Democracy Needs Public Media with Victor Pickard

Victor Pickard returns to Money on the Left six years after his first appearance on the show to discuss the state of the U.S. media system under Trump 2.0. Pickard is C. Edwin Baker Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication and Co-Director at the Media, Inequality & Change Center. Placing current developments in broad historical context, Pickard situates today’s media crisis within a century-long struggle to establish and maintain genuine public media against the overpowering dominance and relentless pushback of private corporate media.

Drawing on his recent writing and policy interventions, Pickard breaks down three distinct layers of media capture: capitalistic, oligarchic, and authoritarian. Crucially, our conversation stresses how the foundational layer—the capitalistic privatization of news and communication as market commodities rather than vital public goods—directly conditions and enables the other two. As long as media institutions remain captured by capitalist imperatives, treating political information as a vehicle for private control and exploitation, attempts to counter oligarchic consolidation or authoritarian coercion will fail to address the root causes of our institutional breakdown.

During our discussion, we explore the history of the struggle to build public media in the United States, from early twentieth-century regulatory choices that privatized the public airwaves to the gradual weakening of public-interest protections and the chronic underfunding of public broadcasting. Against this hyper-commercialized landscape, we insist upon the necessity of fighting for democratic, diverse, and locally sensitive public media infrastructures. Rather than relying on broken advertising models or corporate philanthropy, we explore what it would mean to construct non-capitalist, community-governed media systems designed from the bottom up to serve local publics.

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Transcript

This transcript has been edited for readability.

Scott Ferguson

Victor Pickard, welcome back to Money on the Left.

Victor Pickard

Thanks so much for having me. It’s good to see you guys again.

Scott Ferguson

It’s great to see you. You are an expert at the political composition and history of the US media system, thinking specifically about the press, but also other aspects of the media system, how it’s developed over time, how it’s been fought over over time, insisting that it’s been constructed and reconstructed, nothing about it is natural. You have plenty of important critiques of the way that our media system has been privatized to the detriment of the public, and we spoke to you, I think, six years ago, back in 2020, checking in with your analysis back then.

And we wanted to invite you back because it seems to us that maybe things have shifted a little bit and not for the better. And we’ve been following your work and finding your updated analyzes very helpful. Another thing that we really find helpful about your work is that you’re not just a critic. You insist on having a kind of capacious, future-oriented imagination that is centering the public, centering the possibilities for public options for public media, public media ownership, different kinds of designs, different kinds of constructs, especially during these dark times.

So we wanted to bring you on and learn more from you about what you’ve been doing recently and helping us to understand what’s going on with the US media system today and how we get here. So that’s a wide open question, but you can start wherever you want.

Victor Pickard

Great. Well, thank you for this invitation and I’m so delighted to have this conversation with you all. I can’t believe it’s been six years. That blows my mind. But of course, a few things have changed or a few things have happened, at least, since then. Much of my analysis, for better or for worse, has not changed as far as what’s wrong with the US media system in particular, and what we need to do to try to fix or at least confront some of these problems.

But in many ways it still has accelerated. It has qualitatively shifted in important ways, and there are a lot of different places where we could kind of dip in and depart from, for example, obviously the journalism crisis, which I’m assuming is something we talked about six years ago, has only gotten worse. Quite predictably, that has gotten much worse.

The latest calculation I saw is that since the early 2000, we’ve lost about 81% of our local journalists in the US, you know, more than 40% of our local newspapers, so that now tens of millions of Americans are living in news deserts, in areas with little or no access to local news media whatsoever. So this is catastrophic for any kind of semblance of democratic society.

And certainly during Trump 2.0, we’ve seen nothing constructive happening on this front whatsoever in terms of trying to address the journalism crisis in any structural, substantive way. That’s not to start out on such a dismal note, but certainly things have gotten much worse. There are many pathologies that we could talk about.

I’ll leave it there for now to see which direction you’d like to go and of course, I’m sure we’re going to talk about the future of public media, whether there is a future for public media. But you tell me where you’d like to go first.

Billy Saas

I’m incredibly excited to talk about the future and to do some vision work with you and chart the path forward out of this mess, but I think it might be a good place for us to start with the the death of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as a kind of case study of where we are, something that had been on the chopping block or in the sights of conservatives in this country for a long time, finally seems to have have suffered, at least at the institutional level, its public support, which was minimal in the first place, but now is zero through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

So if we could talk about that in the state of the Public Broadcasting Act in 2026.

Victor Pickard

Sure. Yeah, that’s not the most cheerful place to start. But of course, we should probably warn our listeners that this is not going to be a cheery conversation. Despite all the doom and gloom, I will try to hit on a few points of at least potential optimism and hopes. But we won’t get there yet. So we’ll start out with the doom and gloom. 

