Earlier this week, the Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency “hearing out” NPR and PBS CEOs before going ahead and doing what they had already expressed interest in doing: introducing legislation to take away all government funding from public media.

At a time when paywalls are increasingly common and Internet access is still disparate, access to this free news and children’s programming remains especially crucial.

In this issue:

And also: Palestinian journalist Hossam Shabat’s last article, The Intercept sues DOGE, victory for striking Pittsburgh Post-Gazette journalists, and Game Informer’s entire team returns after last year’s closure. And the resource of the week is a Poynter column about what to do (and what not to!) if you’re in Jeffrey Goldberg’s shoes unintentionally party to government information.

—James Salanga

As of 2022, the U.S. spends a few dollars per person per year — $3.16 — on public broadcasting. Meanwhile, the U.K. spends $81.30.

Still, Republicans are moving to eliminate funding for free and accessible programming in a move that’s likely to gut funding for rural public media stations and broadcasting focused on serving underserved audiences.

During a Mar. 26 Congressional hearing, Republican legislators maligned NPR and PBS efforts to diversify sourcing as “racism”, spouted anti-trans rhetoric, and diminished the utility of public media when rural areas “have an Internet connection.” The next day, following a promise from Marjorie Taylor Greene to “completely and totally defund and dismantle” the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), Representative Ronny Jackson (R-Texas) introduced legislation to do exactly that.

The hearing saw a fixation on national stories over local impact — Russian collusion, the Hunter Biden laptop, and reporting on the Wuhan COVID-19 leak. It focused on demonizing coverage about sex and gender that Americans can choose not to listen to, while glossing over support for states’ emergency systems and self-paced educational resources.

“When you have a DOGE and Pony show, that's the distraction from what's really going on, which is that this is about dismantling progress that was made for equal rights,” said representatives of Public Media for All, a community of public media professionals advocating for a public media representative of those historically mischaracterized and underserved.

The representatives spoke to The Objective anonymously, for reasons of job security.

“This is about dismantling progress that was made for the fourth estate,” they said. “And this is a part of a cycle.”

Read the full piece here.

—James Salanga

Hossam Shabat’s last article: The 23-year-old Palestinian journalist was a regular contributor to Drop Site News, and his final piece before an Israeli military airstrike killed him details the scene at Bein Hanoun, Gaza after Israel broke ceasefire. Even as Shabat bore witness to constant death and suffering for seventeen months, translator and reporter Sharif Abdel Kouddous called his writing “lyrical and arresting”. “Everything is being crushed: the lives of innocent people, their dignity, and their hopes for a better future,” Shabat wrote.

📹 Read more in Drop Site News.

The Intercept sues DOGE over the government agency’s claim it’s exempt from FOIA: Members of the Chicago News Guild have critiqued leadership’s pressing for buyouts to close financial deficits without addressing the top-heavy managerial structure. Thirty of those resigning were Sun-Times employees, including most of the editorial board. The other five worked at WBEZ.

📂 Read more in The Intercept.

Federal judges award rare injunction to striking Pittsburgh Post-Gazette journalists: The order from the Third Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals requires the newsroom to restore the health care it illegally took from its employees and return to the bargaining table. Post-Gazette workers have been on strike for 29 months, making the effort the longest ongoing U.S. strike. Restoring health care was one of workers’ main demands, and they’re meeting soon to discuss the future of the strike with that ask now met.

🏆 Read more in the Pittsburgh Union Progress.

Game Informer (and its entire staff!) is back after IGN shut it down last year: The 33-year-old outlet has a new lease on life. The Game Informer brand and outlet were purchased by Gunzilla Games, which agreed that the outlet should be an independent editorial outlet. Now, Game Informer is operated by Game Informer Inc., and the entire team working there at the magazine’s closure was brought back on board. The print magazine is coming back soon, too.

🎮 Read more in Game Informer.

This week’s resource is … a column from Poynter about what to do if you stumble into government security information.

What would you do if you found yourself in the middle of a group chat with U.S. government officials about their very real plans to drop bombs on Houthi militants in Yemen? And how would you rationalize your decision?

Those are questions journalists and non-journalists alike have been asking themselves after The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg revealed he was added to a Signal chat by Michael Waltz — President Donald Trump’s national security advisor — in which Waltz, Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and 15 other officials shored up their plans for a mid-March airstrike in Yemen.

Many have since dunked on the Trump administration for the national security breach (and cringe emoji use). Goldberg received criticism, too: After being flamed for leaving the group chat early and initially refusing to release the specifics of the war plans, Goldberg and the Atlantic published the unredacted Signal messages with a paywall.

It’s not uncommon for journalists to find themselves in their own (albeit lower-stakes) Houthis PC Small Group chats, argues Poynter’s Kelly McBride in her new column, so it’s important for us to have a framework for how and when we decide to report on accidental leaks. It’s also important for journalists to let the public in on their decision-making process, Trusting News’ executive director Joy Mayer wrote on LinkedIn, so audiences don’t end up assuming our ethics for us.

Often, journalism is about discovering information the public is never ~supposed to~ see. Sometimes that comes from filing FOIA requests, but it can also come from being copied on an inappropriate email chain or discovering lewd Instagram comments, forcing tough conversations about the line between reporting in the public interest and poking at someone for a mistake.

When interning at Billy Penn in Philadelphia, I remember stumbling upon the city’s chief information officer unloading in a public Discord server about his discussions with our mayor about using cryptocurrency to fund free broadband service and talking with my editor about just how much to share.

McBride’s framework is about balancing our pursuit of truth with risk assessment. After verifying whatever information you’re looking at is real, McBride writes, journalists need to consider how to minimize harm and act in the public service.

The American public has a fundamental distrust of journalists bolstered by a burgeoning right-wing media ecosystem that lambasts reporters for “hit pieces” and makes laughable claims that we’re all getting rich off our reporting. In other words, large swaths of the American public are being led to believe that journalists have no ethics.

One major way to counteract that is transparency about values — not just burying them in the bottom of the “about” page. The Atlantic could’ve published a sidebar contextualizing their findings.

Instead, Goldberg never explains the considerations that went into leaving the chat or withholding information about an attack that already happened, leaving audiences to assume he was acting out of self-interested cowardice, or worse yet, had something to gain from exercising just the right amount of self-censorship.

Sunshine is the best disinfectant. It’s about time we show the light on ourselves, too.

—Beatrice Forman, Democracy Journalism Columnist

For more style guides, journalism job boards, and tip sheets, check out The Objective’s resource list.

Thanks for reading. We’ll have more for you next week.

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