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Today's Topics:
1. Thank goodness for the ABC and SBS (Stephen Loosley)
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Message: 1
Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2025 21:40:55 +1030
From: Stephen Loosley <[email protected]>
To: "link" <[email protected]>
Subject: [LINK] Thank goodness for the ABC and SBS
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
Trump?s FCC Starts Harassing Public Broadcasters With Bogus Investigations
Culture: From the dismantling-the-truth dept
Fri, Mar 28th 2025 05:31am - Karl Bode
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/03/28/trumps-fcc-starts-harassing-public-broadcasters-with-bogus-investigations/
If you hadn?t noticed, consolidated corporate media hasn?t been meeting the
challenges of the current moment very well.
There?s generally two reasons: one, these media outlets tend to reflect the
interests of generally white, older, male, right wing ownership, which broadly
thinks authoritarianism is a fair price to pay for some tax cuts, deregulation,
and taking a hatchet to the knees of regulators.
Two, the ad-engagement model results in companies that are generally truth
averse. They?re afraid of upsetting sources, advertisers, ad-clicking
readership, and event sponsors, so they tend to sand all the rough edges off
their journalism out of fear the truth (or responses to the truth) might impact
overall engagement.
Both combined result in a sort of pseudo-journalistic mush that traffics in
feckless ?he said, she said? false equivalency journalism and has trouble
accurately informing readers of the truth. This, in turn, is easily exploited
by corporations, authoritarians and white supremacists, whose shitty, unpopular
views tend to be sanitized and normalized by the weak-kneed corporate press.
One potential solution for this is more publicly-funded journalism. Studies
generally show publicly-funded journalism tends to result in healthier
democracies for the reasons outlined above. Making journalism a publicly-funded
public good (and not a business) has great potential. But the right wing
generally sees it as a threat because it?s not as prone to soften its criticism
of corporatism or authoritarianism.
But after a generation of demonization of the idea, it?s basically a
non-starter in the U.S. And the few partially publicly-funded news
organizations we do have are already seeing relentless harassment by the Trump
administration. NPR (which only gets about 1% of its money from the public) and
PBS are already facing sham investigations by Trump earlobe nibbler and FCC
boss Brendan Carr.
Now Carr is taking aim at smaller public broadcasters as well. Carr recently
sent a letter to WBEZ and twelve other local public broadcasters to inform them
they were under investigation for on-air sponsorships, commonly referred to as
?underwriting.? Carr is pretending to be concerned that the stations aren?t
following FCC rules restricting them from airing traditional commercials:
?I am concerned that NPR and PBS broadcasts could be violating federal law by
airing commercials. It is possible that NPR and PBS member stations are
broadcasting underwriting announcements that cross the line into prohibited
commercial advertisements.?
About 4.6% (1.6%) of WEBZ?s operating revenue comes from public funding.
Publicly-funded broadcasters are restricted from running traditional
commercials. So instead, they generally run corporate underwriting spots
acknowledging corporate support. WEBZ and the other companies all say they?ve
consistently adhered to the rules. Carr has offered no evidence of actual
violations.
Carr, a guy who historically lets giant telecom monopolies run endlessly
roughshod over U.S. consumers and the market, couldn?t actually care less about
these rules or whether these companies are actually violating them (and they
likely aren?t). He?s simply looking for something to harass public journalism
over.
GOP policies are broadly unpopular. That?s why a cornerstone of the modern
radical right involves mercilessly attacking education, academia, journalism,
and informed consensus. And another key cornerstone has been to build a vast
right wing propaganda machine across AM radio, broadcast TV, cable TV, and the
internet that tells right wingers what they want to hear 24 hours a day, 7 days
a week.
Public broadcasting (what very little the U.S. has) challenges this paradigm,
so it?s an obvious early target for Carr.
America has been so consistently conditioned to view publicly-funded journalism
as ?radical socialism,? and media policy deemed so unimportant, that it?s
likely the public and politicians won?t put up much of a fight as what few
publicly-funded stations we have are snuffed out by weird zealots.
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End of Link Digest, Vol 389, Issue 1
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