So regarding the CPB, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, as you suggest, Billy, it was never adequately funded. It was established with the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 and just to back up for a moment to talk about the strange history that led to the very belated and suboptimal establishment of public broadcasting in the United States.

Unlike most democratic countries around the world, when we established our broadcast media system in the United States, and of course, we’re speaking specifically about radio in the early 30s, we went down a very different path compared to most other democracies. To be more specific, we created a highly privatized and commercialized broadcast media system, which again, was very different. We were pretty much a global anomaly by not establishing a more public oriented broadcast media system and, of course, a media system that was dependent on the public airwaves.

I mean, it was inherently a public resource that we then essentially handed over primarily to two large corporations in the early 30s, CBS and NBC. And we can get more into the weeds on this history momentarily if we want to geek out on that, but long story short, because we went down this commercial trajectory, there was this ongoing media reform activism that tried to create a different kind of system.

At the same time, there was a growing awareness of all the systemic limitations that a commercial broadcast media system has vis a vis democratic society. In other words, we found out quite glaringly that there were a number of things that a commercial broadcasting system would never do, would never make sure that all communities have access to a baseline level of news and information, and also cultural and educational fare.

So as we went through the 50s and 60s and some of your listeners may have heard about the famous speech by then FCC Chairman Newton N. Minow in 1961, when he referred to, especially television in general, as a vast wasteland, there was this growing awareness that we needed a systemic alternative to deliver on some of our informational and communication needs.

So that is a very long winded wind up to basically set the stage for why we finally established a public broadcasting system in the late 60s in the United States that was always woefully underfunded. It was never insulated sufficiently from economic precarity and from political pressures, because it was being funded on this annual appropriations process and it was being funded or at least mediated through this CPB organization, where the federal government would fund CPB to then allocate a certain amount of money to various stations, television, radio stations around the country.

Just to bring it up to our current or recent moment, so, as I said, it was always chronically underfunded up until last year, when it was finally defunded completely, it was getting a whopping dollar $1.60 per person per year at the federal level. I mean, this was literally off the chart compared to most Democratic countries around the world.

Compared to the Brits, they were spending close to $100 per person per year for the BBC and many other western European, or northern European countries were spending well over $100 per person per year, and it shows in the health of their democratic societies. We were this global outlier for the pittance that we were allocating towards our public broadcasting system and then even that was phased out by congressional Republicans and by the Trump administration, so that now they’re getting zero at the federal level. This has created all kinds of problems, especially for rural stations, that really disproportionately relied on federal funding to stay afloat. Ironically, it is often in Trump voting regions where its public broadcasting stations are suffering the most.

So those are just a few of the highlights of both the history that led us to this moment, and where we are at this very moment with our public broadcasting system.

Scott Ferguson

And you have been developing, recently, a kind of tripartite – and I don’t know how you would characterize it – if it’s a question of stages, if it’s a question of periodization or more a question of impulses that might be interpenetrating in different ways at different moments, I’ll let you answer it.

Victor Pickard

I like that.

Scott Ferguson

Okay. There. Let’s roll with that.

Victor Pickard

I might steal that. 

Scott Ferguson

Okay. Go for it. 

Victor Pickard

Of course, these are all metaphors all the way down, but one of the ways that I was trying to think of this was that, for understandable reasons – and we might get into this as well – in recent years, especially during Trump 2.0, there’s been a growing awareness and sensitivity towards what we might think of them as these media oligarchs; the Elon Musk and Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos and the Ellison’s, the Murdochs. There are these right wing moguls that control so much of our media and so understandably, our attention is being drawn to this glaringly evident problem.

But what I’m trying to show in my work is that the structural conditions that allow for the oligarchs to capture so much of our media really traces back to these capitalistic logics. Before we even start thinking about oligarchic capture of our media, and, of course, another growing concern with the Trump administration is just flat out authoritarian capture of our media, but we also need to understand how there initially was this capitalistic capture. I think the metaphor I use is that they are nested or overlapping, but however we want to phrase it, there are these different stages of capture of our media system and to really try to penetrate to the core root of the structural problem, I do try to bring it back to the capitalist capture. As much as it’s always fun to talk about these cartoon villains like the Musks and the Ellisons who are so easy to hate, but it’s much more than these bad billionaires doing bad things, right. It’s not a bad apples argument. It really is more deeply systemic. 

That’s why throughout my work, I try to really surface these inflection points where our media became captured by these hyper commercial logics. We already touched on one around our broadcast media.

