In the face of White House condemnation of “DEI,” public media organizations should recommit to building trust in the hundreds of communities they serve, said the public editor of PBS on a recent visit to San Francisco.
“As journalists, we need to step up our game and ask questions of the government about what do we do now as a society?” Ricardo Sandoval-Palos said.
He joined Lila LaHood, executive director of the San Francisco Public Press, on April 30 for a conversation about attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion, and threats to democracy and the media.
Sandoval-Palos said PBS and NPR are likely to survive if the administration were to cut funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but could be hurt by the loss of many small and local public radio and television stations, especially in rural markets.
The very next day, Trump signed an executive order attempting to do just that.
Video by Teo Valadez-Flynn
An audio version of this conversation is airing on KSFP 102.5 FM and available in our “Civic” podcast feed.
KSFP, the low-power community station operated by the Public Press, receives no funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Sandoval-Palos is a Public Press board member.
The following is a condensed excerpt from the April 30 conversation.
Lila LaHood: When I ask, how do we respond to attacks on public media, DEI and democracy, what do you want to say?
Ricardo Sandoval-Palos: If we fortify ourselves with the democratic process, that’s the principal way that you’re going to see successful pushback. And it is something that’s actually mushrooming now. Harvard has done it. A number of institutions have started to look at that as being the most viable answer to a lot of these attacks, these measures that have come in an unprecedented rate and fashion, from the White House. And the funny thing is that the White House makes no bones about what they’re attempting to do.
When I was in Latin America, I had the, I would say privilege — because it was very fascinating — of following Hugo Chavez around for three months one summer. And he had a playbook. And at one point, he actually described how they were remaking the Venezuelan government, which was by attacking the National Assembly, attacking the judiciary — not just at the federal level, but at the lower local court level as well. And then finally, an important cog in that was dismantling the media, which was perceived as an enemy of his government. And he did that by attacking, in many cases, their tax status.
One thing that I think that a lot of us need to be prepared for is — it’s not just going to be public media. Pretty soon, if the White House is successful, you will see attacks on all nonprofits.
LaHood: That’s frightening, because that’s a lot of organizations.
Sandoval-Palos: Because it’s the 501(c)3, status, right?
LaHood: Which the U.S. Treasury now can, without any need for reason, just remove.
Sandoval-Palos: The case in point is El Faro, which is a dynamic online, digital investigative news site in San Salvador. It’s a hard-hitting, investigative shop in Central America. The entire team now is dispersed. The founder is in Brussels. The staff is now living in Guatemala and Costa Rica and Miami. Why? Because the president of El Salvador — Bukele — decided to attack the outlet using threats or an investigation of tax fraud, which is ginned up. But it is enough to chill an operation.
LaHood: You mentioned the White House or Trump trying to fire CPB board members and how that’s been stalled. The five directors are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. And they serve six-year terms. If the Corporation for Public Broadcasting isn’t a federal agency, why are the president and Senate involved at all, and would it be possible to sever ties?
Sandoval-Palos: The Corporation for Public Broadcasting was created 60 years ago by an act of Congress. And what it did was establish a private corporation that operates with some taxpayer dollars, but then is responsible for distributing this money around the nation to all manner of public media entities. So, there is no government involvement per se. The commissioners can be nominated by the president, but the rule also states that the dismissals and change at the board level are either through Congress or the CPB itself. That’s how it was designed in the first place, which is going to make for a very interesting legal discussion pretty soon in the courts.
LaHood: You’re talking about PBS and NPR. So, funding goes to the national entities, but also to local stations. Can you describe a little bit about what percentage of funding is coming from the government and what percentage is raised in other ways?
Sandoval-Palos: $500 million, at least. It goes up to maybe $560 million sometimes depending on the outlay that’s approved by Congress.
Congress has already signed off, and Trump signed the continuing resolution a couple of months ago that provided funding for public media for the next two years: $1.1 billion. So, if you divide that over a couple of years, it’s about $500 million per year. And it’s divided between PBS, NPR — but it also goes to American Public Television, to Public Radio Exchange, and then the bulk of it goes to the hundreds of radio and television public media stations around the nation.
