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“Government-funded media is defined as outlets where the government provides some or all of the outlet’s funding and may have varying degrees of government involvement over editorial content. … “
– Twitter Help Center’s definition of PBS
When we publish columns on the Public Broadcasting Service’s Public Editor page, we traditionally follow up with some aggressive hawking of our words via social media like Facebook, our new account on Subtext, and, of course, on Twitter.
But we’re no longer in normal times, so you won’t see this column pushed on Twitter. In fact, you won’t be seeing any tweets from PBS or its related accounts that go out to more than 2 million Twitter followers for the foreseeable future.
PBS stepped away from Twitter on the heels of a similar decision by National Public Radio; after Twitter arbitrarily slapped “state-affiliated” and “government-funded” tags on the home pages of large public media organizations.
Those intentionally misleading labels had gone nuclear.
And since the decision to idle its Twitter feed, PBS’ viewers, in a stream of emails and Subtext notes, have largely supported the move.
“I totally support abandoning Twitter. Elon Musk is a ‘free speech’ fraud. You can reach me via email!”
– Russ Irwin of Healdsburg, California.
Several viewers congratulated PBS for “leaving Twitter” and some suggested alternate platforms.
STATE-RUN MEDIA
Twitter – more specifically, Musk – may believe there’s a point to be made about taxpayer funds and the influence of liberal politicians in what major public media transmits on the airwaves.
I can prove that accusations of a liberal slant are untrue; that those accusations spring from stubborn misrepresentation and misperception. Those, in turn, help ideologues cast shade on PBS, exploiting the idéa concreta that “public” equals “socialistic.” The idealogues conveniently ignore research that shows PBS remains high in the ranks of trustworthy news sources even though overall media trust has been in a long decline.
Sure, public media fumbles the ball sometimes, and sometimes it’s shameful. (I’ll talk about a glaring example of that in a bit.)
But to ignore that the preponderance of PBS funding comes from stations’ own fundraising conflates misplaced suspicions of political bias with the 15% of government funding for PBS. Among major public broadcasters, this notion is inaccurate at best. At worst, it’s a danger to the kind of democracy this country has developed over two-and-a-half centuries.
If you want to see what real state-run or state-affiliated media look like, see Russia’s RT television or the China Global Television Network. Those broadcasters look nothing like PBS, American Public Television, the UK’s British Broadcasting Corporation, or NPR.
TWEETY-BIRD REACTIONARIES
The social media row between Twitter and the major public broadcasters began a few weeks ago when NPR was first hit with the designation “state-affiliated media.” Twitter must have thought NPR took marching orders straight from the White House and Democratic Party leaders. Of course, that’s wrong. Amid a robust public backlash, Twitter backed off, sort of. The forum’s minders instead issued a less offensive but still dangerously inaccurate “government-funded media” tag, and then applied the label to PBS and the BBC.
Interestingly, the tags showed up as I was preparing a column about how PBS guidelines work to protect the editorial independence of member-station newsrooms from politicians and big funders. This was in response to controversies in some U.S. states where legislators and university officials – not viewers and listeners like you – determine local station funding, and thus sometimes believe they can dictate news programming.
Ideological interference is potentially a big problem for public media. So Musk actually reminds us of a valid criticism: There are, in some states, politicians using coercive tactics to lord over news gathering. But Musk is wrong to think that’s standard, or even acceptable, practice for PBS.
Honestly, I’m left wondering how Twitter, the once-benign host of all manner of (usually) civil banter and boasting, will sustain itself as a trusted platform when the company, without warning or permission, jumps onto users’ home pages and unilaterally adds subjective monikers like “state-affiliated.”
Twitter’s action plays to the swath of its users who are driven by fake beliefs about everything from who won the last presidential election, to why the PBS NewsHour doesn’t dedicate hours to exploring the misdeeds of Hunter Biden. (“You are CLEARLY not only state-affiliated but propaganda. But hey, keep on lying,” one former PBS viewer told us in an email.)
What’s unfortunate is that Twitter is now taking a turn at swinging the sledgehammer that’s driving a wider wedge between communities. In this democracy, seemingly everyone boasts of being right while everyone else is wrong, regardless of objective truths and demonstrable facts.
THE FIREWALLS
There is one word in Twitter’s definition of PBS (displayed at the top of this essay) that needs attention: The word “some” that’s used to describe the amount of support the broadcaster gets from the government.
Like NPR, the federal money PBS receives is overseen by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which directs government grants to national broadcasters and regional and local stations.
The CPB, as stated on its own website, “is the steward of the federal government’s investment in public broadcasting” and “does not produce programming and does not own, operate or control any public broadcasting stations.” That’s as politically neutral as you can get. Among the goals of the private, nonprofit CPB, created by Congress in 1967, is ensuring that 99% of Americans have access to public media, including underserved rural areas and underserved audiences, especially “children and minorities,” according to its mission statement. Perhaps it is that last part of the mission that gives the ideologues some ammunition. Programs that serve “minorities” are easy targets for those wanting to play political football.