I’d pinpoint 1934 when we passed the Communications Act of 1934, that, again, initially privatized and commercialized our broadcast media. But if we want to trace back to one of these inflection points with our print media, I’d say we’d have to go back to the 80s, the 1880s, when so much of our newspaper industry became so inordinately dependent on advertising revenue.

Up until the 1880s, it was much more of a mixed, or today we might call it a blended revenue model, where newspapers typically were getting support from individual readers. We call them subscribers today, perhaps. They were also getting funding from political parties. They were getting a large amount of funding, especially through coastal subsidies from the government to the tune of what would be the equivalent of tens of billions of dollars in today’s currency. The industry was being subsidized in basically very cheap circulation through the entire postal system throughout the 1800s. Even to this present day, there’s still pretty meager print subsidies still at work. So when we start bringing this into focus, we see that it was only when our core media systems became so hyper commercialized that they became biased against and essentially turned against democracy in many important ways.

And of course, looking at the newspaper industry again, once it became so dependent on advertising revenues, it really changed the relationship between newspaper owners and reading audiences. Instead of seeing their readers as first and foremost engaged citizens of a polity, and of course, we should always be clear that oftentimes publishers weren’t truly trying to reach all members of society, that it was always certain members, especially white propertied men, going back to the earliest days of our newspaper system, but they still saw their readers as citizens instead of consumers.

Once they became so dependent on advertising revenue, where they were trying to capture the attention of their readers and deliver those readers to advertisers, this really changed the core relationships between newspapers and democratic society. So these are just the broad strokes of how there were these structural transformations of our core media when they became captured by these hyper commercial logics, these capitalistic logics.

Of course, once our media became primarily commodities, that really teed it up and made it ready-made assets for oligarchs to just start buying up all these various media properties into massive conglomerates and large monopolistic corporations. That’s pretty much where we are today. But again, I think we need to understand those initial capitalistic logics that took over our media to really understand how we got to this point today.

Scott Ferguson

Something that’s in the news as of this week. This interview won’t come out for a couple of weeks. But in the news this week is that California is leading a lawsuit with several dozen other states or so to block this Paramount deal that seems ill advised and scary for countless reasons. But I think through your analysis and your stressing that at the bottom of this is capitalist capture, it’s privatization of public infrastructures, public possibilities, I think this case brings your analysis out more because, at least as I initially read the terms of the lawsuit, they’re just a kind of anti-monopoly, a kind of antitrust suit where the claim is being made that this is bad because it’s going to reduce competition. Right. And so, great. I mean, I don’t want this deal to go through and I hope they win. But it seems like the terms of the lawsuit, at least from what I’ve read, are all just taking for granted that privatization feature that has become so naturalized.

Victor Pickard

That’s right. I think you’re absolutely right. And I agree with you, Scott. Both things are true once, which is, for this merger to go through, it would be bad. It would make bad things even worse. But at the same time, simply stopping this merger and the rationale that’s being used to stop the merger, at least potentially stopping the merger – it’s an ongoing battle – it’s really indicative of this core misdiagnosis of our media crisis, which is, they aren’t just monopoly problems that we are grappling with. They are capitalism problems at root. And so to stop this merger and even to try to break up some of these conglomerates, which to be clear, I think we should do, I think that would be a step in the right direction to really try to break them down  to paraphrase a terrible thing that Grover Norquist once said, break it down to the size of being able to drown it in a bathtub.

He, of course, is talking about government. You might think that way about these media monopolies, right? At least cut down on their political and economic power, which is a threat to democratic society. Make no mistake about it. However, having smaller capitalist media organizations won’t solve many of our problems, won’t solve the news deserts problem, won’t solve what Zuboff has talked about in terms of surveillance capitalism.

It’s still going to be capitalism that we’re dealing with. So we really do need to try to create a non capitalistic media system. Stopping a merger or two or even trust busting some of these big combines will not bring us to that solution. So I think we need to be clear about that.

Scott Ferguson

I want to compliment you and suggest to one of the points of convergence between our project in your project, which is, yes, we have a critique of the privatization of public goods, and for us, that includes all kinds of forms of mediation and for us in particular, money as a form of mediation, which is a public good that has been, arguably even more so than journalism and broadcast media and print media, has been privatized in our country.

But what I love hearing from you, and whenever I talk to you, whenever I engage with your work, is that you don’t use your critique of these capitalist structures as the opportunity to just kind of shrug and say, “well, we live in a capitalist society, and unless there’s a revolution tomorrow, it’s just going to be capitalism and those are the laws of capitalism.” I think we share this commitment that, no, it’s being constructed and reconstructed every day, and we always have to be making choices about how the public is empowering people and empowering the private sector, let’s say, over the public sector. So I think we really share that commitment that it is always up for grabs. There are no laws of capitalism that tell us that this is just going to go on for infinity.

