America’s Three Media Crises and How to Fix Them

You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following this show on YouTube or Substack. You can read a transcript here.

There are three crises afflicting America’s news media, according to Victor Pickard, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. Local news outlets are disappearing over the country. Funding for public media was already in decline and then drastically cut by congressional Republicans and President Trump. Corporate consolidation means that numerous outlets are controlled by the same person or company, such as Sinclair and a few other corporations dominating local television news. Pickard co-wrote a recent Roosevelt Institute paper explaining all of these challenges. These crises require a fundamental rethinking of American media, he argues. We must consider accurate, rigorous journalism as a public good, like libraries and schools, which are not expected to turn profits. And we should then fund that media through taxes, like other public goods. Pickard cites Britain’s BBC as a model for robust, well-funded public media.