the majority of stations have news departments of one or none. The “Grow the Audience” report found the most successful stations carry NPR news programs, the all-news-talk format is the most popular format where it is offered, and news is the most-listened-to programming on stations with a mixed format.13
Exhibit 2: Public Radio Formats, Ranked by Audience Share
Source: Arbitron, “Public Radio Today 2010: How America Listens to Radio,” p. 59.
Public radio stations also benefited from a vacuum created by declining investment in news among commercial radio stations. Between 1994 and 2001, during which the 1996 Telecommunications Act eased radio ownership rules, local radio newsroom staffing declined 44 percent, according to Bob Papper, then of Ball State University.
“Our biggest success in public media is NPR,” said Bill Kling, president and
CEO of American Public Media. “However, the primary gateways to NPR—in fact, the retail face of NPR in most communities—are the public radio stations and public media companies. Often those local stations are considerably less successful than the national networks. Sometimes that is because of the structure they are a part of (university, municipality, school board), in part because it is the result of a lack of direct governance. Most often it reflects leadership deficiencies. And of course, it results from a lack of resources.”
PBS’s news and information programming includes the award-winning PBS NewsHour and Nightly Business Report. The weekly documentary program, Frontline, recently received funding to produce programming year-round, instead of taking a summer break. A new weekly program, Need to Know, launched in May to replace Now on PBS and Bill Moyers Journal. Washington Week in Review is a staple of the Friday night line-up.
Exhibit 3: News Organization Believability
Source: Pew Research Center, “Americans Spending More Time Following the News,” September 12, 2010
Exhibit 4: Public Trust in Major Institutions
Source: PBS Research, GfK Roper Public Affairs & Media Surveys, 2010
Because of PBS’s structure, the national news and information programs are not produced by a single entity but by production companies or member stations in Washington, New York, Boston and Miami for distribution to other stations. Up to now, this has made it more difficult for the program producers to coordinate their efforts and bring their collective strengths to bear on major news stories such as elections or the economic crisis.
Very few public television stations produce local news. At most, they may offer a weekly news roundtable using reporters from other organizations or the occasional local or regional documentary. Some are beginning to partner with public radio stations to produce local and regional news and information programming, an effort that comes more easily to joint licensees.
Federal funding for public broadcasting has never reached the levels expected when Congress enacted the legislation in 1967. For the past several years, federal funding has remained flat, at about $400 million a year. Moreover, the distribution of most of that money is mandated by Congress, going to stations in the form of community service grants and split 75/25 between television and radio.15
Exhibit 5: CPB Budget Allocation Formula
Above chart represents 89% of CPB budget. The additional 11% goes to CPB administrative and system support costs (satellite system, copyright fees). Source: www.current.org/pbpb/statistics/CPBformula.html
While federal funding provides only about 15 percent of the services’ annual budgets, public broadcasting has also seen declines recently in other sources of funding, such as state and local support, university funding, corporate underwriting, foundation grants and individual giving.16 These financial pressures have led to reductions in services, staffing and programming at all levels and come just at a time when public broadcasting needs to make investments in digital media.
Financial pressures were the reason given by management of KCET-TV in Los Angeles when the most-watched public television station in the second largest market in the country declared it was leaving PBS because it felt the dues it paid for programming and other membership benefits were too high.17
Government funding quickly became an issue in the wake of NPR’s firing of analyst Juan Williams over comments he made during an appearance on Fox News Channel’s The O’Reilly Factor in late October 2010. Conservatives, including members of Congress, called for an end to federal funding for NPR and the rest of public broadcasting. While the percentage of federal funds in public broadcasting budgets is relatively small, it is, as PBS president Paula Kerger characterized it, “a critical 15 percent.”18 The episode revealed the precarious state of official support for public broadcasting more than 40 years after its creation.
Exhibit 6: Public Broadcasting Revenue by Source of Revenue, 2008
Source: 2008 Public Broadcasting Revenue Reports, Table 2, September 2009, http://www.cpb.org/stations/reports/revenue/
There is no shortage of challenges to public media—the digital revolution redefining the players and audience expectations, a decentralized public broadcasting structure, declining public television audience and stagnant federal funding.
Yet the opportunity is huge. Public media can become an essential element in our democracy by better serving the information needs of communities. It can do so, as the Knight Commission recommends, by becoming more local, more inclusive and more interactive.
Go Back | Table of Contents | Next Page