For NPR itself, the mothership, as we used to say, it’s 1% of their budget. That’s not a lot. For PBS, it’s 14 to 15% of the budget. I will note that both entities amid these threats — I can’t say for NPR specifically, but I do know that at PBS donations are up, which I think can help make up some of that shortfall.
But the threat is at the local station level. The bulk of rural stations around the country, and even some urban stations probably cannot stay open if they don’t have the support from the CPB. Some stations, up to 60% of their budgets are made up by funds from CPB.
LaHood: Is there any collective plan to help those kinds of stations through this? Or are they having to figure it out each on their own?
Sandoval-Palos: This is not the first time this has happened. The best case was Alaska Public Media a few years ago. The incoming governor of Alaska campaigned on a promise to defund public media. He won. And public media in Alaska lost half of its funding: $2 million.
CPB, with other donors, helped fill in that gap. And the response was very impressive. They collectively formed a single newsroom for all of Alaska. They brought a lot of the programming into a single house that would then go out to all the stations.
And then, very smartly, they reached out to the governor and to the senators from Alaska, and said, “come in and see how we operate. And let’s go out to some of the rural stations that depend on CPB funding.” And they discovered that in Alaska, public media is responsible for the public emergency broadcasting. That for many small communities, it’s the one entity that can put out news and that can connect them to the outside world.
I’m not going to speak for the governor of Alaska, but what I hear internally is that he is now a fan of public media in Alaska. So, I think we can count on at least a couple of senators and several congresspeople who might be resistant to any wholesale change.
LaHood: What do you say when people who would describe themselves as conservatives say PBS and NPR have a liberal bias, and when people who describe themselves as liberal say PBS has a neoliberal or conservative bias, and that major sponsors have undue corporate influence?
Sandoval-Palos: Well, you know, I hear that every day. And maybe it says something about our audience. We get it from both sides. And in a perverse way, that kind of tells me that, okay, well maybe we’re walking the fence, perhaps a little close to the way we should be. If we’re pissing everybody off, then maybe we’re doing it the right way.
I’ll tell you that the way I answer a lot of that criticism: Once a week, my assistant and I, we pick two or three people who have written to us, angry and telling us that we’re biased in one direction or another. And we call them and we say, so what’s the source of your upset? And in most cases, we find out that it’s misinformation or something that they heard wrong or saw incorrectly on the air, and we help them work through it. In many cases, we walk them back from the edge.
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LaHood: Let’s get into DEI a little more. Big picture: What is Trump’s strategy? Or maybe we should say, what is the Project 2025 strategy? What are these attacks about? Why are we seeing all of this right now?
Sandoval-Palos: It’s a political handle. They seized on those three letters — DEI — because they knew that it had an impact with a lot of people who were upset and were leveling charges of reverse racism, and that we’re all liberal “hoaxters” now, who are just out to remake all of our institutions, in particular by eliminating jobs for white people.
In my column I wrote that there’s no reason why we can’t continue to do this work. In fact, in many ways it’s legally required, because we can’t discriminate. The marketplace dictates to us that we follow this path. Because any good market-oriented entity will tell you that you have to go where your market is, where your audiences are. And if you’re not following the diversity of your audiences, you’re going to lose audience, and then you’re going to sink into an abyss.
LaHood: You wrote about Pam in Cleveland, who wrote in that she was reconsidering her support, financial and otherwise, because of PBS’ recent decision to eliminate its diversity, equity and inclusion unit and its activities. And you tried to explain that PBS executives had consulted lawyers and determined that they needed to heed this mandate. But at the same time, you’re saying PBS needs to keep diversity in mind. And so, what do you see as the next phase of this work, and how do you continue doing it, when at the same time you’re being forced to disband a unit that happens to have this label?