Victor Pickard

Yeah, I, of course, couldn’t agree more with what you’re saying. I guess, at heart, I’m a Gramscian when it comes to thinking through these things and hegemonic power relationships always need to be recreated day in and day out. There is an inherent kind of open-endedness to all this.

As long as we say there is no alternative, the so-called “TINA” [“there is no alternative”] premise, then we won’t even be able to imagine alternatives. It’s always going to be a challenge to be realistic about what we can do in the immediate future. A great example would be trying to stop these mergers and trying to hopefully even break down some of these media conglomerates, but we must have a bolder, more systemic vision for what needs to happen on our political horizons that we’re working towards for the long term.

But we have to do our best to try to articulate what this different kind of system could and should look like. There’s different ways of phrasing this. A wonky phrase is “non-reformist reforms” could be one approach, one framework that we’re using where we’re doing what we can given the immediate terrain of struggle, but always with an eye towards the long term to trying to create greater possibilities for transformation down the road, and we have to try to keep these things in mind all at once.

It’s never easy, but we must try.

Scott Ferguson

Maybe before we get into some of your constructive ideas, I’d like us, in part for analysis and catching everybody up to speed, but also kind of for the archive, we think of our show as not just being topical, we’re building an archive. So I wonder if we could just spend a few minutes talking about what this Trump 2.0 is doing to the media system and perhaps with some focus on Brendan Carr and what he’s been up to.

I mean, I think a lot of people are aware of the harassment of late night and daytime TV.The takeover of CBS, the installing of Bari Weiss. There’s so many different aspects of this, but what’s your analysis of how this is playing out?

Victor Pickard

That’s a great question. A big chunk of the current book project that I’m working on right now is trying to make sense of all this. I constantly have to go into these chapters and update the latest thing that the Trump administration is doing.

Essentially they’re trying to weaponize every instrument at their disposal. So that includes everything from frivolous lawsuits to relying on an apparatchik like Brendan Car at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to carry out Trump’s agenda and serve as his attack dog, and basically do everything they can in their power to ensure that our entire media system looks and sounds like Fox News and brooks no dissent.

They’re trying to undercut any capacity for dissenting views for independent journalism. This takes the form in so many different ways. In addition to the things that I just mentioned, it takes a form of trying to facilitate these media mergers that we’ve been talking about with the Ellison’s, these friendly oligarchs that the Trump administration can lean on.

Really, they’ve taken a page out of the Viktor Orbán  playbook for controlling the media, which, again, goes back to some of the things we were just talking about about oligarchic media capture. An authoritarian regime like Viktor Orbán and like Trump can quickly realize that they don’t have to take over newsrooms by gunpoint. Instead, they can rely on friendly, aligned oligarchs.

They can change media policy to, again, undercut any kind of potential for independent journalism. They defund public media in various ways. They capture public media. We’re just seeing all these things happening at once. It’s quite overwhelming to try to even make sense of all of it, and also just constantly verbally attacking journalists, which has an indirect effect of really chilling news media discourse.

Journalists quickly internalize what they’re allowed to cover or what’s going to cause problems, what’s going to be inherently controversial. So take all these pieces together, and we are basically left with a very compliant media system, much worse than Trump 1.0. We’re seeing the media falling in line underneath these official Trump narratives and talking points being amplified.

Of course, during all this, a very strong right wing media sphere is gaining more and more traction all the time with the Ellisons taking over CBS News, for example, and now potentially CNN as well, even owning a chunk of TikTok. I mean, you have Musk taking over what used to be known as Twitter. So we’re seeing so much of our infrastructure become captured in this way so it’s constantly amplifying and just flooding the zone with Trump approved narratives. It has an effect on our politics and on any hope for any semblance of democratic society.

Billy Saas

So to find our way to some hope, where do we look? You mentioned that the United States started off on the wrong foot or on the capitalistic foot, and we stayed on that path and that has shaped everything that we are seeing and experiencing today.

We can’t go back in time, but can we look at present at those other countries and societies that did things differently as models today? Is that enough? Is there sort of fallacy of composition as the US becomes so hegemonic that there’s no model that we could look to that would scale? Where do we start looking and where have you found some promise when it comes to working our way out of this?

I mean, of course, you’ve got, “stopping the mergers.” You’ve mentioned a couple of options, but what else can we be looking toward?

Victor Pickard

Sure. It’s always an important question to ask. I think it kind of presupposes what we’ve been discussing all along, which is that there’s nothing inevitable or natural about our current media system. It was socially constructed, was based on political decisions and policy decisions that can be unmade or made differently. That always needs to be our analytical starting point.

