Elon Musk’s Plan to Defund Public Broadcasting and Destroy Accountability

Undermining a publicly funded media system makes perfect sense if clearing a path for graft, corruption and a lack of accountability is the goal. Buried deep in the 10th paragraph of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy's Wall Street Journal screed on their new Department of Government Efficiency is a line that should worry anyone who cares about the accountability role media must play to sustain the health of any democracy  “DOGE will help end federal overspending by taking aim at the $500 billion plus in annual federal expenditures that are unauthorized by Congress or being used in ways that Congress never intended," they write. One of the items in topping their list of targets is the $535-million annual congressional allocation to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the entity that allocates federal funds to public-media outlets across the country  Zeroing out federal funding for public media has long been a dream of Republicans. But it’s one that’s never come true. Past efforts have run up against a noisy public, including people of every political persuasion, that believes federal funding for public media is taxpayer money well spent. In 2005, I stood in front of the Capitol Building alongside Clifford the Big Red Dog and then-Sen. Hillary Clinton to protest a George W. Bush-era push to strip public broadcasting of nearly half its funding. “What parents and kids get from public TV is an incredible bargain,” then-Rep. Ed Markey said at the event. “The question is not, ‘Can we afford it?; but rather, ‘Can we afford to lose it?’” Millions of people wrote and called their members of Congress to defend institutions like NPR and PBS, a mass mobilization that succeeded in saving public broadcasting from the ax.  The high cost of losing public media  Twenty years later, we face similar headwinds. In 2025, Republicans will control the White House, Senate and House of Representatives. They will be acting on the false belief that the November election delivered them a mandate to disassemble the federal government and remake it in Donald Trump’s authoritarian image. But the actual numbers tell a different story. Trump won by a razor-thin margin, securing less than half of the popular vote (a mandate denying 49.9 percent to Kamala Harris’ 48.3 percent). And the Republican majority on the Hill isn’t large enough to dictate such drastic cuts to federal spending; only a fraction of their members would need to defect for Musk and Ramaswamy’s extreme cost-cutting proposals to fail. Having Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene lead the effort in the House is a move that could easily backfire as well.   If anything has a popular mandate, it’s the use of federal funds to support public media. According to several polls, Americans routinely rank PBS among the most trusted institutions in the country, and a “most valuable” service taxpayers receive for their money, outranked only by national defense. Moreover, large majorities of the public believe the amount of federal funding that public broadcasting receives is just right, or even too little. Comparatively, this is true. The United States already has one of the lowest levels of federal funding of public media in the developed world — at approximately $1.50 per capita. That’s nothing next to the United Kingdom, which spends more than $81 per person, or France, which spends more than $75. Head further north and the numbers head north as well: Denmark's per-person spending is more than $93, Finland’s more than $100, and Norway’s more than $110. And it isn’t just a European trend: Japan (+$53/capita) and South Korea (+$14) show their appreciation for publicly funded media at levels that put the U.S. outlay to shame. It’s about accountability journalism Trump, Musk, Ramaswamy and their ilk don’t just want to freeze out Frontline and foreclose on Sesame Street, but to pull the plug on every network, station and program that gets public support — from Gulf States Newsroom to the Mountain West News Bureau, from Pacifica Radio to New Jersey Spotlight News. And that’s the point. The Trump purge of federal spending is not just about downsizing the government so billionaires like Musk will have no obligation to pay their fair share in taxes. It’s about stripping our democratic system of all accountability mechanisms, including the sorts of journalism that hold our country’s rich and powerful responsible for their misdeeds. (Republicans are also pushing legislation that would empower President Trump’s Treasury Department to falsely label any nonprofit news outlet as a “terrorist supporting organization” and strip it of the tax-exempt status it needs to survive.) Undermining a publicly funded media system makes perfect sense if clearing a path for graft, corruption and a lack of accountability is the goal.  A 2021 study co-authored by University of Pennsylvania professor (and Free Press board chair) Victor Pickard finds that more robust funding for public media strengthens a given country’s democracy — with increased public knowledge about civic affairs, more diverse media coverage and lower levels of extremist views. Moreover, the loss of the quality local journalism and investigative reporting that nonprofit outlets provide has far-reaching societal harms. The Democracy Fund’s Josh Stearns, who’s also a former Free Press staff member, has cataloged the growing body of evidence showing that declines in local news and information lead to drops in civic engagement. “The faltering of newspapers, the consolidation of TV and radio, and the rising power of social media platforms are not just commercial issues driven by the market,” Stearns writes. “They are democratic issues with profound implications for our communities.” For now, Trump, Musk and Ramaswamy are leveraging a lie about a popular mandate to redefine the “public interest” as anything that Trump wants. Trump’s totalitarian dream will not be possible with a thriving, publicly funded and independent media sector. To save this kind of accountability journalism we need people to make as much noise today as they have in the past, and deliver our own mandate for a public-media system that stands against Trump’s brand of authoritarianism. 

