This is a lightly edited transcript of the December 16 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon and this is The New Republic show Right Now. I’m joined by Victor Pickard. He’s a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He studies the media and its effect on politics and society. And he’s also a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, and they had an interesting report last week on the media and its problems, and why the American media is not the sort of tool for democracy that it should be.
So, Professor, welcome.
Victor Pickard: Thanks Perry. Thanks for having me.
Bacon: So I’m going to start—there’s like 40 pages in the report. It covers a lot of media history, but I’m going to try to condense it and ask you at the start: if you had to describe the two biggest problems with our current media structure, what would you say they are?
Pickard: That’s a tough question, because I want to go with three, but I’ll do…
Bacon: Three is fine. Three is good, though. Let’s do three.
Pickard: Okay. Magic number three. So I would identify the three major problems facing the U.S. today in terms of our media system and how it functions within a democratic society would be the collapse of local journalism, the defunding of our public media, and the what we might think of as runaway consolidation of our news media.
And I think those three problems are major, major, major challenges facing us if we do want to be a democratic society. But I think they all also have these structural roots that we try to bring out in our report. We really try to historicize—we answer the question: How did we get here? What policy decisions led to these predicaments?—because so many of the problems that we’re grappling with are really symptoms of deeper structural pathologies.
And so we’re really trying to bring that out into the report to make this ultimate argument that if we care about the future democracy, we really need to center these media-related problems. So we really need to make structural media reform a major focus of any pro-democracy movement.
So, in a nutshell, I’ve pretty much described the report, but of course there are plenty of details that we can geek out on.
Bacon: The three things you said were the cloud, local media defunding public media, and then the sort of corporate takeover of the mainstream media, essentially.
Let’s focus on local media first, because that is a longstanding problem that’s not related to Trump, really. That’s been an issue for a long time. Basically, local newspapers ran on classified advertising for decades, and then the internet kind of ended that business, and they don’t have an alternative revenue source.
That’s kind of the short story there. Well, give the longer version of that story, if you like. I gave it a pretty short account. What’s the long version? Is that pretty much it?
Pickard: I mean, that is it in a nutshell. But I really would want to underscore that this wasn’t inevitable. It really was the result of these, again, structural problems where we allowed our print media system to become so dependent on advertising revenue. Okay, so oftentimes the lazy narrative is that the internet broke local journalism, but that’s not exactly correct.
Yeah, it really was this overreliance—and I would say this hypercommercialization—of what should be seen as a public good, the same way we treat public education in this country. So I feel like that is the fundamental problem. And then when advertisers and readers migrated to the web, newspapers lost their monopolistic position in their respective markets; then suddenly that market—that business model—fell apart, and it’s never coming back.
So we’re dealing with market failure, and the really only solution to systemic market failure is to come up with public solutions. And I think that’s what we sort of tee up with this report…
Bacon: Hold on. Let’s ask one question. Okay, so local media—do we really mean local newspapers, or do we mean local?
Because local TV—it’s worth delineating it a little bit. Local TV and local newspapers are in different places, right? Local TV has done better, I think.
Pickard: Oh, that depends. okay. I would still say that even in their beleaguered state, the primary source of original reporting we’re not reporting.
Bacon: What I mean is the economics of local TV are better is what I was trying to get at.
Pickard: Yes, that’s right. Not suffering nearly as much. And just to put a couple quick, very grim numbers on this problem: So since the early 2000s, we’ve lost nearly 40 percent of our local newspapers. We’ve lost 75 percent of our newspaper journalists. And a key point here is that it’s not just about nostalgia for this old model or ink-stained fingers from rustling through the broadsheets, but it really is because that journalism is not being replaced anywhere.
The newspaper industry served as this kind, as this kind of informational feeder for our entire news media ecosystem. So when we lose those newspapers, we lose those institutions. We’ve lost that journalism. That’s why we should be so deeply concerned about this.
And just one other benchmark: Where in the early 2000s we had 40 journalists per 100,000 people in the United States, we’re now down to 8.2 journalists per 100,000 people, so that means that tens of millions of Americans are living in news deserts. We all learn in school that democracy requires a free and, by implication, a functional press system.
And now we have the studies to show what happens—these kind of natural experiments—what happens when a local community loses its local news media? Sure enough, they’re less likely to vote, they’re less civically engaged. They have lower levels of political knowledge, higher levels of corruption, higher levels of polarization, and extreme right-wing politics.
