Public media is facing one of its most transformative moments in decades, and for Steven Bass, the former president and CEO of Oregon Public Media, reflecting on his career shows just how much the landscape has shifted. “I think we’re going through an immense shift,” Bass said during a recent discussion at Bucknell University. “When I started in 1980 in Madison, Wisconsin, there were three or four over-the-air TV channels. There wasn’t even much cable television in the market at that point. There were a handful of radio stations. There was effectively no other way to get audio or video content. I mean, there weren’t even any video rental stores there because the VCR had not really become a consumer item yet. So we have moved from a time when people were utterly reliant on broadcasters to serve up to them at a time of their choosing the content that they selected for consumers to a time now where people have the choice of anything from anywhere at any time that they want. That’s a massive shift.”
Bass said the mission of public media—to serve the public interest—was clear from the beginning. “I think my interest in public service came from the attributes of the market at that time, where there were large swaths of the market that were being not very well served. That was not that long after Sesame Street was invented, which revolutionized children’s television. There was a dearth of kind of serious reporting and documentaries on network television. There were a lot of entertainment options, but a lot of the market was being missed. Having that kind of public service orientation was very important.”
The conversation also brought in Matias Vernegno, professor of economics and director of the Bucknell Institute for Public Policy, who explained the institute’s role in fostering discussions about public media and civic engagement. “The Bucknell Institute for Public Policy has been around since 2010. At the end of the day it tries to bring together all the efforts and discussions on public policy that already exist on campus. We bring in speakers, we have discussions, we connect with the community. The role of BIP is to highlight these things and bring them to not just the Bucknell community inside, but to the area around Lewisburg.”
The topic of a “crisis” in public broadcasting came up, with Bass clarifying what he meant. “I think public broadcasting has been dealing with having an asteroid strike it at the same time that it’s in the middle of a hurricane. The hurricane is the slow, predictable changes in media—like the internet, podcasts, social media, streaming services. The asteroid strike is the fairly unexpected loss of federal funding. What this requires now is that local public media organizations re-think and evolve very quickly, to do things in new and different ways that may not be comfortable. Nonprofit organizations often are change-averse, but public broadcasting is now in a position where it has to change. There really is no choice.”
Reflecting on the history of public broadcasting, Bass noted, “Many people think public broadcasting started in 1967 with the Public Broadcasting Act. It actually goes back 50 years before that. Land-grant universities in agricultural and rural states started to experiment with radio with an educational focus. Oregon Public Broadcasting started as one radio station on the campus of Oregon State University in Corvallis. These stations operated locally, creating virtually all of their own programming. After 1967, public broadcasting became more nationalized with PBS and NPR, but now the system of relying on local broadcast stations is starting to break down.”
Bass sees opportunity in the shift. “The emphasis is going to shift back to local service, less about distribution of programming and more towards the creation and curation of journalism, civic information, and cultural expression that is distributed and allows people to engage with it in all sorts of ways. It’s a lot more like the first era of public broadcasting than the second, although technology allows for things that were not possible before. It’s actually pretty exciting.”
Vernegno added perspective on the continued relevance of national networks. “Even with the asteroid of the lack of federal funding, NPR and PBS will still produce content that might be shared, and so we’ll have some elements of that national production while local stations continue to innovate.”
The discussion highlighted both the challenges and opportunities facing public media today, underscoring the vital role it plays in informing communities and sustaining civic dialogue.
