Pa.’s sneak attack on its public radio, TV | Will Bunch Newsletter

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Near the end of January 2021 — a month like no other in American history, which saw an attempted insurrection on Capitol Hill, the second impeachment of then-President Donald Trump, and finally the inauguration of President Biden — the newsroom leaders of Harrisburg’s public radio station, WITF, unveiled an unprecedented move.

In a piece on the WITF website, top editors Tim Lambert and Scott Blanchard announced that any Pennsylvania state or federal lawmaker who’d formally challenged the validity of Biden’s 80,000 vote 2020 victory in the commonwealth — in a lawsuit, a formal letter or the certification vote on Capitol Hill — would now see their actions mentioned every single time they appeared in any story from their station. They argued the threat to democracy that a valid election could be overturned was too great to allow the audience to forget what happened.

“We understand this may be an unusual decision for a news organization to make,” they wrote. “But, these are not normal times. As disinformation and misinformation take more and more of a foothold in our social media feeds and dinner-table discussions, it is important for our journalists to adapt, as transparently as possible, to bring you the facts and not memory-hole the damage done to our democracy in the last three months.”

It was a remarkably bold move, and many people took notice. In the world of media criticism, WITF was praised — for recognizing the threat that what’s become known broadly as the “Big Lie” around the 2020 election poses to democracy — by the likes of the Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan, who said “I’d like to see more accountability.” Inside the GOP-dominated Legislature in Harrisburg, reviews were less favorable. The spokesman for state House Republicans, Steve Miskin, called the policy, in a tweet, “another example of arch left wing progressives pushing their slanted agenda through so-called news.”

Late last month, House Republicans and their Senate colleagues had another message for WITF and its colleagues in Pennsylvania public radio and television — delivered with the sound of silence. For the first time in six years, lawmakers sent Gov. Wolf a budget with no money to aid the state’s seven public TV and radio organizations, a list that also includes WHYY here in Philadelphia. Last year, the state had awarded the stations, including WITF, $750,000 to help air children’s programming and deal with other technological costs.

Three things need to be made clear upfront. First, I wouldn’t writing this piece were it not for outstanding journalism by Stephen Caruso of the Pennsylvania Capital-Star, who broke this story late last week. Second, the monies in question are just something of a state booster shot, a tiny sliver of their overall operations — so the move won’t affect their day-to-day operations. Third, there’s no smoking gun to establish any link between the disappearance of state funding and WITF’s posture on the “Big Lie.”

» READ MORE: The cruelty is the point of GOP-driven Pa. budget that won’t help Pennsylvanians | Will Bunch

You see, this is part of the problem with Harrisburg — that the annual budget process, which is arguably the most important thing lawmakers do every year, is designed to be opaque and limit public scrutiny. We just saw this problem writ large in a state budget crafted to not spend at much as $7 billion available from a surprise surplus and COVID-19 relief, which was passed in less than a day with little real debate.

In the case of Pennsylvania’s seven public broadcasters, which have received a total of $2.75 million in state aid over the last 5 years, initiatives such as this are often left out from Gov. Wolf’s original budget and added by the Legislature with Wolf’s OK; this year, again, Wolf did not propose the spending at first but then lawmakers never added it, even though similar items — like state dollars for zoos and a Pittsburgh supercomputer — were put back in, in a year when (let’s remind ourselves again) Pennsylvania had an extra $7 billion to work with. Rather than offer an explanation, the key players who spoke with Caruso just pointed fingers at each other.

“Unfortunately in Pennsylvania, state funding for public television stations is never a constant,” Sarah Trexler Sheehan, WITF’s director of marketing, told me via email, citing past cuts under Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell. “We can’t speak to the legislature’s motives, but we will continue to share the good work of public media in Pennsylvania with our legislators.”

Whatever really happened behind locked doors, the appearance is not good, and it speaks to a growing and important conversation within America’s news media. In a business which had already experienced a generation of job losses and the death of hundreds of small town newspapers — whacked again in 2020-21 by the pandemic and evil hedge funds — many advocates have said lately that public money — since you can’t have a functioning democracy without an informed public — might be the only answer.

But the latest flap out of Harrisburg shows the enormous peril of government dollars for journalism, even as a partial solution. In an era when a growing number of elected officials are waging war on the truth, from election results to coronavirus vaccines, would journalists be forced to choose between an important story or their survival?

“Direct subsidies of the sort that exist in Pennsylvania are an invitation for government to interfere in news coverage, and to use funding as a threat in order to bludgeon journalists into staying away from certain stories,” Dan Kennedy, journalism professor at Northeastern University and a top media critic, told me Monday. At the same time, he noted that indirect government aid — funneled through larger entities like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, or tax policy that promotes donations — can and should help news orgs.

I agree, but here’s the bottom line: It’s a difficult slog, and maybe a futile one, but we need to convince the millions of individual citizens who still believe in the news as a public good to support us with subscriptions, donations, or any way they can. The biggest reason we depend on quality journalism is because we can’t depend on our elected officials to do what’s right.

Question: When you find yourself feeling frustrated or depressed by the state of our politics, what do you do to recharge your batteries? Listen to rock and roll? Watch old movies? Go for a run? Or what? — Via Donna Halper (@DevorahLeah) on Twitter

Answer: The one positive thing for me about the lockdowns and working from home has been taking all that time I formerly spent commuting on SEPTA to Center City and reinvesting it in longer and longer walks with my two dogs, Daisy and Bella. We mix it up every day with a couple of nearby trails or a local dog park, and that’s when I get lost in my array of podcasts or Audible books that I recommend here. It’s been great exercise (yes, I’m one of those freaks who lost weight in the pandemic) and the Great Outdoors has also kept me sane.

Since their epic run of five straight NL East titles ended in 2011, my baseball “second marriage” to the Phillies hasn’t always been easy. The last two years — saddled with a bullpen arguably the worst in the modern history of the sport, on a team that seems uninterested in the fundamentals of defense or base-running — have been especially hard. But nothing has infuriated me as much about our Fightins’ as this weekend’s newest revelation: The Phillies are a bunch of COVIDiots.

» READ MORE: Will Bunch: My love affair with the Phillies, or how I dumped the Mets | Perspective

It turns out that the Phillies are just one of just seven of 30 MLB teams that haven’t hit an 85% vaccination rate, which would allow them to loosen some pandemic restrictions. This was driven home on Sunday when third-baseman Alec Bohm contracted COVID-19 and that day’s scheduled starting pitcher, Aaron Nola — a son of Louisiana who thinks the vaccine is too experimental or something — was scratched, as one of Bohm’s contacts. Miraculously, they still beat the Boston Red Sox, but COVIDiocy could hamper the Phils in the second half of the season. Although surrounded by medical experts, a number of players who were vaccinated now falsely blame their shot for every minor muscle strain. “There’s gotta be some science behind it,” reliever Brandon Kintzler said of the clubhouse conspiracy theories. No, Brandon, there isn’t! Unwarranted, the Phillies remain role models to a lot of people in this region — especially impressionable young folks — and they could do much good by preaching the need to get vaccinated. Instead, the team that leads the league in blown saves is now blowing an opportunity to save a few lives. It’s shameful.