Rebuild Local News Urges Action in California After Public Media Defunded

On November 12, Director of Policy Matt Pearce provided testimony for the California Assembly Arts and Entertainment Committee’s informational hearing on the defunding of public media:

Good morning. My name is Matt Pearce, and I am the director of policy for Rebuild Local News. We’re a nonpartisan, nonprofit coalition that develops and supports public policies to strengthen community news and information. I live in L.A. and I once donated my old Prius to KCRW for a fundraiser.

I’ll give some fast background to why the federal defunding of our public broadcasters is going to hurt California’s access to quality local news.

The commercial market no longer supports local news production at the scale we enjoyed in the 20th century. In 2025, more and more consumers report using social media to get their news even while they report not trusting what they see on social media, which is only getting worse with AI. 

Meanwhile, most of the journalists who are trying their hand at the creator economy on those platforms are not making money doing it, which is a major reason why you’re not seeing new commercial media scale up on platforms like TikTok and YouTube. So what we call “legacy media,” like public media, is still a major source of the news that you see on new media, even if it’s being aggregated or commented upon by someone else.

So if we want better access to quality local news across all sorts of communities and platforms, it’ll require public support for the folks who are producing that high quality news.

Unfortunately, even before the federal defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the U.S. by far trailed the advanced world in the public dollars we spend to support public media.

Our public broadcasters include the larger anchor stations in Southern California, the Bay Area and Sacramento, which might typically have received millions of dollars in federal funds to support community programming.

A key feature of these stations relative to many other major commercial news sources in California – like the L.A. Times, where I used to work – is that the public broadcasters make quality content available at no cost to consumers, meaning that even when you’re encountering their news on the internet from anywhere across the state, you don’t have to pay to get past a paywall. LAist KPCC in Pasadena, KQED in San Francisco and KCRW in Santa Monica are among the very top public media sources for community news and information in terms of web traffic in the U.S.

But a critical feature of federal funds is that they also supported many stations in California outside of our megacities, with significant Corporation for Public Broadcasting grants going to places like Fresno and Shasta Counties, and more elsewhere. This kind of geographic distribution made possible by public funding is especially critical given a new report from Northwestern University found that 98 percent of private philanthropic dollars for all types of nonprofit media were concentrated in large urban areas.

Another critical feature of public broadcasters is that their broadcast distribution reaches rural areas or other regions that we might call “news deserts” due to their lack of access to other local news sources, which can be especially critical during emergencies like wildfires.

California was already struggling with access to quality local news before the federal cuts to local broadcasters. We rank among the 10 worst states in the U.S. in terms of the number of local journalists per 100,000 residents, according to the Local Journalism Index we produced this year with Muck Rack. California has about 6.1 local journalists per 100,000 people, while the national average is 8.8 local journalists per 100,000 people.

Places like San Bernardino, Riverside, Fresno and Contra Costa counties are among the worst performers by this stat, making public broadcasters especially important information infrastructure in those underserved areas.

Publicly supported media have grown in importance as California has lost more than 40 percent of its newspapers since 2005.

Only about 2,400 full-time journalists are left producing local news in California across all sorts of outlets. 

In recent years California has taken some early steps to provide more support for community media of all types.

• • The state added $15 million this year to place publicly funded journalists in local newsrooms through the California Local News Fellowship at UC Berkeley
  • The state has also allocated $10 million this year to a new Civic Media Fund to be created by California GO-Biz
  • AB 1511, enacted last year, directs state agencies to boost ad spending on community and ethnic media.

This support has been directed across all community news types, though not specifically public broadcasting; California is not among the 36 U.S. states that provides some kind of direct appropriation specifically for public broadcasting.

All told, there’s a lot more work to be done to provide support to ensure the public still has access to quality community news and information, which is why hearings like this are a good first start to put the issue in front of decisionmakers.