Knight advisors urge reboot of public broadcasting
Published in Current, Dec. 13, 2010
By Karen Everhart
A year after the Knight Commission published a stinging assessment of public broadcasting’s local newsgathering capacity, the field’s top execs heard a sobering analysis of its incomplete response during a Dec. 9 roundtable forum in Washington, D.C.
Veteran news executive Barbara Cochran — a news chief at NPR in the 1980s — warned that the field must step up its structural reforms and public advocacy if it is to successfully redefine itself as digital public media. Given the difficult political environment for federal aid to the field, the climate for change has worsened during the past year, she said.
Cochran reviewed progress made since October 2009 when the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Citizens in a Democracy called for public broadcasting to “move quickly toward a broader vision of public-service media, one that is more local, more inclusive and more interactive.”
The newsgathering expansion and journalism collaborations initiated since last year are positive steps in the right direction, Cochran wrote in her report, “Rethinking Public Media: More Local, More Inclusive, More Interactive” (PDF), but she said the field needs to scale up these initiatives quickly and undertake the hardest work of all — station consolidations, governance reform and changes in the funding formula that divides federal aid between television and radio.
“Leaders of public media at the national and local level face the most important task: to relinquish the status quo and embrace a new definition of public media that is more local, more inclusive and more interactive,” Cochran wrote. “Only public media leaders can convince government and philanthropic supporters that they have a new vision worthy of their investment.”
Cochran brings impressive credentials and experience in Washington journalism circles to her analysis of public media. She recently stepped down as head of the Radio Television Digital News Association, a post she held for 12 years, to accept a D.C.-based endowed chair with the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism. She was managing editor of the Washington Star before serving as news v.p. at NPR, where she oversaw the startup of Morning Edition. Cochran later became e.p. of NBC’s Meet the Press and Washington bureau chief of CBS News.
During the collegial but often downbeat discussion at the Knight event, top pubcasting execs and their allies in the policy, philanthropic and academic arenas responded by suggesting talking points and strategies for raising the funds needed to expand public-media newsgathering and responding to congressional proposals to cut annual appropriations.
The odds for expanded federal aid are slim, said Washington insiders who predict pubcasters will lose a significant portion of their federal aid in the forthcoming Congress. At best, the federal contribution to public broadcasting will align with across-the-board reductions in federal discretionary spending, according to Democratic strategist and former Capitol Hill aide Bruce Wolpe.
“This is going to be fighting a rear-guard action to keep some significant share of the money that has been there — not to add to it or expand it,” said Norm Ornstein, American Enterprise Institute scholar and former PBS Board member, who urged pubcasters to pursue new funding through spectrum-auction revenues.
Ornstein sketched a pessimistic scenario with the weakest, cash-strapped stations selling their excess spectrum to religious broadcasters, frittering away a valuable asset that the field collectively could leverage more effectively to advance public service media as a whole.
Forum participants critiqued one another’s organizational priorities. American Public Media President Bill Kling defended his proposal to convert more public radio stations from university ownership into independent, community licenses. Without effective governing boards for news-centered public stations, firewalls protecting journalists from interference will be ineffective, he said.
Alluding to NPR’s Impact of Government proposal to expand the corps of journalists reporting from state capitals, Kling said reporters who produce Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of Wyoming state government, for instance, will surely need a heat shield to protect them from political interference. “You’re putting the cart before the horse if you don’t fix governance,” Kling said. “It’s just headed for a train wreck if there isn’t a clear firewall protecting the reporters.”
NPR President Vivian Schiller didn’t respond to Kling’s criticism directly, although she did acknowledge the vexing problems posed by governance issues. She described the Impact of Government initiative as one of several journalism collaborations that move public radio and television toward the local newsgathering role prescribed by the Knight Commission.
Local and regional initiatives that have jump-started collaborations among stations and their instigators at CPB and NPR include the CPB-backed Local Journalism Centers now producing multimedia reporting for public radio and TV stations, and 12 stations’ NPR-assisted Project Argo blogs reporting on specialized topics. The Impact of Government initiative, launched in October with a $1.8 million grant from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, will soon announce a new batch of funders for enterprise journalism in state capitals, Schiller said.
