Your Independent Journal from the Heartland
Many years ago, when I was a media columnist for the Buffalo News, I hosted an interview program for the local NPR station. My co-host was a tall, attractive Black woman from the Midwest, a star reporter at the News. We were products of the same graduate program and clearly shared political views, but we were never a couple, as the newsroom rumor mill suggested. (She told me she had dated White guys and found it interesting, but not promising.) I’m not sure what the station called our show, but we called it, with heavy irony, “Welcome to Buffalo.” Because so many of the guests we interviewed — Hell’s Angels, gay activists, Black Panthers, AIM warriors from Pine Ridge and Wounded Knee — were so far from welcome in the Buffalo mainstream.
I don’t know how we fared in the ratings — we managed to offend some of our colleagues at the newspaper and at least one managing editor — but the show was a real adventure. It achieved its highest drama when we were interviewing the rebel Indians from the Dakotas. One of them had suffered a gunshot wound in a confrontation with the FBI, and in the middle of one of Judy’s probing questions our producer raced into the room shouting “Hal! Your sleeve! Look at your sleeve!” I looked down at the right sleeve of my tweed jacket and saw that a slender river of blood from our guest’s bandaged arm wound had run across the microphone table and just reached the buttons on my sleeve. The studio was too dark for either of us to notice.
Now that’s live radio, right? My news experience up to that point had been mostly on the arts and entertainment side of the business, and this felt a lot closer to the battlefront, to the line of fire. I don’t know what the radio audience thought of the wild interruption. Judy gasped audibly, and my guest and I both pushed our chairs away from the blood and the microphones. The interviews continued after some dead air and recorded apologies. The AIM activists were very articulate, and we let them tell their side of the story, of the historic reservation uprising that resulted in the murder conviction of Leonard Peltier. I’d venture to say that nothing like it aired on the Buffalo media that winter.
These memories, imperfect now, were called up by the news that the Trump administration and its captive Congress are in the process of destroying NPR and all public broadcasting, actually “clawing back” a billion dollars they had already been allocated for the next two years. The pretext, of course, is that non-commercial media skew to the liberal side of the spectrum and undermine the sort of mindless see-no-evil patriotism MAGA hopes to standardize. Knowing that, I couldn’t help re-examining “Welcome to Buffalo” and our motivation at the time. Of course we were idealistic, which some people would translate to innocent, but at no point did I feel we were being exploited by the underdogs and outsiders we welcomed to our show. We didn’t endorse them, we didn’t ask softball questions to make them feel more comfortable. We thought our audience, whoever it was, deserved a rare chance to hear them.
No one had ever heard of DEI in those days, though “diversity, equity and inclusion” are all concepts we would have embraced. It’s frightening to think, 50 years later, that an American government rejects all three as left-wing propaganda. What we thought we were serving, what we wanted to believe all journalists were serving, was the First Amendment. Free speech?
This was long before shameless partisan broadcasting, before Fox News. But any broadcaster who depends on advertisers has to avoid offending them, which made public media the ideal environment for freestyle micro-projects like ours. Every president, every administration has respected this, to a greater or lesser degree. Until now.
Free press? As part of his retribution campaign, Donald Trump has already filed lawsuits against several networks and even the Wall Street Journal, owned by Fox News overlord Rupert Murdoch. In each case it was a particular story, particular language that enraged him. For Donald Trump “free press” means his free access, as president, to unlimited screen time and air time. But his vendetta against public media will have more fatal consequences than his quarrels with CBS or Murdoch. NPR and PBS were never more vulnerable, as the internet continued to upend the information ecosystem. Public media faced a hostile government that controlled the purse-strings, with minimal restraint from Congress or the courts. They also faced a social media-addicted public that seems largely ignorant of what’s at stake.
This was an uneven struggle, against a deranged egomaniac who held all the cards. Journalists have only their principles. Trump and the MAGA vipers at his command have no principles and no clear sense of what a principle might be. They have only egos, wallets, grudges and prejudices. For this president, the truth is anything that flatters him, a lie is anything that doesn’t.
