This post originally appeared at https://www.badgerinstitute.org/state-should-cut-funding-to-public-media/
Wisconsin taxpayer dollars should not be used to buy off journalists
I call it the “tornado, tomato, quilts and kids” defense — all the reasons supporters of big government subsidies for public media programming invariably will point to if anyone so much as whispers about cutting their federal and state taxpayer funding.
It’s time for Wisconsin’s politicians to stand up and throw some tomatoes of their own.
We reported last week that the Trump administration, accusing public broadcasting throughout the country of leftist bias, is already shutting off the federal spigot that sends over $8 million to Wisconsin public TV and radio each year. Our elected officials in Madison are putting together a budget right now and looking for savings. Cutting state funding as well could — and should — save additional millions.
Public subsidies turn journalists into sycophants, undermine true scrutiny of government excess, distort the market for news and entertainment, create unfair competition for privately funded media, and are a waste of tax dollars.
Government should not be paying journalists and the people who manage and edit them, especially in a day and age when there are so many other media outlets and podcasts and social media platforms and government-funded books and writers and universities and artists.
Speaking of universities, the first thing at the top of the PBS Wisconsin site when I went there earlier this week was the latest episode of Why Race Matters — an interview with a university professor who, along with the host, digressed into a lament about “passive-aggressive racism” in the Midwest.
When I returned a few days later, it had been replaced with a video of a presentation last summer at the Hoard Historical Museum on the life of Wisconsin poet Lorine Niedecker.
Speaking of books, I had already coincidentally downloaded one just a couple of weeks ago: “A Poet’s Life,” about Niedecker, written by Margot Peters, published in 2011 by The University of Wisconsin Press.
Suffice it to say I confess a lot more interest in Niedecker than in passive-aggressive racism, but I don’t think public media is needed to advance either in this day and age.
In short, using tax dollars to fund public broadcasting is somewhere between unnecessary and wasteful, and that should hold true regardless of perceptions of bias. Tax dollars should not be used to fund right-wing diatribes any more than left-wing screeds — or anything in between.
The funding itself is a little complicated.
There are a couple of strands of public media in Wisconsin. The largest, Wisconsin Public Media, is a division of the University of Wisconsin-Madison that includes six public television stations, branded as PBS Wisconsin, and 39 public radio stations, branded as Wisconsin Public Radio.
According to WPM’s financials, $8.2 million in state general appropriations flowed to the organization in the fiscal year that ended in June 2023, and another $9.1 million flowed in the fiscal year that ended in June 2024.
WPM officials did not respond by my deadline to a question about what the appropriations specifically are for.
We do know, according to a Capitol source, that the state gives the money as a lump sum to the UW System. The UW System then determines how much of it each campus gets, including UW-Madison. Since WPM is a division of UW-Madison, the UW-Madison budget office determines how much of that general purpose money goes to WPM, and then WPM determines how much goes to Wisconsin Public Radio and to PBS Wisconsin.
So, bottom line, legislators would probably have to both cut funding and pressure the university in order to cut off WPM.
To complicate matters further, there is other state money involved.
Another state entity, the Educational Communications Board, is also responsible for management of PBS Wisconsin and Wisconsin Public Radio. UW and the ECB have joint but “distinct responsibility for different aspects of the state’s public media services,” according to Marta Bechtol, executive director of the Educational Communications Board.
According to its website, the ECB provides “broadcast engineering and transmission services” — in other words, “the technical infrastructure,” things like broadcast towers and transmitters. The ECB, which gets about $6 million in general purpose funding from the state each year, also operates the Emergency Alert System that transmits Amber Alerts and severe weather warnings.
That can leave the impression that programming and emergency services are unavoidably intertwined.
“ECB’s non-commercial infrastructure is the critical backbone across the state, offering redundancy when less resilient forms of communications fail under the stress of emergencies and their aftermath,” states Bechtol. “Wisconsin Public Radio and PBS Wisconsin broadcast stations across the state serve as the delivery and relay points for national and state EAS activations and their required monthly tests.”
“State dollars that support ECB’s infrastructure are used to both carry the signals of PBS Wisconsin and Wisconsin Public Radio along with signals for EAS, Amber Alerts and other public safety broadcasts.”
“ECB,” she added, “relies on (general purpose) support to maintain the infrastructure it manages for the State,” including money for 25.94 full-time equivalent “professional and technical staff.” That general purpose funding to the ECB amounts to more than $6 million for a two-year budget cycle.
Emergency Alert and Amber Alert systems are legitimate functions of government.
That shouldn’t have anything to do with whether state tax dollars should be used to produce programming and journalism.
Asked what the rationale is for state taxpayer funding of public broadcasters or news media when there are so many other for-profit and non-profit media entities in the state, Bechtol responded that it “is vital for supporting access to news and information, educational resources and emergency alert services in a largely rural state. The state’s investment in public broadcasting allows us to provide essential service to areas of the state where there is no other broadcast choice and where broadband is very limited, with no cost and no paywall.”
We’ve posted her entire response to that question on our website, by the way, and you can find it here.
Not that I agree with it.
Some of the defense might have made sense 100 years ago, or even 20. Nowadays, when everyone and his sister and grandmother has a cell phone and social media and access to weather apps and streaming and privately held media that absolutely loves to chase tornadoes and cover wet basements in floods, arguing that state-supported public media is necessary to spread the word seems disingenuous at best.
If the state wants to continue to build some infrastructure for emergency communications, so be it. County emergency responders, it appears, currently use excess tower capacity — an example of a good thing. Amber Alerts can be valuable. So can educational programming for kids. Let the state continue to pay for emergency initiatives and philanthropists pay for the kids’ stuff. Right now, about 30 percent of the PBS Wisconsin and WPR budgets come from state funding. Eleven percent comes from the federal government and the rest comes from fundraising and from selling programs.
Nothing is stopping public media from continuing to hit up philanthropists for programming and music — or from charging users when possible. Maybe some of those dollars can be used to buy technical help and infrastructure and pay for some of those positions over at the ECB. That way the state could actually make by charging whatever’s left of the existing stations for use of infrastructure instead of spending it on stuff most taxpayers either don’t care about or can find elsewhere.
Mark Lisheron contributed to this viewpoint.
Mike Nichols is the president of the Badger Institute, which accepts no government funding. We raise money from foundations, organizations and individuals to pay for our policy work and journalism, including this viewpoint.
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