So we know for sure—we can empirically show—that this is bad for democracy.
Bacon: Let me make two other points on state and local news here. Two other points I wanted to ask about. We think the news deserts are disproportionately in sort of rural areas, small towns. Is that correct?
Pickard: Yes, but I would qualify that because there are many areas—especially communities of color—that have never been well served by a commercial media system. So in many ways, we’re all living in news deserts increasingly, even in urban areas across the United States.
But you’re absolutely right. If you look at the map where the news deserts are, they disproportionately spread across these rural areas. And also, that’s why our public media are so important for those areas, which is something maybe we’ll get into.
Bacon: Let me ask one question about the local. So, like, I assume a lot of people who are going to listen to this are living in cities—particularly, the audience is more urban, more liberal. So you’ve got Baltimore, you’ve got Chicago, you’ve got Philadelphia. There are these cities where you’ve had these sort of nonprofit news outlets sort of pop up, but I think there’s like 12 cities in a country of a lot. Like, I think we should not—if you have a local news site that’s sort of a digital new thing in your area—you are an unusual person, probably living in a pretty big metro, correct?
Pickard: That is correct, and you put your finger on another common solution that people say: Well, if the market’s no longer doing this, why don’t we just rely on nonprofits? We’ll rely on rich benefactors, philanthropists, foundations—but disproportionately those resources go to the metropolitan areas.
They also depend on local audiences where, again, you have better resources than just more people living in those areas. That even if you only get 1 percent of people paying for their media, it’s going to work in a city, but it’s not going to work in most other places.
So this keeps coming back to the fact that there really is no market solution for the local journalism crisis. And there’s also not an easy nonprofit fix. Like, this really does beg the observation that the solution of last resort would be a public model, which, I think, starts to overlap with this idea about the future of our public media.
Bacon: So let’s come back to the next one, the defunding of public media. And I guess, before I read your—I guess it’s worth delineating here between [00:08:00] the NPR station in South Dakota and PBS, obviously resourced in different ways, right? But PBS has a lot of—there’s a bigger thing there that has more resources. So talk about, when you said the defunding of public media, what exactly are we talking about?
Pickard: So what we’re talking about is the federal allocations to our public media that—even before this latest rescission package that Congress passed, that Trump pushed Congress to pass, where they threw out the two years’ worth of $1 billion–plus of funding for our public media that Congress had already allocated before.
So this was already an unusual move, but the detail here is that even before that rescissions package, we were only paying about $1.58 per person per year for our public media. I mean, this was a paltry amount, especially if you compare it to all democratic societies around the world. We were literally off the chart for how little we were allocating to our public media.
The Brits spend close to $100 per year for the BBC. Northern, Western European countries spent far more than that.
Bacon: It said 27 countries comparable to the U.S. We were 25th. Something like that. Does that seem right to you?
Pickard: That’s right, that’s right. Yeah. And that’s based on a bigger study. We actually ended up looking at 33 countries. And again, like, the U.S. was, like, on the far edge of that chart.
So we really are a global outlier for how little we’ve allocated towards our public media. And that was before Congress defunded it completely. So now our public media are dependent on foundations, viewers and listeners like us, and corporations.
So even to call it public is a bit of a misnomer. It’s always been more reliant on private capital. And this is a problem. This has kept it economically and politically weak. This is one of the things that we flag as something that we have to change going forward. But going back to your original question, this disproportionately hurts these smaller communities.
Tragically, ironically, these are often Trump supporters that are losing their public media outlets because those outlets were disproportionately relying on that federal funding. They weren’t getting enough money from other sources that I mentioned earlier.
So they really if they lose that public media—or that public funding which they have—there’s a good chance that they’re going to go under. And then those communities will become complete news deserts in many cases. That’s the last news outlet standing in these areas.
Bacon: So I’ve always been worried about public media. Because what you’re getting at—when you say public, you mean government-funded in a certain way, right?
Pickard: Yes. I mean, largely.
Bacon: Yes. Taxpayer-supported public.
Pickard: Yes.
Bacon: I guess I worry a lot about President Ron DeSantis if we rebuild public media. President Ron DeSantis gets to choose which reporters, and so on. How does that work in nations so well? How does that work to be—if you had a well-funded, taxpayer-funded media—how does that not become an organ of the government, in the way that Trump is trying to do with our current media on some level?
