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Last week’s decision by Republicans in Congress to eliminate government funding for public media blows a billion-dollar hole in the budgets of local news stations across America. While NPR and PBS will survive, the existence of small broadcasters in rural, red-state news deserts is now endangered. In at least one sense, however, this attack on the public’s right to news will have a unifying function. Journalists, citizens, and civil society as a whole—red, blue, or striped—can be assured that we are all riding a pendulum swinging at terrifying speed in the wrong direction. 

If we want to see a robust level of news reporting exist in this nation—comparable to what we had in the twentieth century—we will need public funding for journalism. Not the paltry $1.1 billion that Congress just yanked from public broadcasting, but tens of billions of dollars, enough to prop up the ubiquitous local and regional reporting that is vital to a functioning democracy. You can arrive at this conclusion not by ideology, but by a straightforward process of elimination. Advertising revenue funded the journalism industry of past generations. Tech platforms like Google and Facebook figured out how to extract most of that revenue, leaving media companies in need of other funding streams. Nonprofit news outlets? There are great ones, but there is not enough donor money to go around. Subscriptions? Ditto. My Substack is earning me a living, but not the hundred other reporters I worked with in my last newsroom. The government is the funder of last resort. Unless journalism gets public funding, the profession will continue to decline for the foreseeable future. Anything else, I’m sorry to say, is magical thinking. 

That said: as long as Republicans control the federal government, we will not be getting public funding for journalism. This gloomy culmination of the past two decades of media industry decline offers journalists some lessons. The first is to never get too comfortable. As my own generation of perpetually laid-off colleagues has learned the hard way, any good gig or thriving publication is always one lawsuit or lost investor or algorithmic tweak or reactionary election away from doom. 

And as easy as it is for journalists to feel personally attacked, the cuts to public media funding were part and parcel of the Trump administration’s much broader attack on the entire concept of “government spending for the public good.” The decision to defund public broadcasting in rural communities at a time when there are 75 percent fewer local journalists than there were a quarter century ago is clearly insane, if you consider the government to be a thing that should make people smarter, healthier, and happier. But this administration does not believe that. One way to feel better about the grim outlook for media is to tell yourself, “Hey, at least we’re not scientists, doctors, or park rangers!”

The second, more constructive, lesson of the moment is that we must rouse ourselves enough to save ourselves. Generations of American journalists have been trained to believe that their craft, their industry, and their ethics can float above the tawdry concerns of politics. This was always an illusion. It was an illusion that was possible to sustain when profit margins were high, the news business was lucrative, and reporters were insulated from political pressure by a protective bubble of revenue. Turns out that all of that was temporary. Journalism—the social good, the civic necessity, the informer of the citizenry, the force holding powerful people to account—is as important as ever, but it has lost the material resources that it needs to exist. Politics is the struggle over how those material resources should be apportioned. Journalists must believe in their own importance enough to shake off their reflexive fear of being labeled political. We are part of the public good. We will fight for the public good, or be crushed along with it. 

This fight requires politics. Politics is not partisanship. Journalists believe that the public deserves to know what is happening in the world, that the powerful deserve scrutiny, that the press should be free, honest, and ubiquitous, and that the absence of adequate news resources in most of the country is a direct threat to our democracy. The hypothesis that laying off thousands of reporters would lead to a less well-informed populace, which would then make it easier for politically motivated misinformation to flourish, has been pretty well proven, at this point. All of this is “partisan” only to the extent that the political parties act to either strengthen democracy, or to weaken it. 

Even as the pendulum we’re collectively riding swings toward austerity, privatization, and oligarchy, do not lose sight of the fact that it will, inevitably, swing back again. That’s the nature of pendulums, and of political extremism. The farther they go, the closer they are to reaching their limit. A good use of time while we endure the painful part of this cycle is to plan for what we need to get when momentum shifts in the other direction. 

We can offer the public a beautiful vision: Ample local news in every community. Reporters who are your neighbors, covering your city council, your street’s potholes, and your kid’s high school volleyball game. When the local politicians or business leaders try to sell you out, there will be someone watching who can call them on it. As simple as this sounds to those who grew up with healthy local newspapers, it is a vision that escapes most younger people. We do not just need to restore the Corporation for Public Broadcasting funding; we need to create a permanent public revenue stream for journalism everywhere, lest our entire democratic project crumble in service of the FAANG companies’ stock charts. What an ignoble end that would be. 

The truth obscured by all of Trump’s “fake news” screeching is that people like journalism. They want and need to know what is happening. Even the crankiest internet commenters want something to comment on. In the face of an ideological assault, journalists and media institutions must fight in the political arena, proudly, for our own survival. Yeah, they’ll all miss us when we’re gone. But let’s try not to be gone. 

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