Sandoval-Palos: Well, for the simple reason that the work was begun and the work was underway before we attached the three letters to it. And I can’t stress the importance of those three letters. For some reason, in conservative media it became one of the buzz phrases. And so, I think very smartly and astutely, the White House and the folks who were leading Project 2025 at the Heritage Foundation saw that as a way to engage a swath of the American electorate and electrify it.
But in reality, labor laws and our own society dictate that we have to look like America. The marketplace tells us that we have to look like America. So, I think the work continues.
LaHood: It’s interesting too, because we have these conversations, and perhaps we’re jumping ahead and not explaining that we talk about the importance of having a diverse newsroom to reflect the communities that we’re serving. And as journalists, we also talk about the importance of fairness and independence in our reporting, and striving for objectivity and avoiding bias. But there’s also been some shift and expansion of what those terms mean. And at the end of the day, it comes down to editorial decisions about whose voices and perspectives get included in the stories we tell. So, as journalists, how do we balance all of these factors to serve our communities effectively?
Sandoval-Palos: We are suffering from a lot of our own self-inflicted wounds in this business. And one of the worst ones has been not making headway into neighborhoods and communities that didn’t trust us, that don’t trust us, that don’t know us. And so now, we’re having to do this in many places from the beginning and rebuild that trust.
A good friend of ours, Sally Lehrman, runs The Trust Project, and it’s following eight tenets that can show an audience that you are trustworthy. And one of them is community engagement and outreach, and an honest accounting with the audience, with the public. And it dovetails with one thing that I’ve been telling people around this country as I’ve traveled around over the last year doing these town halls: that a way of looking and spotting misinformation, and sources of disinformation in particular, is by looking at the “about” tab online and seeing if that has the names and a way to contact the principal editors. And maybe, if you’re lucky enough, an audience representative. But also, a corrections policy. How we handle making mistakes, right? If they don’t have that, that’s a clear signal that that institution, that outlet, perhaps, doesn’t have objective-seeking truth telling as part of its as part of its mandate.
LaHood: What do you think journalists generally could be doing to improve coverage of federal government attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion, and attacks on transgender people and attacks on immigrants?
Sandoval-Palos: Go ask questions of what’s happening to our data. What’s happening to government information and critical units inside of the Department of Justice, the Department of Education? They’re getting rid of the civil rights units in these large agencies, which was our primary defense against discrimination, our primary defense against abuses.
Before these horror stories that we’ve heard about people being held extrajudicially at the border by Customs and Border Protection and by ICE — this has been happening for some time. Because these agents on the border actually do have court-authorized extraordinary powers to seize phones, to seize electronics, to hold people without charges for a while. So, we’re seeing this now flower. And so, the problem is that now we’re losing the recourse that as a democracy we always enjoyed, that always made a difference for us. That’s going away. And so, as journalists, we need to step up our game and ask questions of the government about what do we do now as a society?
LaHood: Is PBS willing to forego its federal funding?
Sandoval-Palos: I can’t speak for PBS in this regard, but I would say that from my position, looking inward, I don’t see how we can. If we say “thanks, but no thanks,” it lets those who would like to permanently do away with that source of funding say, “hey, y’all are okay without us.”
LaHood: How do we convince people to pay for good journalism? Because the money is needed to keep it going.
Sandoval-Palos: I have an idea. There’s an entity in our marketplace that’s overlooked when we talk about funding for local media: the internet service providers. The ISPs have 300 million homes wired for the internet. And they survive on the content that is generally given to them for free, by and large, by local media outlets. And I have suggested to people in the business, why don’t we ask the public, very quietly and gently, for $1 a month on your internet bill that goes to internet content services? Now, you start multiplying the numbers, and we’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars that can go to local outlets. And regionally, local governing boards could help distribute the funds to nonprofits and other news outlets in a community. This can be done. There’s a model for it now. Cable companies that support public access stations follow a similar formula. So, why not take this to the ISPs? You won’t need government to be involved. This could be something that the industry can solve on its own.