Pickard: Yeah, absolutely. That’s always the legitimate concern. But if I’d start out by saying, we can look to many of the strongest democracies around the globe that have figured out exactly how to do this.
In fact, that study that I mentioned earlier shows there’s positive correlation with the health of the democratic society and how well it funds its public media. So those countries aren’t sliding into some sort of totalitarian dystopia, right? But what it requires are these independent structural safeguards between the government and between the public media outlets.
That’s really what the CPB, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, was supposed to do is has now shut its doors, thanks to the defunding, but there are many different ways that we can do it. I’ve written a lot about this. I wanted to note earlier too, Perry, you had an excellent plan that came out a few years ago about how we could support 200 new journalists in every congressional district.
So there are ways that we can fund media, and fund the local media that democratic society requires, without this media becoming a mouthpiece of the state. But it is always the legitimate concern. I want to be very clear about that.
Bacon: So I live in Kentucky. I live in Louisville, so we have more newspapers and more news outlets. But we’re high on the news-deserts list outside of Louisville and outside of Lexington. On some level, I guess the challenge—one thing that was in my mind as you were talking—is that a lot of places that have the biggest local news crisis are also the most Republican, and they’ve voted, they’ve been, they’re the most hostile to media.
They voted for the fake news guy. Do they—I mean, is part of it that they don’t want news, or is that the wrong way to ask it? I would agree they might need news, particularly news about the school board, news about corruption, but are—are—has the—do they believe that media are flaming liberals and therefore kind of resist them for that reason?
Pickard: Yeah, that’s an important question, and there are two quick responses. One is that actually—and this is somewhat counterintuitive—but even the survey data that we have shows that, especially among conservative constituencies, they don’t trust the media.
But if you drill down to that—into that data—a little bit, you see that when you talk about their local media, they actually have warm, fuzzy feelings. And this extends to public media as well. Public media enjoy, like, relatively high levels of trust across the political spectrum, so I think that’s important too.
But the other one is a little more of a wonky economic idea, but that is: Democratic societies have these things that are based on needs, not wants. Sometimes they’re called merit goods. And sometimes that’s our national health care. Sometimes it’s our public education.
But we still know that a healthy democracy needs those kinds of institutions. So we need to find ways to fund them.
Bacon: What was the category three? The third one was, I used the term corporate, but what was the term you actually used? How did you define the third problem?
Runaway media consolidation and conglomeration. Yeah, so this is the hard … this is the Jeff Bezos and this is the Comcast, and I mean, this is the Paramount is merging with Netflix and whatever is the CNN. This is the—Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post. And this is the thing that we sort of see in the news all the time.
Pickard: That’s right. And we know that’s a problem. Again, most democracies refer to this as media pluralism. In the United States, we’ve called it media diversity. This idea that if you have just a few people controlling so much of what we see and hear and read in our media, that’s not good for democracy.
That’s not good for diversity. And so most democracies figure out ways to diversify media ownership, to make sure that you have a wide range of voices and views represented in your media. It’s like democratic theory 101, basically.
Bacon: So CBS, NBC, is it that they’re not diversified, or that they’re all owned by corporations, like The Washington Post, the L.A. Times, the New York Times, CBS, and they’re at this point owned by different corporations and billionaires, is the problem who owns them, or the lack of diversity of ownership? Because I feel like we have—we have a diverse group of corporations and billionaires that own them. So is that the problem, the lack of diversity?
Pickard: Yeah, that’s an excellent question and a very thorny one that we could probably spend a couple hours teasing apart. But I’ll start by saying that I think what you’re putting your finger on here is that we often mistake the problems for being just media monopoly problems, when in fact, some of these problems are actually capitalism problems.
Some of these problems are, in fact, that so much of our media is driven by these commercial values and logics. And so even if we break up a couple corporations into two or three, that’s not going to transform our media landscape. So I think that’s also something we try to bring out in our report, especially as we trace this back historically, and this gets back to the public media question as well.
When the U.S. was creating its broadcast media system, we went down a very different path compared to most democracies on the planet at that time that were building out predominantly public media systems. We instead went down this hypercommercialized trajectory. And I would argue, and indeed much of my work shows this, that that’s why we are where we are today.
So, but the thing that’s most visible to people are these big, bad media monopolists, which a problem. That is something we have to wrestle with. But I don’t think that gets at the core root of the problem.