His shadow is long and dark, in the last few places where facts still matter and “truth” is still a goal. The resignation of Edith Chapin, NPR’s editor-in-chief, was reported just a week after Republicans in Congress cut off all federal funding for public media. A day later the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the agency that oversees NPR and PBS, announced that it’s laying off its staff and will hang an “Out of Business” sign in January. Analysts predicted that one in every five NPR stations will have to shut down without federal money. Many of them are in the South, in bright-red states where commercial broadcasters bow to an arch-conservative business community. Once these local, alternative voices are gone, a permanent silence will fall.
Trump’s war on public broadcasting, apparently a first-round knockout, coincides with a shocking decline in reliable local journalism. Seventy million Americans live in “news deserts,” wide areas on the map where professionally sourced newspapers and newscasts have disappeared. A recent study found that one-third of America’s counties lack a single full-time journalist; the number of local journalists has been reduced by 75% since 2002, according to The New York Times. Since the turn of the century, 60% of the nation’s newsroom jobs have been lost, and more than 2,500 papers have shut down their presses.
It’s no secret where this is heading. Every dictatorship, every fascist takeover begins with an effort to silence its critics, and is never satisfied until every independent news source has been eliminated or intimidated. The next step, the Russian model, is to establish official state media, where the only available news is sponsored and edited by the government. Would Trump go that far? Are you kidding? It’s his dream, pursued relentlessly, to be not only the commander-in-chief but the editor-in-chief as well.
As long as any semblance of democracy remains, the trick is to get enough voters to go along with this obscene violation of America’s laws and traditions. It’s done by targeting scapegoats, arch-villains that gullible citizens might buy into. Trump chose the imaginary legions of the “woke,” way-Left radicals who have devoted their lives to policing pronouns and parsing micro-identities. In reality these extremists are a fairly rare breed among Trump’s passionate enemies. Though we shared many principles and commitments, I have a friend who once dismissed me as “about as woke as the average wolverine.” But MAGA, or at least its congressional branch, was more than ready to go along with the president’s War on Woke. For his war on immigration, of course, Trump chose to demonize undocumented immigrants as “criminals and rapists.” This was painfully ironic because the Orange One himself is an accused rapist, and I’d be willing to bet that none of those poor deportees carried a rap sheet with half as many convictions as the felon in the White House. The second irony is that “Welcome to America,” the message and purpose of the Statue of Liberty, has become as ironic as “Welcome to Buffalo” was back then.
It’s impossible to predict the next outburst or outrage from a president who’s lobbying for the Nobel Peace Prize and his place on Mt. Rushmore, who covets Greenland and plans to stage an Ultimate Fighting Championship on the White House lawn. A president who just accused Barack Obama of treason, and whose fierce crusade against wind power— tilting against windmills?—-has immortalized him as the most ridiculous knight-errant since Don Quixote. The circus goes on and on. But the shutdown at the CPB and its lethal effect on independent local stations is a tectonic, spiritual loss that moves America’s cascading culture death much closer to its last rites.
WGBH in Boston responded by launching a fund drive and posting a big sign outside its studios that says “Local. Trusted. Defunded.” But small, wildcat community stations like WERU in Hancock County, Maine, which receives 25 to 30 percent of its funding from the Corporation, are the ones that will suffer the most. WERU, a Pacifica station, operates very much in the tradition we thought we were serving back in Buffalo — it features Native American programming and even airs a “Queer Hour” in a region where that might go against the grain. “I’m sure we’ll do well with this next membership drive,” says WERU program director Joel Mann. “But a couple of years from now … I’m afraid I just don’t know.”
The reckless, clueless belligerence of one crazy old man is dismantling, stone by stone and brick by brick, many of the most valuable things Americans have built and sustained. He’s even managed to defund the Voice of America, an international radio presence responsible for our image abroad. Donald Trump is a one-man Holocaust for communicators, for truth-tellers. What and who will survive?
Hal Crowther is a longtime journalist whose latest essay collection, “Freedom Fighters and Hellraisers: A Gallery of Memorable Southerners” (Blair, 2018) won the gold medal for nonfiction at the Independent Press Awards, as well as the gold medal for essays at the Foreword Review Awards. A winner of the Baltimore Sun’s H.L, Mencken Writing Award, he is the author of “An Infuriating American: The Incendiary Arts of H.L. Mencken” (Iowa, 2015) and four previous collections of essays, with a fifth collection of essays, “Bible Belt Blues,” to be published in November.
Email delennis1@gmail.com.
