Pbs News Hour West to Go Dark After Asu Discontinues Contract
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The news that PBS News Hour West is going dark after Arizona State University discontinues its contract has sparked a lively discussion about the economics of journalism and the challenges of maintaining good, freely accessible, and ad-free press. Commenters lamented the difficulties of supporting quality journalism, with some pointing out that public funding can be a viable solution, citing examples like NPR's text site and the ABC's functional RSS feeds. The conversation took a critical turn, with some commenters blaming capitalists for exacerbating the issue, while others nostalgically recalled a time when people readily paid for newspapers and news magazines. Amidst the debate, a few commenters cleverly sidestepped the main topic to rant about annoying ad practices on the State Press website.
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Dec 19, 2025 at 6:59 PM EST
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Good, freely accessible, and ad-free press. You can only choose 2.
The economics of journalism are tough.
I would have, if this planet didn't f*ck me over yet again with crippling poverty lol
You misspelled capitalists. They are the ones who are fucking you, me, and anyone with money.
They're no longer officially supported though.
And all news is biased. The only thing is, you can only see the bias towards your ideological enemies. When it's your bias, it's called "the truth."
We are living in an era of more news, different formats more in depth. I think our expectations are misaligned we expect everything to be one click away and social media to present it to us in a doom scroll. The articles shared just here on hn you would never find in a newspaper. If you are lucky you discover a zine like phrack or 2600 and wait months for the next issue.
:(
(uBlock Origin successfully blocks all of them.)
He even advocated for world government, endorsed politicians, etc.
[0]: https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/arizona-state-universi...
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2025/05/02/nx-s1-5384790/trump-orders-en...
David Brooks isn’t representative of the Republican mainstream at the moment, but they’ve started getting more representative Republican counterpoints on their panels over the past few months, even after the republicans cut their funding.
They present a more reasonable, tempered, and charitable perspective on both political parties than any other major news outlet.
Culture war bullshit.
How do they do that and how do you know it's their intent?
Probably best to dissect a specimen. I guess really the guy's just hocking his book here, but it's vacuous and packed with opinions and pessimism, and really not particularly high quality journalism.
I had to go back pretty far to find a professor, specifically, the first few were social outreach or labor organizers.
What's disturbing is that you're probably an engineer, like you know how to open PRs but also think the 2020 election was stolen. Maybe that explains why software has bugs
https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-tru...
I will be very pleased to see the back of all of you in my expatriate retirement.
As long as my social security checks arrive, you can trash this place as much as you like. Have at it.
As was recently revived, a pox on both your houses. May the intellectual rot of both parties hasten.
I'll prefer to see this at a distance.
[1] NPR generally has always had some liberal cognitive bias, but their professionalism was sufficient to keep them rather straight. Even Justice Scalia used to listen to NPR News, at least as late as the aughts.
PBS on the other hand— while obviously coming from an institution that exists because of things liberals value— clearly puts a lot of effort into representing most mainstream views charitably. It’s almost like if Reuters had a daily news hour.
"Truth is treason in an empire of lies" - George Orwell
https://current.org/2025/11/weta-to-cut-staff-cancel-pbs-new...
Their statement: Michael Rancilio, the general manager of News Hour Productions and WETA's executive vice president and chief content officer, said in an email to PBS News supporters that the decision was "based on Arizona State University's revised priorities,"
What you are referring to is whether PBS as a network decided to not renew their contract with the University due to budget cuts. In which no statement has been made about this yet and would be nothing more than conjecture at this point.
IF that is the case, there is a bigger question at play: “is it a public service if the public is required to pay but not allow to contribute?”. For example, not everyone is allowed to enroll in the University.
Low wages, less employment opportunity, and the decrease in interest of writing. Combine this with social media and the age of influencers - you suddenly have a huge decline across the board.
Journalism is not what you see on tv. Those are essentially actors and are the 1%. The rest are those writing in newspapers (in decline) and making barely livable wages with most on contract rather than salary. It’s an incredibly difficult line of work when it comes to wages and job security.
That's moving the goalposts. Universities are not for-profit organizations (with a few exceptions).
By insisting on focusing on 'profit', the enemies of liberal education and liberalism can shut down much of it. Business school is of course profitable, and science has patents. What about the history department?
Every university has to decide what is profitable and what is a loss leader. You have to be well rounded to attract students, but also make money.
In this case, the school decided that this studio had less benefit to them than reward. If this studio attracted more students (tuition $$) then it would be a benefit.
People are getting mad at the White House, but in reality the school decided that this studio wasn’t worth keeping.
Just trying to be rational here.
> the school decided that this studio had less benefit to them than reward
Again, you are assuming that is a goal of higher education. You're making a circular argument.
> reality the school decided that this studio wasn’t worth keeping.
That's obvious, and possibly because of political pressure.
If PBS was not paying significant money to ASU, then it is unlikely to be related to federal politics.
Regardless, this is a university cutting back on that expenditure as it is less/not profitable for them compared to other programs.
However, absolutely nothing is stopping you from buying that air time! Anyone can buy airtime.
Unless your intention was that everyone else should cover that cost from their hard earned paychecks..
However, disagreeing with the Legislative or Executive branch in no way erodes your democratic rights.
The house of representatives controls the budget. Moderating perceived bias would be an obvious survival strategy.
https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-tru...
I don’t want my extorted taxes funding any of this. I hope other countries in Europe follow suit and shut down any state funded media and journalism networks.
P.S. Funnily enough, in my country, the hard left was very fond of the state media network - that they filled with their own talking heads - until recently when the present center right government started changing the seats to their own apparatchiks and the programs started to change from hard left propaganda to neo-liberal propaganda. Now, they don’t fancy all that money going to the state media channels anymore. Suits them right.