Public Media is on the Ballot
By Sonya Childress
Marlon Riggs, the genre-defying documentarian, was in his mid-30s, teaching at UC Berkeley, producing films, writing poetry, and navigating a recent HIV diagnosis when he found himself at the center of a political firestorm. The broadcast of his 1991 film, Tongues Untied, on the PBS series, P.O.V., lit a fire underneath a cabal of far-right politicians, clergy and funders who used their outrage about the homoerotic imagery in the film to take aim at federal funding for public media and the arts. Not one to be bullied, Riggs penned an Op-Ed in the The New York Times the following year, raising the alarm on what he viewed as a craven attack on free speech and independent cultural production hidden under the guise of protecting children and the public from pornographic work. He argued, “…I’ve witnessed with rising horror a perversion of a different order now on the rise in politics: the ruthless exploitation of race and sexuality to win high public office.”
Three decades later a new crop of players have adopted, and adapted, the far-mongering playbook. Once again race, gender, and sexuality are being used to fuel conservative attacks in a new culture war that threatens to reshape our national landscape.
This past June, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis pulled over $30 billion dollars in arts funding from his state budget in response to a cultural festival he deemed pornographic. At a press conference defending his draconian measures, he said, “When I see money being spent that way, I have to be the one to stand up for taxpayers and say: ‘You know what, that is an inappropriate use of taxpayer dollars.” The festival at the center of the firestorm took a page from Riggs and mounted a public defense of their work, asserting, “This unwarranted reaction guided by a misinformed opinion has strangled access to all arts and cultural programs in the state… Children’s museums, opera companies, ballet troupes, and local arts funding bodies all lost much-needed support because of this action, and Fringe has been named scapegoat.”
The leaders of the Fringe Festival understood, as did Riggs, that the space they created for an exploration of sexuality in their festival programming made them an easy scapegoat for conservative activists who aim to limit creative expression to adhere to Christian, heteronormative perspectives. They understand that the cultural sector must be able to carve out space to contain all corners of our diverse society. But Marlon Riggs went further than defending his personal right to make provocative art, he directed our attention to the high stakes of relinquishing control of public media for cultural programming and creative work that represents all corners of the cultural spectrum. “What conservatives are very adept at, and very insightful about — in ways that people at the center of America and on the left still don’t quite get a handle on — is how culture, not simply government and business and the law, is critical to control,” he implored.
The architects and foot soldiers of today’s culture war advance a politics of grievance using new bogeymen of wokeness, drag queens, and Critical Race Theory to justify their campaign to defund public institutions — from libraries to schools and media — thereby upending the foundations of a multiracial, pluralistic, democratic society.
Texas Senator Ted Cruz has made his intentions clear by taking aim at what he charges as a left-wing bias at NPR and CPB (the Corporation for Public Broadcasting), to advance the alarming strategy outlined in Project 2025 that would cut federal appropriations to public media altogether. And while there are important efforts to galvanize “viewers like you” to protect this vital resource, the very real threats to public media are being lost in this year’s dramatic presidential campaign.
Admittedly, one might not characterize the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and PBS as the vanguard of independent media given the heavy reliance on British scripted content and a history of uneven commitments to diverse voices, but the fact is that the lionshare of resources for independent nonfiction filmmaking in this country flows through CPB to local stations and regranting entities like the National Multicultural Alliance (consisting of the Center for Asian American Media, Pacific Islanders in Communication, Black Public Media, Latino Public Broadcasting and Vision Maker Media), ITVS, POV and even organizations like Firelight Media. To lose these defenders of diverse, powerful nonfiction would hollow out the documentary sector, and rob our cultural fabric of storytelling that reflects the richness of this nation.
We would be wise to heed Marlon Riggs’ words and consider the damage to our democracy if we cede public media institutions, like CPB, to forces intent not on strengthening them, but on defunding them altogether. There is a reason why independent media has long been considered the “fourth branch” of a democratic society. Those are the stakes before us.
Audiences, filmmakers, arts organizations, and even philanthropy, have the power to reassert the importance of public media institutions. These institutions ensure that audiences have free access to nonfiction films that provide a pathway for Americans to understand the complexity of our world, and not simply a way to escape it. Our democracy rests on a free and independent media ecosystem, and now is the time to use our power as viewers — and voters — to protect the institutions built for the public good.
Sonya Childress is a co-director of Color Congress, an ecosystem-builder that resources, supports, connects, and champions organizations led by people of color that serve nonfiction filmmakers, leaders, and audiences of color across the United States and US islands.