November's Real Heroes: Election Workers

Hoboken voting location, 2024.

They’ve endured a global pandemic, power outages and even swarms of bees to help oversee one of the most accurate election processes in the world.   But nothing has presented a larger threat to millions of U.S. election workers and volunteers than the scourge of disinformation coursing across social networks in 2024. Complicating matters further is the small handful of bad actors who seem determined to transform these online lies into acts of violence at the polls and during the vote's immediate aftermath. This disinformation includes lies about noncitizen voters that some of the most powerful online influencers are spreading, including X owner and reactionary propagandist Elon Musk. Musk is Bad Actor Number One when it comes to amplifying this election falsehood. He marked his second anniversary at the platform’s helm by continuing to boost the false claim that Democrats were transporting hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants into battleground states to skew the vote toward the party's candidates. Again, none of this is true. “Election experts agree that noncitizens voting in federal elections is virtually nonexistent,” reports Issue One, a national pro-democracy group that works to strengthen and defend the country’s election systems. But that doesn't spare election workers from having to deal with the lie's consequences. The money driving the disinformation In its most recent report, Issue One revealed some of the dark web of secretive donors supporting the spread of such election disinformation. It’s a rogues’ gallery of former Trump administration officials with extensive ties to Project 2025, the far-right effort to dismantle U.S. democracy — and the system of checks and balances at its core — and replace it with an authoritarian regime. Musk himself is a major source of support for the disinformation network. He has funneled tens of billions of dollars into efforts to remake U.S. politics in his image. In 2022, Musk spent $44 billion to take control of Twitter (now X), and has spent tens of millions more in an apparently illegal effort to pay for votes this year in Pennsylvania. Wired’s Vittoria Elliott recently revealed Musk as the money (more than $100 million and counting) behind a political action committee created to compile and amplify false reports of election fraud — and use these lies to disrupt the vote count. Elliott’s reporting links Musk’s effort with the disinformation-spewing “Election Integrity Network” that Issue One exposed. Shelter from the storm In the eye of this tornado of lies stand the election workers themselves. For years, members of this mostly female civic workforce have warned about threats to their safety. In 2021, the U.S. Department of Justice set up its Elections Threat Task Force to assess threats of violence against election workers and, when needed, prosecute those who act on these threats. David Becker, founder of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, has led efforts to safeguard U.S. election processes, paying particular attention to the election administrators and public servants who voters encounter as they cast their ballots. “The fact is somehow the hundreds of thousands of election workers and the millions of volunteers who worked on the 2020 election managed the highest turnout we had ever had in American history,” he said during a recent Free Press webinar. And they did so, Becker added, in the middle of a global pandemic. “Their work has withstood four years of more scrutiny than any election … in world history,” he said. In that time, Becker noted, they’ve been threatened and harassed “not because they did a bad job, but because they did an outstanding job. They’re American heroes in many ways [but] as we head into this election, they're exhausted.” Unfortunately, these heroes aren't getting any relief from the technology platforms, which have retreated from previous commitments to safeguard election integrity. And this retreat isn’t just happening at Musk’s X. X is backsliding, but so are other platforms In an analysis released on Nov. 1, my colleague Nora Benavidez and I found that nearly every platform has avoided dialogue and accountability around the elections. “With few exceptions, the election-integrity problem has worsened since a 2023 Free Press research report found that the largest and most widely used platforms — Meta, X and YouTube — were backsliding on commitments they made in the wake of the 2020 elections, as ‘Big Lie’ content overwhelmed much of social media,” we wrote. Recent reporting and research indicate a trend of declining social-media engagement on public posts that provide useful information about the voting process, including information that would debunk the sorts of lies that vilify election workers. This trend has been documented most extensively on Meta-owned platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Threads, that have hundreds of millions of users in the United States.   According to Free Press’ 2024 polling, more than half of voting-age Americans are using social-media apps to access news this election cycle. These platforms have the expertise to implement election-integrity measures. They have the resources to invest in human moderators and staffing. But over and again tech execs like Musk and Mark Zuckerberg demonstrate their true values when they choose not to spend more on election protection. Poll workers pay the cost of this negligence. Since the 2020 vote, and the false rightwing claims about its legitimacy that followed, many election workers have faced a "campaign of intimidation" from members of the Stop the Steal movement, foreign agents and political operatives. With more and more people in the United States using social networks as a source of news and information about voting, it falls on companies like Google, Meta and TikTok to stop recycling widely disproved lies about the voting process and stand with election workers in defense of our democracy. While the concern is real, the swarm of disinformation shouldn't keep people from the polls. “What the voters of this country are experiencing is that voting for the vast majority of people is going to be convenient and easy and secure and safe,” Becker said during the Free Press webinar. “And that’s the message I really want voters to understand … as some people might be on the fence wondering whether they should turn out or not. Turn out and vote. You’re going to have a good experience.” Let’s hope he’s right.