Taking support for NPR stations across the country would hurt communities most in need of reliable news and information, Katherine Maher says—even in a time when there are already so many sources of “news.”
“There's a very big difference between disseminating the news and gathering the news,” she says.
“And what we do is we do news gathering. It allows for people to then be able to come in and add their spin and their commentary on it.
"So I have no problem with TikTok influencers or other people resharing that news. I think that's actually great. But we want them to have credible sources of news to begin with, to be able to base that work on.”
Maher, speaking on The Daily Show this week about the administration’s plan to defund public broadcasting, said the big misconception is that this money goes to NPR or PBS alone.
“The reality is that the vast majority of funds in public broadcasting go directly to local stations … and that really matters, especially when you get into rural parts of the country. So I was in Asheville, North Carolina, recently, (which suffered) as we all know, devastating damage in Hurricane Helene. They have enormous radio towers that broadcast across that topography, because it's the Appalachian Mountains.”
The same is true in Eastern Kentucky and the Rocky Mountains. NPR stations cover 99.7% of the country, “and that allows for Americans to have access to news, even in places where news deserts are growing, where disasters happen. That's what your federal funds go to. They go to your local station, they go to your local reporters.”
Twenty percent of Americans live in places where they have no local news coverage other than public radio, Maher said.
“What that means is that when we lose public funding, we are no longer going to be able to cover things like what matters in the statehouse. We're not going to be able to cover natural disasters. We're not going to be able to cover issues in local politics, issues of what's happening in your local sports team.”
Local news, and public radio in particular, benefits everyone because the service contributes to lower rates of polarization, higher rates of civic engagement, and higher rates of civic trust, she said.
“This is foundational infrastructure for our country, even when we disagree. This is the sort of thing that can start to peel some of those disagreements and bring us back together.”
NPR and its member stations have some of the best journalists in the business, reporting on topics of immediate concern nationally and in communities across the country.
“I think we need to be able to bring more voices onto our air and have folks in conversation about the policies that are being made in this country today. We need to be able to hear from policymakers from across the spectrum.”
Critics will accuse NPR of liberal bias, though the network makes a point of inviting guests from across the political spectrum.
“What I love about our mission and our mandate is that it's actually our responsibility to try to serve everyone,” Maher said. “No other commercial media organization has that same mandate. They can hyper-serve a particular audience, and that contributes to polarization. It's actually our job to bring folks together…”
“Another criticism that we see is that, you know, we're too ‘woke,’ she said.
“The reality is, this is a very diverse nation, and our
mandate under the Public Broadcasting Act is to serve everyone, including the
unserved and the underserved, and we can't pull away from that either. We have
to be able to represent America in all of its diversity, even when that makes
us sometimes uncomfortable.”
- John Strauss
No comments:
Post a Comment