Beyond that we need to also look internationally, not just historically, but internationally, to look at historical contingency, but then look at these other practices, perhaps best practices, how things could be done differently. Another important starting point is to look at public media systems around the world. I don’t think there’s an ideal model out there that I would say, “we must do that,” but I think at the very least, we begin by looking at how the strongest democratic societies – I mentioned this in passing earlier – empirically, we can show the strongest democratic countries on the planet also have the most robust public broadcasting systems. Now, I don’t think that we should take from that the assumption that we need to simply throw more money at NPR or PBS. But I do think a starting point would be to try to bring the funding of our public media up in line with global norms. If we were each spending $100 per capita per year towards our public broadcasting system, we would have an amazing public media system.

But beyond that, any kind of romanticism I may have harbored towards the BBC has been beaten out of me by my British friends. So I don’t want to make that mistake of saying that that’s some kind of ideal model. When I hear about their problems, I kind of wish we had those problems here in the US.

But nonetheless, I think, at the very least, if we were to begin with the kind of funding level that the BBC has and then radically democratize to make sure that the public media system that we have to rebuild here. This really is another key point too – there is a silver lining. This starts getting more into the kind of hopefulness. The silver lining to the destruction that Trump has brought upon so many of our core systems and infrastructures really gives us this rare historical opportunity to rebuild things from the ground up and to remind ourselves that what we had before was not necessarily awesome. It was always already, inherently, structurally flawed, especially our media system. To be able to reset and rebuild, reconstruct, reimagine is really an incredible opportunity. It’s something that we’ll be able to start working on hopefully in just a couple of years. 

Scott Ferguson

That’s a word I keep seeing more and more and it’s very exciting. The word is reconstruction. It’s got the resonance with post-Civil War with what the Radical Republicans were up to and that feels very exciting. That’s across the board. That’s not just about the media in a narrow sense, that’s about all of our institutions. There’s a sense that so many of our institutions were inadequate and that’s in part what got us into this mess in the first place.

Victor Pickard

That’s absolutely right. We can imagine something better, you know, building back better, as it were. Something that, of course, I think we could do much better than the Biden administration was able to do. But I do think that begins with imagining a public alternative to our failing commercial media system. It really should be based on these principles of not just deprivatization, decommodification, but really radical democratization.

Why I think of it as radical is that I think it has to be based on radical participatory democracy that really begins at the local level and that, of course, is where our media crisis is most acute: around the utter collapse of local journalism and by extension also the collapse of emergency communications, to give one example. We can unfortunately assume that that’s only going to become more of a problem in the years ahead with the growing, ever worsening climate crisis. So we really need to have this infrastructure in place and it can’t be a commercial infrastructure. These are not things that a commercial media system can do or will ever do.

To begin on that basis, if we’re really going to confront the news deserts problem, if we’re really going to maintain this normative benchmark that all members of society should have access to a baseline level of news and information, then that really has to be a public media system. I think it’s something that we’ll have to really work on and hash out at the local level.

I think it should be federally guaranteed, but locally owned and controlled, locally governed. There are ways we can do this. We can devolve control down from the federal to state and local levels or other models we can look to. On one level, some of this seems utopian by necessity and I think in a practical sense, we need to be utopian right now, but at the same time, I think there are concrete examples of this happening internationally and in our own history and so I really think we can broaden our political imaginary about what’s possible.

Scott Ferguson

Some of the concrete ideas that you’ve discussed is using and amplifying and transforming extant public infrastructures, like local libraries, for example. I remember from your 2020 book, talking about the ways that actually this public media movement uses university radio stations as a kind of testing ground. 

So public universities and public libraries being extant, public infrastructures that we could be building out in new ways.

Victor Pickard

Absolutely. I think we have these already existing public infrastructures that we can leverage. I would also include post offices. There are tens of thousands of post offices across the country in far flung locations, and that is critical public infrastructure. It also would be poetic if we were to deploy our postal system towards disseminating news and information, which really was its original purpose in this country. It was primarily a newspaper delivery infrastructure, where up to 95% of the weight of the postal system into the 1800s was made up of newspapers.

So I think just using those spaces as a place where we can house local, community journalists. In fact, speaking of real world examples, in the middle of the cornfields in Urbana, Illinois, media activists more than 20 years ago raised funds and bought the downtown post office. To this day, it serves as this multimedia hub for community news media production.

I think that’s a great proof of concept of something that we could replicate across the country. Also, Public Access Media Centers like the PEG (Public, Educational, and Governmental) stations). There’s a fantastic one in Philadelphia here called Philly Cam that’s also multimedia. It does video, audio, and various kinds of media production and it involves members of the community.