This leads to the woefully incorrect part of Twitter’s definition of government-supported media, where it insists that there are “ … varying degrees of government involvement over editorial content.”
The operational truth is that legitimate public broadcasters hold to ethical and professional standards that prohibit funders – be they politicians or corporate executives – from acting as though public media means “pay-to-play.” The CPB, NPR, PBS, and the BBC maintain firewalls between editorial staff and major donors. There are Inspectors General and in-house lawyers, standards and practices officers, and public editors (like me.) These firewalls stand up daily to the scrutiny of viewers nationwide who do not hesitate to write, call, or tweet about real and perceived lapses in journalistic integrity. Public broadcasters may not be perfect, but they are accountable to the public. Don’t think the public is not watching them like a hawk.
“Government financing can be part of a larger solution, but it must come with firewalls that guarantee editorial independence,” said Tony Cavin, NPR’s managing editor for standards and practices. “I would add that depending exclusively on any one source of funding is always problematic and the best solutions would no doubt include multiple sources.”
That accurately describes NPR and PBS, where the public money is a molehill next to the mountain of viewer and listener support.
CRACKS IN THE FIREWALLS
Despite my dread of what Twitter relabeling means for the future of civil, general-interest social media, I do see a sliver of a ray of light coming from this episode: Twitter’s ham-handed attempt to smear PBS as a puppet of liberal politicians and bureaucrats is a reminder for public broadcasters of the importance of trust. So, when we stumble in that arena, we must stop and address our behavior.
Today, one way to do that is to recognize that the opposite of ethical public media is what happened recently at West Virginia Public Broadcasting.
Late last year, a radio reporter for WVPB saw her part-time job abruptly disappear, soon after she’d produced investigative stories about alleged abuses at public West Virginia facilities for people with disabilities. The state office that manages those facilities cried foul, demanding retractions because, it said, there were errors in the reporting. And while the stories were not retracted, reporter Amelia Ferrell Knisely’s work contract was not renewed – a decision she says was made by the station’s top manager.
That manager, Chief Executive Officer Carl Antolini, is a former spokesman for West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice.
The station’s official position is that Knisely’s part-time contract expired when WVPB added a full-time reporter to its radio news team. And Antolini has said that reporting on Knisely’s departure has been marred by inaccuracy.
OK, we can give him that. But it’s hard to overlook a number of media reports, notably an investigation by NPR’s David Folkenflik, that feature former WVPB executives and editors, describing, on the record, newsroom interference by station leadership.
The West Virginia state government is WVPB’s licensee and its single largest funding source. WVPB attracts nearly 100,000 radio listeners, anchored by the syndicated Mountain Stage show, and almost 700,000 viewers who enjoy local and PBS programming.
It’s been reported that Justice and his conservative political allies are not fans of the public broadcaster’s news coverage. Justice campaigned on promises to eliminate state funding of public media. But audiences of all political stripes pushed back and Justice was only able to trim 10% of the station’s budget.
What Justice and his allies seem to have overlooked is the station’s printed mission statement, which holds to NPR and PBS standards that promise to shield “the editorial process from the fact and appearance of undue influence.” (WVPB’s radio operation is a member station of NPR while its television side is a PBS member station. As such, they’ve agreed to abide by the standards and practices of each.)
These guidelines should be no surprise to any station manager: They’re emphasized in regular discussions that PBS offers to station executives. Everyone in leadership positions should know that the firewalls are supposed to keep political ideology – liberal, conservative, or in between – well away from newsrooms.
Politicians like Justice have been behind a string of longstanding campaigns against public media funding by taxpayers. What’s happening because of perceived liberal bias in West Virginia mirrors the conservative-led defunding effort a few years ago in Alaska and a campaign now underway in Georgia.
POLITICAL INFLUENCERS
The West Virginia dustup should stand as a lesson to an emerging school of journalism thought leaders now pushing for more direct state and/or federal funding of local news outlets.
Such support is indeed needed as diminished revenue streams shrink regional and local newsrooms toward irrelevance. In California, public funding of reporters who’ll join some community newsrooms already has begun.
But authors of such efforts must beware of unfettered political interests. I know the California effort will hold the line against political shenanigans because it is administered by the University of California, Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and a team of experienced, ethical journalists quite familiar with standards like those employed by PBS.
That most public media leaders know and understand the separation of funder and journalist is why there’s irony in the West Virginia controversy: One billionaire social media company executive with autocratic tendencies complains about leftist political influence over public broadcasting. But in red-state West Virginia, the leading politician – a wealthy conservative – attempts to exert political influence over public broadcasting through allies who run the newsrooms.
There are 19 states and U.S. territories where lawmakers hold operating licenses and budgetary sway over public media budgets. Another 49 universities run public media stations.
It would be interesting to transpose a map of political power onto a map of the U.S. – and the states where there are recent and ongoing legislative efforts to gut public media. I’ll bet Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, and, of course, Vladimir Putin in Russia, would be proud that some of our politicians seek the kind of influence over broadcasting that emulates state-run media in their countries.