Laura Flanders Substack

07/25/2025

The question is not why so many wealthy media conglomerates like Paramount/CBS have been content to bend the knee to Trumpism. Wall Street and Silicon Valley are happy sucking up our data, polluting our environment and our minds, and weakening public scrutiny.

No, the question is, why those who claim to care about democracy have been content to strangle public media for so long.

Let’s get our history straight. The FCC — the actual regulator born in the New Deal era — was created not only to bring order to the airwaves but to defend against fascist propaganda at home, and abroad. FDR and his circle knew that democracy needs truth to breathe, needs diversity of voices, and needs protection from the loudest, wealthiest liars. In the age of rising fascism, they championed not just civil rights but anti-fascist vigilance on the air. That is the DNA of American public media.

Which is why so many billionaires, snake oil salesmen and would-be dictators treat public media like a pariah, and have done so since its birth.

But the solution to what ails our media culture cannot be more lawsuits to claw back the pittance that Congress has already clawed. When it comes to America’s public media system it’s not rescue that it needs. It’s reinvention. The only real alternative to a media that is delivered by billionaires doing backroom deals is one driven for the public interest instead. And that requires public caring and investment.

We need secure, robust public funding and true independence for non-commercial media — the kind the FCC was created to guarantee, not undermine.