Modern democracies have long recognized that commercial media are incapable of providing for all of society’s informational, cultural, and educational needs. For most healthy democracies, this systemic market failure has necessitated maintaining robust public media systems. Public media can guarantee access to specific types of content and services that otherwise would remain under-produced, ranging from high-quality children’s educational programming for poor households to emergency communications during natural disasters.

The U.S. government, however, has remained a global outlier for how little it funds its public media. Even before the 2025 rescission package nullified federal support, U.S. annual expenditures were approximately $1.60 per capita—almost literally off the chart compared to most leading democracies. To even call our system “public” is a misnomer; it has long been funded primarily by private sources of capital from individuals, foundations, and corporations.

This structural contradiction—public media funded by private capital—has rendered the U.S. system politically and economically weak. Even so, public media institutions have often provided higher-quality fare compared to their commercial counterparts. This became especially notable during the Trump 2.0 era when privately-owned, commercial media have capitulated to various forms of oligarchic and authoritarian capture.

For these reasons and more, we must establish independent public media if we’re to achieve any semblance of U.S. democracy. Moreover, the current media poly-crisis offers a rare opportunity to entirely reimagine and rebuild our public media system. The following analysis begins to sketch out the structural conditions necessary for creating a new public media system anchored by what I term the “Public Media Center.” Broadly speaking, three organizing principles—de-privatization, democratization, and localization—can help guide us toward reconstructing our public media from the ground up.

De-privatization

From its earliest days, the American public media system has depended heavily on private philanthropy and, increasingly, corporate funding. Paltry government support and subsequent policy changes further incentivized public media institutions to seek out corporate sponsorships in the form of seemingly full-blown commercial ads (euphemistically referred to as “enhanced underwriting”). Such reliance on corporate money not only blurs important distinctions between commercial and public media, but it also can skew programming in anti-democratic ways. The first step toward creating a truly public media system requires sufficient, permanent, and insulated funding to support high-quality and universally accessible media. Ballpark calculations based on international standards and historical precedents put this budget at roughly 30 billion dollars per year. This money could be allocated via block grants to states and further devolved though public grant-making like those deployed by civic information consortiums aimed at supporting local journalism.

Democratization

A growing body of research demonstrates positive correlation between independent public media systems and healthy democracies. However, public media institutions themselves also should be democratized. To do so isn’t only ethically sound, but also strategic: Democratization can help ensure bipartisan trust, structural resilience, and journalistic independence. Toward this aim, a public media system shouldn’t be public in name only but actually owned and controlled by local communities. This collective ownership and governance must translate to public participation in all stages of media production and dissemination to encourage trust and community investment. In fact, public media institutions are often cross-ideological islands of trust in an otherwise dismal landscape. This trust can be further deepened through direct public ownership and participation, perhaps through community action programs, participatory budgeting, or some similar bottom-up model of governance. Rotating oversight boards could be locally elected or randomly selected to ensure public accountability.

Localization

Although locally rooted, public media outlets often amplify national instead of community programming. By becoming more localized in their coverage, public media outlets would realign their programming with the types of news, cultural fare, and information currently being under-provided in many communities. This refocusing also would return public media institutions to their historical roots. Prior to the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, educational broadcasters were typically situated in community-facing stations based at public universities. But once the public broadcasting network became consolidated and centralized, it shifted toward national programs instead of showcasing local culture and public affairs—partly because producing local media is costlier than syndicating national content. While some recent initiatives focus more on providing the local journalism that the contracting newspaper industry no longer produces, public media outlets have long remained an under-utilized infrastructure in combating the ever worsening news deserts problem. To prevent undue federal control over the allocation process, public media funding could be devolved to the state and county levels—even municipalized—to better respond to community information and communication needs.

Imagining the Public Media Center

Supporting strong public media at the center of our broader information ecosystem can help guarantee a baseline level of reliable news and communication for all members of society—a universal service mission that commercial systems rarely provide. Moreover, public media often yield spillover effects—positive externalities—that encourage better media from commercial and nonprofit sectors as well.

Yet, while salvaging existing public media institutions is important, it’s insufficient for long-term democratic health. A more ambitious project would aim to establish Public Media Centers (PMCs) in every community across the country. These multi-media hubs should be federally guaranteed but locally owned and controlled, perhaps housed in already-existing public spaces such as post offices, libraries, public access media outlets, universities, and public broadcasting stations.

A PMC model can be broken down into six discrete layers that must be democratized: the funding layer determines how this system can be financially sustained; the governance layer ensures resource allocations and other key decisions are made collectively; the ascertainment layer accesses a community’s critical information needs; the infrastructure layer focuses on the material needs (including universal broadband service) for guaranteeing reliable access to information; the technological layer privileges public media in search and news feeds; and the engagement layer empowers local communities in making their own news and telling their own stories. These layers can be seen as part of a broader “public media stack.”

A holistic critique of the problems afflicting our information and communication infrastructures—structural pathologies mostly predating the Trump administration—should inform systemic solutions. Many such problems, including media/tech oligarchy, exclusion from high-quality news and information, and the local journalism crisis all stem directly from or are exacerbated by market failures and run-amok capitalist logics. Only a public media system, if properly designed, can avoid such predictable hazards.

Today, with the ongoing collapse of local journalism and the abject failures of commercial media, the need for a public system is glaringly acute. Any plan for revitalizing American democracy requires an information ecosystem with a fully funded and independent public media system at its core. Reconstructing this system is not a silver bullet for all that ails American society, and other structural reforms remain vitally important. But supporting such essential infrastructure is non-negotiable for any democracy worthy of the name.