Public Funding Is The Solution To Media Bias, Not The Driver

Scoop

24-07-2025

If ever there was a sign that democracy in the United States is in dire straits, it was Congress's rescission of $9 billion in funding for public media, achieved via a party-line vote of 216 to 213 on July 18, 2025. The vote took place despite the fact that millions of people wrote to their elected representatives urging them not to cut funds and that a majority of Americans, including Republicans, support federal funding of public media.
Public funding of media is not the problem that President Donald Trump and his puppet masters at the Heritage Foundation claim it is. Not enough public funding for it is the real problem. According to public media experts Victor Pickard and Timothy Neff, 'the U.S. government is notable among democratic nations for how little it funds its public media.'
Compare the public media funding cuts to the $28 billion in tax dollars that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency will receive thanks to Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill—a subsidy that goes against public opinion.
A well-resourced media ecosphere is essential to democracy—an informed electorate is far more capable of keeping its representatives accountable than an ignorant one. Fascism thrives on ignorance, and that is precisely what the defunding of public media symbolizes within the context of excessive funding of armed enforcement agents.
Since 1967, congressionally appropriated funds have been distributed to thousands of small broadcast media outlets via the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), a private nonprofit organization. But CPB funding represents only about 0.01 percentof the federal budget. American media were never very well-resourced—and that was always the problem. For a nation of nearly 350 million people, a few billion dollars of taxpayer funding for public media is akin to crumbs from a heavily laden table.
And still, using those crumbs, small radio stations managed to operate in all corners of the nation, never fully thriving, and constantly relying on pledge drives and corporate sponsorship to fill budgetary gaps.
That sliver of the federal budget just barely enabled the maintenance of an essential public service. 'Although mainstream news media face historically low levels of trust, public broadcasting enjoys relatively high levels, even among Trump supporters,' wrotePickard and Neff in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2021.
CPB President and CEO Patricia Harrison concurred, saying that'public media has served families in every corner of America, especially rural and tribal communities, providing extraordinary vital content and services free of charge.'
Moreover, according to Harrison, 'Cutting federal funding could also put Americans at risk of losing national and local emergency alerts that serve as a lifeline to many Americans in times of severe need.' Given the unprecedented flooding that states like Texas and North Carolina faced in July 2025 due to unchecked global warming, local emergency alerts are more necessary than ever.
For nearly two decades, I worked at KPFK, Pacifica Radio in Los Angeles, a station that once relied on CPB funding. At regular intervals, KPFK would test—as required by virtue of being a public radio station—its emergency alert system over the airwaves. The loss of public funding is likely to lead to the closure of many such public radio stations, and therefore emergency alerts, across the nation.
We knew this was coming, and indeed, Americans voted for it. The Heritage Foundation's Mandate for Leadership, also known as Project 2025, made defunding public media a major goal, claiming that 'To stop public funding [of media] is good policy and good politics.' Advising a future Republican president, the document's authors quoted the late conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia as saying, 'conservatives were being 'confronted with a long-range problem of significant social consequences—that is, the development of a government-funded broadcast system similar to the BBC.''
Project 2025 specifically named those media outlets deemed the greatest threats to conservative ideology, saying, 'Stripping public funding would, of course, mean that NPR, PBS, Pacifica Radio, and the other leftist broadcasters would be shorn of the presumption that they act in the public interest and receive the privileges that often accompany so acting.' And yet, NPR and PBS in particular have often appeased the right, as per years of analysis by the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR).
Interestingly, Project 2025's authors understood that stripping public funds for media would not impact big media outlets such as NPR and PBS, saying, 'Defunding CPB would by no means cause NPR or PBS… to file for bankruptcy,' and that 'NPR and PBS stations are in reality no longer noncommercial, as they run ads in everything but name for their sponsors.'
Indeed, one can argue there is a correlation between private funding and bias, and not public funding and bias. The more a news outlet relies on private sources of funding, the more likely it is to play it safe to avoid upsetting its sponsors.
U.S. media has been so tilted toward the right that we have a culture that is now dominated by conservatism. If media outlets operated according to the highest standards of journalism, they would indeed be biased against the doctrine favored by billionaires and bigots—injustice, greed, domination, and authoritarianism—values that thrive in a web of lies and wither when exposed by facts. Not being tough enough on right-wing ideas and policies has, in part, paved the path to defunding the media.
To summarize, conservative forces have claimed (wrongly) that NPR and PBS are biased against them, admitted that those outlets aren't as reliant on public funding as smaller media outlets, and voted to defund public media anyway; they are hurting the constellation of small media outlets relying on taxpayer funds. The long-term conservative goal is to fuel public ignorance and the subsequent embrace of the morally bankrupt ideology of the right.
The coming mass shuttering of small publicly funded media outlets will happen within the context of already expanding news deserts. The U.S. has, for generations, suffered from unsustainable models of media funding. Without public funding, news outlets have few options: they can rely on corporate advertisements and sponsorships, appeal to foundations for private support, or cultivate subscriptions and donations from individuals.
Corporate advertising and private philanthropic support are most problematic and can result in subtle pressures on editorial coverage to appease funders. Meanwhile, subscriptions and donations are extremely challenging, especially for smaller media outlets, and rely on a populace weary of rising costs and stagnant wages.
Public funding of the media is an antidote to bias, not the driver of it. Just as public funding offers solutions to the crises of health care, child care, banking, and education, it is an obvious solution to the crisis of unsustainable journalism.
Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of 'Rising Up With Sonali,' a weekly subscriber-funded television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her books include Talking About Abolition: A Police-Free World Is Possible (Seven Stories Press, 2025) and Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and was a senior editor at Yes! Magazine covering race and economy. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women's Missionand is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.