Every time federal funding for public media becomes politicized, we’re reminded that PBS (and, to a lesser degree, NPR) are among the “most trusted” organizations in the United States. PBS even dutifully conducts a public opinion survey each year or so to validate that finding.
And that trust has had almost zero meaningful impact on the public debate.
Two recent research reports hit my radar, and there are both truth and worrisome warnings in them, regardless of what Congress decides to do with CPB funding.*
The first report is a study published in the Journal of Communication, the premier academic publication in the field. Second, the Pew Research Center and the Knight Foundation published a report looking at trust in media, comparing local and national outlets.
The Journal of Communication study essentially validates what we’ve always known: The public has an almost unique sense of trust in public media organizations, regardless of political leanings.
Authors Christopher Ali, Hilde Van den Bulck of Drexel and Jonathan Kropko of Virginia set out to explore whether that sense of trust exists and why. (Disclosure: Ali is a colleague at Penn State.) They wrote, “In the hyper-commercial U.S. media ecosystem and post-trust context, PBS stands out as an ‘island of trust.’ PBS’s seemingly enduring trust cannot be separated from its foundational public service mission.”
The top-line findings are overwhelming: 47% of people surveyed thought PBS delivers excellent value for the public funding it receives; 35% said the same about NPR. (Congress? Only 17% rate it as “excellent,” and barely one-third call it “good” or better.)
On trust, 80% said they trust PBS “a lot” or “somewhat.” And those feelings of trust span the entire political spectrum. PBS, in particular, is viewed as “uniquely apolitical,” the authors wrote. “PBS is a major news source regardless of political persuasion: both self-declared extreme conservatives and extreme liberals come to PBS” for news.
Their paper didn’t just stop at whether people trust public media; it delved into why. The authors cited three key sources of that trust:
That mirrors a finding from the second study, published last fall by the Pew Research Center and Knight Foundation’s joint Pew-Knight Initiative. A key finding: Amid the polarization seen on the national political and media landscapes, audiences trust and appreciate their local media organizations. Eighty-five percent of U.S. adults say local news outlets are somewhat important or very important to their communities. More than two-thirds say local journalists are mostly in touch with their communities (up from a similar study in 2018). Yay, right?
Well, two sneaky weaknesses pop up in those studies, and they match the whispered conversations many of us have at the bar at public media gatherings.
First, just because people trust public media doesn’t mean they use it. And our financial support — those community donations that contribute to our trust — rely on audience size. The paper from Ali et al notes that, for all the “trust” people express in PBS, the audience size for the flagship PBS Newshour declined by 9% from 2020 to 2022. Other reports show similar decreases in NPR listenership and tune-in to terrestrial broadcasts of any type.
Audiences, in other words, are shifting to digital distribution. Public media “needs to go where the audience is. … (T)his means that PBS needs to [be allowed, even encouraged] to embrace digital opportunities, more than it has done so far,” Ali and his colleagues wrote.
A second sign of that audience problem: The researchers asked survey respondents why they trust public media so much. For PBS, there was a simple, important reason: “Because they grew up on it.” It’s wonderful that people have fond memories of watching Mister Rogers or Sesame Street as a six-year-old, but is that still relevant when they’re 55?
Second, localism matters, but too few public media outlets produce meaningful amounts of local content. One study cited in the Journal of Communication piece showed that two-thirds of public TV stations produced no local news content. As the University of North Carolina’s journalism school noted, at many public radio stations, “local” news is often just aggregated from other sources and jammed into ATC or Morning Edition as a handful of headlines.
Some stark conclusions emerge from these studies: Want trust and the financial support that derives from it? Don’t just rely on being the passthrough carrier for the national PBS or NPR signal.
Retired Oregon Public Broadcasting CEO Steve Bass made this point far more eloquently than I: We need to return to our local roots with meaningful local content and strong community engagement. And we need to be where our audiences want us to be. For most people under the age of 60, that isn’t on radio and television but on the digital devices where they live their lives.
Trust is a wonderful thing, and the Ali/Van den Bulck/Kropko study should make all of us in public media proud. But trust alone won’t solve our myriad challenges. We need to lean into local and digital to keep that trust — and turn it into the financial support we need.
(*As I write this in mid-April, Congress has held its performance-art public “hearing” about public media funding. Almost no minds were changed, and my lobbyist friends in Washington are convinced that Congress will defund public media this go-round. Given the federal chaos these days, that conventional wisdom will likely change at least four times between the time I finish typing this sentence and you read it several weeks from now.)
Tom Davidson is a professor of practice in media entrepreneurship at the Bellisario School of Communications, Penn State University. He was a reporter, content leader, general manager and product builder at Tribune, PBS, UNC-TV and Gannett. He can be contacted at tgd@tgdavidson.com.
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