Updating the Public Broadcasting Act

Key Points

• The Public Broadcasting Act was last amended more than 30 years ago and must be updated to meet today’s challenges. Congress should emphasize a role for public broadcasters in local news gathering and reporting, which are now hard to find in many parts of the country.
• Instead of being constrained by strict mandates tying public broadcasting funds to radio and television, public broadcasters should have more discretion to spend the funds as they see fit to keep up with changes in media.
• More transparency in how public broadcasting money is disbursed federally would help provide necessary external oversight of this type of spending.

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Introduction

The Public Broadcasting Act, which created the public television and radio systems, was signed by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967. It was last amended in 1990. Since then, the telecommunications world has changed beyond recognition. The idea, as the act puts it, that programming which takes “creative risks”¹ needs government financial support has been overtaken by what many consider a golden age of original content—through streaming services, podcasts, and other technologies that simply did not exist when the original act or its amendments were enacted. The act’s goal of universal, free, over-the-air broadcasting seems far less relevant in an era of broadband and mobile devices, through which Americans can access media of all types directly—without television or radio stations.

The time is right, in other words, to revisit and revise the Public Broadcasting Act. A revised and reauthorized act would identify and direct resources to needs that contemporary telecom content providers are not meeting and adjust the allocation of federal appropriations to reflect the drastically changed environment of what today is referred to as “public media.”

Such changes would include greater support for locally focused content, particularly journalism, produced by public media licensees. This would acknowledge that consumers can now access national programming “over the top”—that is, through a computer or mobile device rather than a terrestrial station. It would reflect that local license holders will need to play a new role in a changed telecom world—and that the US has seen a widespread reduction in the number of local news-gathering operations, such that the term “news desert” has been coined.

This report examines why changes to the Public Broadcasting Act, which I suggest be renamed the Public Media Act, might be appropriate now. It discusses the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the nonprofit entity chartered by Congress to distribute the annual public media appropriation (currently $445 million) and overseen by a board of nine presidentially nominated members.

This report suggests the following non-exhaustive list of possible changes:

1. Roll back the requirement limiting support to television and radio, with the greater share going to television. Instead, allow local public media licensees to use grants at their discretion.
2. Limit the required costs for local license holders to access content provided by national distribution enterprises such as NPR and PBS.
3. Ensure external review of the public media system by relaxing the requirement that the CPB board of directors include public media television and radio license holders.
4. Require CPB to report regularly to Congress the demographics—including socioeconomic status, minority representation, and regional residence—of public media engagement.
5. Ensure transparency through public discussion of line items and majority vote on the annual CPB budget by the board of directors.

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Notes

1. Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, 47 U.S.C. § 396 (1967).