These are things that we can point out and say this isn’t just pie in the sky dreaming. These kinds of models already exist. We need to find ways to replicate them and to scale them and I think that’s possible.

Scott Ferguson

What do you think about the scale of politics and advocacy now? I think for us, in our experience, in our theoretical framework, there’s no proper scale. All scales matter and you take up whatever scale of politicizing that seems to be open that you’re aware of. If that means doing something locally and then trying to scale it up, fine.

If that means you’ve got a mass movement that’s pressuring Congress members, then you do that. I mean, ideally, you do all of it at the same time and you probably share this approach. But I’m curious if you have a sense when it comes to the politics of media broadcast print journalism, and what’s worked, what hasn’t worked. Are there any lessons here in terms of just the scale of politicizing this?

Victor Pickard

Right now, just out of sheer necessity, we have to focus on the state and local levels. In fact, and again, this is keeping with our theme of trying to be a little more hopeful as we’re looking across this blasted landscape, we’re seeing so many things here. I’m thinking of like Mamdani’s  New York, it’s sort of like a return to the sewer socialists of old.

But I do think at the municipal level, there’s some real opportunity at the state level. We’re already seeing a number of blue or purplish states, because I’m thinking of including Pennsylvania in this category, but at the state level, we’re seeing a number of public investment schemes towards subsidizing local journalism. So the exemplar has always been sort of the gold standard has been the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, where they’ve been allocating millions of dollars towards local journalistic initiatives and have been quite successful.

California just passed a recent civic media bill that’s going to put at least potentially tens of millions of dollars towards the local journalism we’re seeing here in Pennsylvania. Chris Rabb, who recently won a primary, is most likely going to the US Congress – he was my state representative at the state legislature – has been pushing a bill modeled after the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium. So there are all these signs of hope at the state level where we’re moving in this direction, where we recognize that there is no commercial future for the local journalism that we need. We’re going to need public investments. We’re going to need to shift towards this predominantly public media model, especially at the local level.

When I’m thinking of scale, I don’t necessarily mean scaling it up to the federal level, although I do think at a certain point we are going to have to have these policy interventions at the federal level, but it’s also just about replication and just learning what is something that could work in communities across the country.

I’ve been talking more and more, probably six years ago with you guys about this idea of a public media center based in every community across the country that, again, is federally guaranteed but locally owned and controlled. So I think we need to have those dreams on our horizon and just work towards it however we can.

Billy Saas

Talking about federal guarantees and evolving control over these local, state and municipal media systems, you can imagine, and we frequently do, that people are going to ask, “how are you going to pay for that?” in this context. That’s where we come in and with respect to the current media landscape and the death of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, you noted that a pretty fatal flaw of the Public Banking Act was to bring the issue up for a vote every year or two in terms of the funding.

That’s exactly what happened this time. They voted for zero funding and that was it. That makes it contentious and up for grabs more often than we would like it to be. That’s certainly not a guarantee, right? If you look at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as maybe a model today, they received their funding directly from the Federal Reserve on a guaranteed basis and the near death of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is much easier avoided because it was that guaranteed direct payment from the Federal Reserve rather than routing through Congress. I don’t imagine, as we’re thinking in utopian terms, and we’re thinking small and local, that we have much faith or belief that the Fed can be operationalized in that way soon. But there are maybe other ways that we could fund these local initiatives.

I wonder if that has come up in your recent thinking at all, like, okay, so we get these motivated local journalists together with the spirit of revivifying local public institutions, how do we pay for their lunches, right? Or how do we keep the lights on?

Victor Pickard

Yeah. Always such a wickedly daunting question, “How do you pay for it?” But I really try to make sure that’s a conversation starter, not a conversation stopper. I think we have to begin with the core assumption that we need insulated, permanent and adequate funding for the media that we need, that democracy requires. There are at least a couple of different models. I mean, ideally, yes, that could come directly out of the Treasury.

There could instead be an autonomous endowed fund to support the media that we need. The original blueprint for our public broadcasting system in the United States was modeled a little bit like the BBC. The BBC has historically had a license. Everyone pays this license fee so it has this guaranteed revenue stream. The initial blueprint for our public broadcasting system was that there would be an excise tax of up to 5% on television sets, and this was in the original Carnegie plan, which almost verbatim became the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, except that key detail didn’t make it into the final cut.

So we always left it in this very precarious situation. I’ve very loosely calculated that we need a budget of about $30 billion a year to support a national public media system. That’s really not, if you look at what we’re spending now on our war on Iran or like whatever tax cuts that were in Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill.

