New Report Reveals Corporate Capture in NPR and Local Stations Report Calls for New Approach to Public Media to Ensure Stable Public Funding and Community Representation

WASHINGTON, Sept. 19, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — The Center for Study of Responsive Law (CSRL), the Ralph Nader-founded public interest group, today released a groundbreaking study – The Public’s Media: The Case for a Democratically Funded and Locally Rooted News Media in an Era of Newsroom Closures by Michael Swerdlow. The report offers strong evidence that National Public Radio (NPR), The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), and local public media stations are failing to live up to the mission that The Public Broadcasting Act assigned them: “to encourage the development of programming that involves creative risks and that addresses the needs of unserved and underserved audiences, particularly children and minorities.”

For the full release and report visit: https://csrl.org/2024/09/19/new-report-reveals-corporate-capture-in-npr-and-local-stations/

“NPR has a long way to go upward. This report offers a variety of special, sustainable funding plans for contemplation by the listening audience, the NPR journalists, staff, and governing bodies. The founding laws of public broadcasting and their pragmatic visionaries afford a legacy of enablement for their reporting to adopt without further delay.” – Ralph Nader.

“When we lose reliable local news outlets – as tens of millions of Americans have – we lose our ability to understand our neighborhoods, communities, governments, and even the economy. The Public’s Media makes the choice clear: spend the equivalent of one tenth of one percent (.01%) of the federal budget to maintain a free press and root public media institutions within the communities that they serve or watch as our democracy continues to fade away.” – Michael Swerdlow.

According to the report, NPR and local public media stations receive public funding at roughly 1/20th the rate of peer democracies. Accordingly, most local NPR stations lack the resources to systematically gather and report on local news.
In addition to stable public funding, public news media must also be rooted within the communities that they serve. To achieve this, the report recommends that stations (1) maintain governing boards that are representative of the communities they serve; (2) provide communities with a freedom of information right of access to their news media’s operations; and (3) host and publicize representative deliberations on citizens’ informational needs.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT:
Michael Swerdlow or Ralph Nader, 202-387-8030 or [email protected]

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SOURCE Ralph Nader, Consumer Advocate