The Vital Role of Independent Journalism

When Connecticut Public CEO Mark G. Contreras asked me to join the Board of Directors, I was intrigued. The invitation came at a time when the need to support independent journalism has never been more apparent, or more important. It’s also a time when public broadcasting remains one of the few places that supports independent journalism - and when funding for public broadcasting is shrinking . That’s why it has never been more apparent, or more important, for the public to fund that work.

From an early age, I listened to RTE or the BBC. It instilled in me the purpose and power of independent journalism to shape our understanding of an increasingly connected world. The BBC’s public funding – via a “license fee” attached to each television set – along with a charter requiring it to "act in the public interest" and be "impartial” are what gave journalists the freedom to report and investigate. They were able to ask the tough questions, demand answers and provide information that was as close to the truth as one could expect an independent journalist to find.??

When I moved to the US in the 90s to pursue a career with deep connections to journalism, I was surprised that I had to scramble a bit to find similarly independent news reporting here. Instead, information was coming from every direction and in ever-changing forms. One of my clients at the time described the problem in terms of the “economy of attention,” where our attention is the scarcest resource. News sources proliferated trying to capture some of that resource.?

But with that proliferation came dilution. There was no longer enough revenue available to support the expense involved in practicing independent journalism. Of the nearly 1,750 daily newspapers in America in 1970, fewer than 1,300 exist today, and in most of them newsroom staffs have been slashed to almost nothing. Commercial radio has consolidated, too.

Worse, the competition for attention also meant news often became a “product” that was designed to appeal to a particular “consumer,” to the point where it was difficult to discern who was truly independent. And as more news sources went online, algorithms rather than independent editors began to determine the stories we’d see. That was taken even farther by social media and its nearly opaque selection algorithms.?

Now most people’s “news” comes from an endless number of online sources that produce “content” that lines up with, and reinforces, whatever set of beliefs or prejudices they already have. Add in clever deep fakes and now generative AI, and deciding what information we can trust has become immensely complex. It’s also problematic for society’s future: While people of all ages now rely on social media more than any other source for news, it’s most pronounced with Gen Z. An?AP-NORC poll ?in mid-2022 found that only 39% of Gen Z get news daily from “traditional” media sources, but 74% use social media as a daily news source.?

That’s why the best news source that I found in the US in the 90s is so valuable today: National Public Radio (NPR). My first exposure was to KQED in San Francisco, then when I moved to the east coast, it was WNYC and Connecticut Public Radio.?It has been consistent in its pursuit of independent journalism and, because it is publicly funded, has been able to avoid the hollowed-out newsrooms of many ad-supported news sources.

The NPR model, though, is not quite the same as the BBC. There is no annual license fee to provide an income stream. NPR nationally is funded largely by donors, underwriters and programming fees from individual stations -- and those stations are funded mostly by listener contributions. Probably a far more egalitarian model than the BBC, because it allows those who have more to give more.?

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Joining the Board at Connecticut Public Broadcasting is a privilege for me. It has been eye-opening to see first-hand the inner workings of this organization. It also has made me appreciate, even more than I did from the outside, the vital role public broadcasting plays in a society like ours. In a world that has become even more polarized, where information sources masquerading as news are contributing to that polarization, we can’t sit by. NPR is fighting to protect journalistic integrity and protect an endangered part of our culture – and that is something we all must continue to support.