Bacon: And the core root is that we’ve sort of privatized too much our media.
Pickard: That’s right. Not just privatize it, but we’ve stripped away what few public interest regulations we used to have. So I mean, there are three general ways to design a media system or to prevent concentrated ownership over a media system from harming democratic society.
One is to break up the media monopolies and prevent those monopolies from happening in the first place.
Two is to regulate the media outlets, to apply public interest obligations and protections. We used to have this thing called the fairness doctrine that I’m sure many people in your audience have heard of before.
And the third one is to create a public alternative or public alternatives to these commercial, privately owned media outlets.
And of course we’ve failed in all three of those areas, so we’re really reaping the rewards of having the sort of perfect storm, the worst of all worlds here. And that’s something that we have to fix going forward.
Bacon: So the local media problem, I see very clearly. The national media problem I want to probe you a little bit on.
We’re talking on a Substack Live. Heather Cox Richardson is probably more read than most columnists of any newspaper, even The New York Times, at this point. We have The Bulwark, we have a ton of new center-left, left, center-left, particularly outlets that have sprung up.
If you want to get an honest perspective about Donald Trump, even if you think Bari Weiss has taken over CBS and made it something different, there are plenty of other places to go. How do you evaluate this sort of new media, particularly sort of a more pro-democracy, anti-authoritarian media, to sort of come up?
Is that useful? Is that important? I’m sure you’re not going to say it’s useless, but where do—where do you see it fitting into the story you’re telling?
Pickard: Well, there’s a couple of points here. I mean, much of what you’re describing is also a kind of fragmentation of our media system, right? That’s so we can all find our preferred outlets and our preferred political flavors online or wherever. We have our influencers, we have our podcasts. But are they covering what’s happening at the local school board?
Bacon: Obviously not. I agree with that on the local level, obviously not.
Pickard: And are they also asking the questions that we need to have asked? We’re all being drawn to particular persuasions, and it doesn’t guarantee that we actually have a diverse and reliable news and information infrastructure. And so it’s a golden era for discourse and commentary. But for actual journalism, I’m not so sure.
Bacon: That’s a great way to put it. It’s a golden era for commentary and discourse, and not really—because at the end of the day, The New York Times, CNN, CBS are the places that still cover an earthquake or a fire or, a tornado, or the big stories that still come up. Other places have lots of journalists, and that’s still not Substack people’s—that’s what you’re getting at.
Pickard: That’s right. And what are the audiences actually being exposed to? And of course we know that so much of our media—much of our major media outlets—are becoming captured in various ways by whether it’s authoritarian government or, again, this kind of hypercommercialized like, these imperatives. By any measure, we’re not dealing with a healthy media system for a democratic society right now. And that’s exactly what we need to change.
Bacon: So I’m looking—I’m thinking as you talk, though—so you would say the BBC is an example of publicly funded media.
Pickard: The BBC is an exemplar, although my British friends will tell me about all the problems they have. Although, frankly, I wish we had those problems.
Bacon: And the BBC is different from NPR and PBS. Can you explain the difference for the audience here?
Pickard: I would say, first and foremost, because of the funding level.
Bacon: Okay. How is it much more funded by the government than ours?
Pickard: That’s right. I mean, there, it’s being funded indirectly by the government through individuals for these licensing fees. And so it’s a way to kind of, essentially, socialize broadcast media. But they’re unrivaled in terms of—especially, like, their international media coverage.
And yet they’re not perfect. I mean, one point that sometimes I forget to make really clear is that it’s not just about decommercializing our media and publicly funding it, but it’s also about democratizing our media. And the BBC… I think the legitimate critique there is that it is still very elitist. It’s still too close to government, although it’s often more adversarial than many of our commercial outlets here in the U.S. towards our government.
But there are certainly things that we would want to change if we were to adopt a… I’d like to see a BBC model radically democratized and basically funded much more—BBC on steroids, basically, here.
Bacon: I’ve been following the BBC a little bit, because Trump is a—and it seems like the BBC is very vulnerable to this. You’re too far left, and Trump is attacking you, and you’re getting—there’s sort of a purging. It seems like the BBC, while funded differently, seems to have the same ethos as The New York Times of, we must tell you how neutral we are, which leaves you vulnerable to these Republicans.