This is pocket change, right? This is not that much. As much as I do think we need to talk about that, I also try not to get too caught up in the weeds about it, because that too often derails the conversation. I think what’s as important, if not more important, is to also talk about how the money is allocated and how those decisions are made.

I’ve looked at things like community action programs during the LBJ administration’s anti-poverty initiatives. It was based on this assumption that the communities themselves who were purportedly being helped with these funds, had to have a say, had to have representation in deciding how that money is going to be spent. I think that also needs to be a core feature of how this new kind of public media system should be designed, that local communities really help determine how this money is being allocated.

Scott Ferguson

This is maybe just a different way of getting at the reconstruction question, but I think that at least in certain social circles. I think of Cory Doctorow’s now often-used term enshittification. I think the fact that that term circulates so widely is an index of its usefulness in calling out the reality of what’s going on.

I think that there is a strong sense, at least in parts of public discourse, that our media system sucks. One question would be, what’s the difference between this vast wasteland and the vast wasteland of 1950s commercial television? A part of me wants to go back to that vast wasteland. It seemed less of a vast wasteland by comparison.

Victor Pickard

Less enshittified.

Scott Ferguson

Although, you know, plenty racist and patriarchal and sexist. I guess I wonder, it seems like there’s an opportunity just in terms of public opinion about our media. It just seems like such a shit show, right? The way that television has exploded into all these streaming services that you have to buy à la carte that nobody can afford. You’re constantly buying one and then subscribing and then stopping. The whole thing seems like such a big mess. Let me put it another way. Even if we’re going to accept the capitalist logic by capitalist logic standards, I don’t think that you can put out a bunch of surveys today and have the so-called customers, instead of citizens, say that they are happy, or say that they’re enjoying themselves.

Maybe there are swaths of the public that really like what’s going on. But it seems to me that there’s a lot of unhappiness.

Victor Pickard

I couldn’t agree more. I agree also that this is an opportunity, or at least it should give us some leverage over steering what’s already low opinion towards our media, towards something more constructive. But that is where it often gets lost. Even this notion of enshittification, although Doctorow is clear, though I don’t think clear enough, but he does say in his writings that this is stemming from these hyper capitalistic logics. Enshittification is what you get, this is what capitalism does to our media.

Scott Ferguson

Right, this is not a natural evolutionary tendency of technology or something like that.

Victor Pickard

Exactly, but too often the critique sort of stops with, “oh, it just sucks,” and not why does it suck? That’s where we all have work to do, to try to connect these dots to show people,” oh, it sucks because they don’t care whether you enjoy it or not. They’re just trying to extract as much value in and generate as much profit from this as possible.”

So once you start understanding that that is where this hyper capitalistic logic takes us, then we begin to realize, “oh, we have to build something new that’s not so dependent, that’s not so pegged so closely to these capitalistic market relationships.” It’s this very inchoate sense of, our media system sucks, we want something better, but to understand how we get there, to create something better, we really have to understand the structural roots of these problems, right? This is what capitalism does to our media. That’s what I’m trying to walk through in my own work. But going back to the original idea, though, I do think it’s another silver lining with Trump 2.0 that people are carrying and thinking and talking more about media ownership, for example, than they normally ever would.

And so that, again, is a fleeting window of opportunity that we really should try to exploit.

Scott Ferguson

This is part of the mystery of how we got Trump. How did the latter day Trump come to be? How did he become president? There’s all kinds of explanations for this, like these ridiculous claims coming out of the last election, not the left, but the Democrats need their own Joe Rogan.

A bunch of big donor Democrats are going to do the great search for our own Joe Rogan, as if Joe Rogan is single handedly responsible for putting Trump back in into the White House. I guess I tend to think more in terms of the long game. I guess it seems to me that the neoliberal legislation that was ushered in under the Clinton administration, not that it single handedly did anything because nothing is single handed, everything is always up for grabs. But it seems to me that in privatizing the internet, in its commercial construction in the way that they did, they essentially took what was mostly on AM radio and Fox News and just opened the door for that sensibility to take over. I think about the way that the centrist, neoliberal Democrats who helped engineer that system just screwed themselves, and screwed their party.

I don’t know if that makes any sense. I don’t know if this is even worth keeping in, but I’m just curious if you have any thoughts about that.

