We come not to praise the newsroom formerly known as Crosscut, but to curse its executioners. As Erica C. Barnett first reported yesterday at PubliCola, the public-television suits at Cascade Public Media, which is mostly Seattle PBS station KCTS-9, are getting out of the long-form news business and cutting more than 15 jobs.
That effectively ends the nearly two-decade run of the news site originally known as Crosscut, which was founded in the mid-2000s after a different set of suits halted publication of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, gutted its newsroom, and threw dozens of journalists out on the street.
The Cascade PBS suits blamed Donald Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress for nationwide cuts to federal support for public broadcasting, which cost the organization $3.5 million, or about 10% of its budget. We’re going to go ahead and call that what it plainly is: mendacious bullshit.
As the budget people in the Legislature like to remind us every year, a budget is a statement of values, and that’s never more true than in tough times. Cascade PBS is kicking the stepchild of its operation out into the cold just as the winter rain starts to fall. And for what?
A poorly understood fact about public radio and television is that much of the money, both from the federal government and the cash that gets raised regionally from underwriters, sponsors, and “viewers/listeners like you” via those irksome pledge drives actually gets shipped out of town, in this case to pay PBS and other providers of syndicated programming.
Without the federal money, Cascade’s annual budget will be about $31 million per year, per Daniel Beekman’s take in The Seattle Times. As a rough estimate, the all-in annual cost of the journalists they’re kicking to the curb is about $1.7 million. So the aforementioned suits are prioritizing, just to take a sample from today’s TV lineup, Sesame Street, Antiques Roadshow, PBS Newshour, and Amanpour and Company, over actual human beings who covered the state, county, and city their viewers live in. Because that set of choices will keep the flame of democracy burning.
Also, as others noted, the aforementioned suits, Cascade’s executive team, themselves take home some $2.2 million per year, or more than the human cost of the “long-form” newsroom. Meanwhile, its most recent financial statement reported that the organization had an eye-popping $95 million in net assets, including $10 million in cash.
The derisive use of the phrase “long-form” adds insult to injury. It’s almost as if they said “We do television; let’s get rid of those icky print nerds who don’t look good on camera.” Don’t even get us started on the local programming they chose to keep. The food show? Like you can’t get THAT anywhere else.
We should acknowledge at this point that Crosscut rarely lived up to its potential, both before and after it was merged into Cascade Public Media. It was frequently irrelevant and seldom compelling, seeming to do less with more. We hoped for it to morph into something akin to the inspiring story of the Colorado Sun, which not only survives but thrives in a smaller and poorer market by simple formula of kicking ass on the regular.
But ultimately that failure also lies with the suits at Cascade Public Media. When you rescue some starving news strays from the mean streets, you should feed them up into a pack of ferocious new-school newshounds, not turn them into an expendable backwater of your moribund 20th-century organization.
At least the suits who torched the P-I’s newsroom back in the day were bad guys from outta town. They worked for Hearst, a company whose very name is steeped in rapacious capitalism. What’s happening at Cascade Public Media feels almost more sinister. What Trump and Congress did earlier this year marked the bitter end of the old-school public broadcasting model, which naively imagined that some meaningful portion of our journalism and entertainment would be paid for by a benevolent and enlightened federal government. Faced with that, Cascade chose not to stand on its own muscular financial legs and provide the journalism anyway, but to capitulate to the very intent of a now-hostile government, which was to stifle voices it found insufficiently compliant.
We struggle to find a word for that that isn’t cowardice.
This article also appears in the author’s political website, The Washington Observer.
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As a former KCTS producer and often a critic of the current regime, I take isssue with this one. KCTS forgot its purpose–it is a TV station remember?–back in 2014 when it cut all of its TV producers, stopped making serious documentaries and decent news programs and replaced them with online material, plus a truly pitiful 90 second “newsroom” special before and after the PBS Newshour. Since then, it’s the national PBS stuff on KCTS that’s been worth its salt–especially the increasingly terrific NewsHour, which is gutsy enough to take on Trump every night, and programs like American Experience, Frontline, etc. that are now being gutted by the Trump administration. I’ve written at times for Crosscut, but to be honest, have almost never met anyone who reads it. The damage was done in 2014 by the board chair, corporate exec Paula Reynolds. I do agree that management salaries are far too high but the real issue is that Nine quit being a local TV station in the Dunlap era.
I really appreciated this piece by Paul Queary. I also appreciate former KCTS producer John De Graaf’s insight. We need to look into the weaknesses of the “nonprofit” journalism model (many around here, including the new nonprofit Spokesman Review) as well as those outlets dependent on major millionaires/billionaires for survival (see also: Washington Post). As we’re seeing here, nonprofit suits can be nearly as evil/cowardly as their for-profit kin, even when their salaries may be a digit or two fewer.
This is so maddening. As you say, a budget is a statement of values, and this decision by Cascade Public Media, in the middle of a nationwide local-news famine, says everything about theirs.
Thanks for this story and for saying it without a lot of word mincing. Joel Connelly’s story in PA about the same sorry situation is also excellent. I think “cowardice” is a tactful word for what they’ve done.