The Roles of Public Media and Local News in Building it Back

On a recent trip to San Francisco, I took a few minutes to chat with Lila LaHood, editor of the nonprofit San Francisco Public Press, a 10-year-old influential news outlet dedicated to in-depth and investigative community news.

The Public Press is an online news outlet and operates a community radio station. It also broadcasts a popular local podcast, Civic, which goes deep into resonant issues affecting life in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Full disclosure: I am a member of the Public Press board of directors, so it was an easy “yes” for me when LaHood invited me to talk about media trust, objectivity and the impact of misinformation in today’s democracy. We explored how the PBS public editor’s office deals with audience concerns, complaints and questions about these issues.

 The conversation, embedded in this story, is a good addition to your podcast list this weekend. We dove into the roles of public media and local news outlets facing unprecedented challenges of shrinking resources and increasing assaults by authors of disinformation campaigns. We even talked about how our human responses to information reveal our biases – an issue we touched on in a 2019 column I wrote, about Grover allegedly dropping an F-bomb in an episode of Sesame Street.

The Civic podcast is part of a series of town halls and meetings we’re organizing to directly engage public media audiences around the country.

Anchoring the series is an event we’re hosting at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. on June 30, that we’ll record for broadcast on our website and, in collaboration with the Press Club, on our YouTube channels.

Talks like the Press Club event and the Civic broadcast underscore my concern that our democracy is threatened by misinformation and dwindling trust in the media. This is one way I hope to elicit concerns from our audiences, and explain how PBS is working hard to maintain the robust amount of trust lent to us by viewers like you.