When you say democratize it, you don’t mean make it evenly balanced between the two parties according to the parties’ leaders, right? What do you mean when you say that?
Pickard: That’s right. That’s spot on. What I’m really talking about is bringing it down to the local level in many cases. I mean, there are certain media outlets where that won’t make sense.
But I think for many of our media outlets, we should be bringing it down to local levels of accountability and oversight, and that makes sure that we all have a voice. It’s been so naturalized in the United States that how our media is being designed is being figured out behind closed doors in the public’s name, but without our consent—it’s like so many chips being traded back and forth among some oligarchs. And that’s absurd for any democratic society worthy of the name.
Bacon: So as you’re talking, I’m concerned about the sort of—having worked with The Washington Post recently—the sort of billionaire incorporation, ownership of the media seems bad. I don’t see public funding anytime soon.
Your job is to put out ideas. I get that. I agree with that. What do we do? Right now we’re in this middle course. Like, is it useful to try to build up this sort of niche nonprofit, maybe the good billionaires fund some things? Like, what do we do in this period where we’re facing these oligarchs, anti-authoritarian oligarchs, and Trump trying to take over the media?
We just defunded public media. What do we do when we’re running this middle? What should we be trying to support right now if we don’t have the support from the public but the good guys on the corporate side have become bad?
Pickard: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. We have to face immediate threats and do whatever we can. Yes. And that includes funding. Like, all of us as individuals should be donating to our local public broadcasting stations, subscribing to reliable, fact-based news organizations, supporting journalists.
However we can—they are doing God’s work; we must help them. But there are also things that we can do even at the policy level—I’d say at the state and local levels. So for example, here in Pennsylvania, they’ve recently introduced these two bills that would support local journalism.
One is based on a civic information consortium model, which has been operating in New Jersey for a number of years now, where government basically gives public grants to local media institutions. And this is a tried-and-true proof of concept. And it’s something that a number of states are considering right now. So we can do that. We can even do things at the city level, where we have advertising subsidies where city governments have to allocate a certain amount of their funding—advertising—towards community and ethnic newspapers.
That’s what they’ve been doing in New York City for several years now. So there are things that we could be doing, even these kinds of media vouchers that they’ve been discussing in Washington, D.C., and Seattle, Washington, where people are given a certain amount of money that they can allocate towards a local media institution of their choice. That’s another example of something we could be doing at the local level.
Bacon: So if anybody—any politician—says, I’m for democracy—which a lot of politicians, particularly a lot of Democrats, do—we should be asking them, what is your agenda on journalism?
Because that’s—if you want to defend democracy—that’s what you’re kind of—what you’re getting at. Blue states—I’ll use the term blue states. Blue cities should certainly be doing this stuff, because that’s what they claim they’re for: defending democracy, right?
Pickard: A thousand percent. We have to make sure that a media agenda is central to this pro-democracy project. And if there’s any silver lining here, it is that during the Trump years, we’re seeing all these institutions being hollowed out, but it means that we must rebuild.
And we must be thinking about rebuilding now. We have to have our plans and projects in place now so that when the time comes, we’re ready to rebuild these kinds of democratic infrastructures that we need.
Bacon: As you’re talking, I’m thinking that there are some media outlets that are doing well, that are making money right now. That are on the left, that are pro-democracy, let’s say. But I think probably part of your point, though, is that we should not overcelebrate.
A media company that makes profits is good for that company. But we don’t necessarily want to tie the success of media and journalism to profits, and therefore to the sense that, oh, this outlet did not get enough of an audience, they lost money, therefore they should die. We don’t want to apply the principles of sports teams or banks to the media. That’s what you’re getting at as a big point here, right?
Pickard: That’s right. That’s a huge part of the problem—that we think that the market is the best democratic arbiter of, you know, which media institutions should survive or die. And that’s what we’ve been doing for decades now, and we really have to have this kind of paradigm shift where we think of our news media, especially local journalism, the same way that we think of our public education.
We talked about libraries before, public parks—there are these public goods that we would never leave entirely up to the market. And that’s the kind of market fundamentalism that we need to move away from. In fact, I think it has thoroughly discredited itself by this point. So I think we’re ready. We’re in a good position now to reimagine what journalism could and should be.
Bacon: And it’s a great place to end on. Victor, thank you for joining me.
Pickard: Thank you, Perry. Great to see you. Bye-bye.
