What Will the Next Era of Public Media Look Like?

In 2023, a group including the MacArthur and Knight foundations announced Press Forward, a massive philanthropic effort to respond to the democracy-threatening collapse of local news. Press Forward committed funds amounting to an average of $100 million per year over five years to support local news. But in a single day earlier this month, five times that amount—$535 million per year—vanished from the media system when Congress, at President Trump’s directive, eliminated the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). It was a crushing blow to the effort to revive community journalism.

In response, Knight, MacArthur, and several other foundations announced this week that they were funding a Public Media Bridge Fund to fill the absence of CPB. About a hundred TV and radio stations were receiving more than 30 percent of their revenue from CPB; many of those would be in danger of going dark. Managed by the Public Media Company, the Public Media Bridge Fund aims to provide as much as $100 million, with $26.5 million raised so far, toward ensuring that those most at-risk stations survive.

The name of the fund raises a question: A bridge to what? Going forward, what is the proper role of taxpayer support for the media? The demise of CPB opens the opportunity to creatively rethink how funding for public broadcasting and other local media can work.