Free Press Offers New Strategies for Supporting and Redefining Public Media in the Digital Age

A new policy paper from Free Press presents a series of creative policies and proposes reforms to support quality news reporting in local communities and to build a world-class noncommercial media system in America.

"We believe local news reporting should become one of public media's top priorities," said Free Press Managing Director Craig Aaron, one of the paper's co-authors. "We should redeploy and redouble our resources to keep a watchful eye on the powerful and to reliably examine the vital issues that most Americans can't follow closely on their own." The paper notes that the United States spends just $1.43 per person in federal money on public media — a small fraction of what is spent by other leading nations. In the paper, Free Press urges the creation of a trust fund seeded with a substantial endowment to supplement annual congressional appropriations and ultimately to enable the system to be completely self-sufficient. Free Press proposes a number of ways to support such a trust, including spectrum fees, a spectrum auction, a small tax on advertising, changes to the way advertising is treated in the tax code, or a small assessment on consumer electronic devices.