Victor Pickard

Yeah, I do. I have a lot of thoughts on all that and I agree with the thrust of that line of reasoning, which is certainly under what we’ve come to refer to as this kind of neoliberal paradigm. We basically privatize public goods and we undercut capacity for healthy public discourse about anything by ensuring that there’s little journalism, because journalism typically costs money to produce. Good journalism costs money to produce and it also is often bad for business because it often would take an adversarial position, even by simply reporting on things factually, often does not redound to the business interests. For these reasons and more, we have created such a public sphere, but really we’ve ensured that there is very little public sphere beyond just like shouting and commentary and shouting heads on ubiquitous screens, but not really creating the capacity to develop political consciousness and a healthy political consciousness outside of kind of proto fascistic formations.

I’m also being very vague here, but basically, I’m agreeing with the premise that systemically, at a structural level, we basically undercut the preconditions, the necessary preconditions for a healthy democratic society. We’ve undercut any kind of viable communication infrastructure and the internet is another one of these examples of privatizing what inherently began as a public resource.

The internet was a testament to socialistic fostering of a media system. It was born out of pub massive public subsidies and then was essentially handed over to a handful of corporations and continued to develop along those trajectories so that when social media firms took root, it was assumed that they were beyond reach of public policy, they could not be subjected to democratic decision making.

This has all helped. I would always be careful in the kind of causal relationships that I draw. But at the very least, they are contributing factors to the rise of Trump and where we are today.

Scott Ferguson

Sure. And then, of course, there’s Section 230 and the fact that these social media companies are not liable for what is said on their websites. Yeah.

Victor Pickard

Yeah. I mean, there are so many of these kinds of policy decisions or indecisions. Sometimes the shorthand is this kind of Silicon Valley, techno libertarian ethos, but it was just always assumed from the get-go that we couldn’t regulate them, that they were just beyond reach, that somehow these new technologies were magical in a particular way, that we just could not try to wield any sort of public policy over them.

Now we’re reaping the rewards of those earlier mistakes.

Scott Ferguson

Right. And that’s what’s happening with the generative AI push now. 

Victor Pickard

We’ve seen this movie before. The same discourses are being deployed. It’s treated as something like fait accompli. It’s already beyond our control. This is where things are headed and we need to just adapt to these new technologies instead of trying to steer them in democratic ways and making sure that they’re serving our social needs, and not simply the profit imperatives of a handful of tech oligarchs.

Scott Ferguson

Is there anything in your tracking of the contemporary situation beyond the basic point that all of this oligarchic and authoritarian capture is predicated on a deep privatization that is unjust and ill conceived? Is there anything else that’s going on in the contemporary media scape that you wish people were attending to more? Because I think in a sense, these are front page headlines, like California going after the Ellison’s for the Paramount deal.

Is there anything else that you can attune us to that maybe the public isn’t thinking about or that isn’t being framed for everybody in a flashing headline.

Victor Pickard

I would keep coming back to the same drum I’ve been beating on forever, which is the collapse of local journalism and how that is treated as something that’s utterly beyond our control. It’s like a natural disaster. It might be unfortunate, in fact, many people think it’s unfortunate to the extent that they even know about it even now.

I mean, in our little circles, it probably seems like such old news and it’s so banal to even bring it up again, but the fact is, survey data show consistently that the vast majority of Americans have no idea that there’s any kind of journalism crisis. They think they have access to more news and information than they’ve ever had before.

That is such a problem. The fact that people don’t even know that the crisis is happening and then the extent that they are aware of it, again, it’s thought of as just something completely beyond the reach of public policy, it’s beyond our control, it’s an act of God and we really need to start seeing this as a political decision if we’re allowing 81% of our local journalists to lose their jobs. It’s just mind blowing. There was that weekly newspaper in Kansas a couple of years ago where local authorities marched in and shut it down because it had ran some article that offended some local elite and that was treated as a national scandal that people would come in and shut down a local newsroom.

But when the market is doing that day in and day out, there’s this kind of sociology of resignation where it’s like, “that’s unfortunate, but, you know, the market has spoken and there’s just nothing we can do about it.” That’s a very long winded answer to your excellent question, which is, that’s an example of something that should be headlines every day about what’s happening to our local journalism.

In so many ways that’s much more fundamental than what the media oligarchs are doing right now  and if a couple corporations merge, these are bad things, but this is nothing compared to the utter collapse of our local journalism.

Billy Saas

Well, thank you so much for that reminder and for joining us again on Money on the Left six years later, let’s not let another six years pass without another conversation. This has been lovely. Victor Pickard, thank you so much for joining us again.

Victor Pickard

Thank you both for having me. It’s always great to talk to you. Let’s definitely make sure we don’t wait another six years. Hopefully the next time we talk, we’ll have even more hopeful things. Lots of things will have changed by then. We will have solved all these problems and we can just talk about how great it is.

* Thank you to Zachary Nosbisch for the episode graphic, Nahneen Kula for the theme tune, and Thomas Chaplin for the transcript.