These grant-funded collaborations “are profound and worth noting and celebrating,” she said.
No extra funds for status quo
In her report, Cochran endorsed the newsgathering expansion that public radio jump-started last fall, but called for pubcasters to move more aggressively on several fronts if they are to make an effective case for continuing or expanding public support .
“There is universal agreement that funding sources — whether government, philanthropic or corporate — will not provide more money to support the status quo,” Cochran wrote. “Many recognize that some of the funds now going to public media could be redirected for greater efficiency and less duplication. Some believe public media missed an opportunity to bring new ideas to the table when the FCC’s national broadband plan was under discussion.”
During the roundtable discussion, Cochran said the difficult political environment for pubcasting makes it “more important than ever” for stations to restructure themselves as “public media centers in local communities.”
She advocated that the field move with urgency to:
- create a $100 million fund to to hire 1,000 journalists —more “boots on the ground” in local communities — increasing the field’s present newsroom workforce by 50 percent. The fund would be created at the national level with “reallocated and new government funds and a bold commitment from philanthropic organizations,” Cochran said.
- build out the Public Media Platform on-demand distribution system now being prototyped in an NPR-led project, and expand APM’s Public Insight Network, a systematized crowdsourcing tool for reporters.
- establish a task force of public TV managers and others to devise “a strategy for news content and civic engagement” by local stations. Cochran recommended that CPB back this work “as an effort comparable to the Grow the Audience project for public radio,” the strategic analysis undertaken by the Maryland-based Station Resource Group.
- persuade Congress to reauthorize CPB as the Corporation for Public Media and alter the funding formula of the Public Broadcasting Act to provide more flexibility and embrace “a wider range of technology and broader concept of public service.”
- break down barriers between public radio and TV stations as Cleveland’s ideastream stations did through the merger of WVIZ-TV and WCPN-FM in 2001. Creative personnel should be assigned to work in content areas in which they have expertise, such as the arts, science or public affairs, rather than in silos defined by distribution technology such as radio, TV and the Web.
Cochran proposed an alternative to APM chief Bill Kling’s concept for reforming the governance of under-performing public radio stations, which he floated at the MPR-hosted Future of News Summit last November.
“I don’t recommend taking licenses away from universities and other institutional license-holders,” Cochran said. She recommended that such stations be required to create community boards that would bring expertise in development and community outreach to their leadership, and that stations recruit community leaders with expertise in digital technology to their boards.
It’s up to public broadcasters to work across the barriers that separate them and create a more effective and efficient structure in which they can thrive as public media, Cochran said. “Only public media leaders can convince the government, their philanthropic supporters and, most importantly, their own communities in the need for investment.”
Cochran’s report and last week’s roundtable in the marble halls of Washington’s Cosmos Club mansion on Embassy Row were backed by the Aspen Institute’s Communications and Society Program and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which jointly initiated the Knight Commission’s study.
More localism = more buy-in
Participants largely endorsed Cochran’s analysis of the field’s progress and shortcomings and tried to reach beyond their own organizational priorities for a platform that could make a broad-based and compelling case to bolster them through the political thickets ahead.
“The more you can develop localism, the more buy-in you’ll get from across the political spectrum that can transcend political differences,” said Wolpe, former general counsel to Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.). “On the other hand, there hasn’t been a clear voice from the public broadcasting community itself on where it wants to go.”
Roundtable moderator Charlie Firestone, executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Communications and Society Program, repeatedly challenged participants to address “the elephant in the room” — the perception that public broadcasting’s content is “too liberal.”
“We tend to fight the last battle with the last vocabulary and that clearly is not going to work this time,” said CPB President Patricia Harrison, adding that she couldn’t “wade into the weeds” of political messaging because Congress prohibits advocacy by CPB. But she cautioned against directly responding to criticism of liberal bias. Doing so would be akin to answering the question, “When did you stop beating your wife?” she said. “If we start into that response, we’ve already lost.”
“We need to define the real proposition for public media in United States of America right now,” Harrison said. She said pubcasters should emphasize localism, the mix of public and private funding that gives the field strength, and “American exceptionalism and where we fit into that idea.”
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