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8 New Years Resolution Ideas for NPR
There is so much that National Public Radio could do to make itself better and raise the expectations of its listening audience.
Jan 03, 2026
The reasons Congress created NPR, or National Public Radio, under the Nixon administration were to fill the yawning gaps of commercial radio in local, national, and international news coverage and to give voice to the people without the censorship that comes from advertisers. It was to be publicly funded by taxpayers. Almost 55 years later, NPR is now funded heavily by large corporations. NPR’s local affiliates solicit local business advertisements and grants from local corporations. President Donald Trump has cut out NPR’s small federal subsidy, further increasing its dependence on commercial funding.
Resolution One: Apart from excellent features around the country and the world, NPR should give voice to what civic groups are doing to improve our country locally and nationally. NPR is heavy on entertainment and coverage of entertainers. It needs to fill some of its airtime with news about the bedrock civic community in America. The imbalance is serious from the national to the local. NPR anchors regularly ignore calls by civic leaders requesting discussions about this exclusion.
Resolution Two: NPR has featured many reports and interviews on race but needs far more focus on class. Class exploitation of the poor and working class by the rich and powerful corporate supremacists feeds racial discrimination. The euphemism used is “inequality,” but corporate-bred crime, fraud, and abuse affect all people indiscriminately, which often disproportionately harms minorities. A result of the gross imbalance of time devoted to race and not to class is that indiscriminate injustice is mostly ignored.
Over 60 million poor whites in our country, if they even bothered to listen to NPR, might ask, “What About Us?”
NPR often focuses on racial plights without going to the sources of race- (and class-) based harms from commercial greed. Redlining, exploitation of tenants, lower pay (average hourly wages for Black and Hispanic men are substantially lower than those of white men), substandard healthcare, rampant overcharging of the poor (recall the book The Poor Pay More: Consumer Practices of Low-Income Families by David Caplovitz), greater difficulty getting loans, and discrimination against upward mobility to corporate executive ranks are some examples of systemic commercialism fueling systemic racism.
NPR’s collateral benefit from this inattention is that business advertisers large and small love NPR and its affiliates. This is especially the case for corporations with bad records, which crave NPR’s asserted prestige. NPR should reject ads from disreputable or criminal corporations.
Resolution Three: Stop mimicking commercial radio. NPR’s three-minute news segments on the hour often don’t even match the mediocre quality of CBS Radio’s choice of topics. For example, why, in 2023, were tennis star Novak Djokovic’s visa problems in Australia at the top of NPR news day after day? As for commercials, NPR stretches the envelope, airing, with its affiliates, as many as 30 ads per hour! Imagine the audience irritation. How many times do we have to hear each hour, “NPR is supported by XYZ corporation”? NPR gives abundant repetitive ad time to the same few advertisers that one wonders whether they are assured of exclusivity vis-a-vis competitors. Moreover, NPR starts the evening program "Marketplace" with ads, which even the commercial networks do not do.
Your listeners want you to decongest your programming from ads. And some may want to know why you haven’t, given the decades you have largely given up on reversing the relative decline of congressional appropriations. You give ample time to loud right-wingers and right-wing causes. Why aren’t you gaining bipartisan support for more congressional funding?
Resolution Four: Compress the weather forecasts. Back in 1970-1971, Congress knew that commercial radio stations gave plenty of time to weather, traffic, sports, and music. That is still true. So why does WAMC in Albany, an NPR local affiliate, have such lengthy forecasts, some starting with the West Coast, with ludicrous repetition for adjacent areas? WAMC is above average, with full-time staff covering local and state governments and candidates for public office.
Resolution Five: NPR should re-evaluate its music policy. NPR’s affiliates take their weekends seriously, so much so that they take off right at 6:00 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday evenings. Let the listeners hear music for the rest of the time, as if the world stops then.
Also, musical intervals are often too long, inappropriate for their context, and foolishly interjected. NPR’s evening program Marketplace, anchored by jumping-jack Kai Ryssdal, illustrates these observations. Even while he is rapidly giving the stock market numbers, there is background music loud enough to be considered foreground.
Resolution Six: Reconsider the uniform formulaics shackling your reporters. They respond to the anchor’s inquiry with a zigzag between their sound bites and corroborating sound bites from consulting firms, think tanks, and academic commentators. This model has a tedious staccato ring to it, especially since the reporters often, by way of their introduction, repeat what the interviewees are going to say.
Resolution Seven: Correct or explain your major faux pas. NPR staff need tutorials on the constitutional authority of Congress. NPR needed to explain immediately to its listeners why, with all that staff in Washington, DC, it took about 90 minutes (or until about 3:30 pm) to start telling its affiliates about the January 6, 2021 violent assault on Congress. Commercial CNN and other commercial media started reporting no later than 2:00 pm that fateful day. “And that’s not the only time NPR has messed up,” said one reporter for WAMC (that annually pays NPR $1 million for NPR programming).
Resolution Eight: Give your public editor, Kelly McBride, a regular public time slot to discuss her insights, presently communicated mostly internally, and to address serious feedback from your listeners about NPR’s broadcasting flaws. For example, NPR has broadcast Trump’s soundbite blatant lies without pointing out that they are false. The New York Times and Washington Post frequently advise their readers that such statements by Trump are false. (Local affiliates invite political opinions, personal development, and "how to" questions on related shows).
Ms. McBride could share the program with NPR’s CEO–a position more remote from the NPR public every decade. Hear ye, Katherine Maher! Among other benefits, you’ll get good suggestions for important, little-told news stories (see reportersalert.org).
Congress should have held long-needed public hearings in both the senate and the house of representatives to ascertain whether the original missions accorded to public radio and public broadcasting are being pursued both qualitatively and quantitatively and whether these networks and their affiliates have steadily strayed from those missions, due in part to the absence of congressional oversight and adequate mechanisms for public evaluations.
In that spirit, we issued a report in 2024 titled The Public’s Media by Michael Swerdlow, distributed to many reporters, editors, anchors, and top officials at NPR. The only response was from public editor Kelly McBride, who called it “a fair critique.” Even NPR’s resident intellectual, Scott Simon, has yet to share his thoughts.
There is so much more to learn about NPR and PBS about their relations with American Public Media, the BBC, and other connections to make them better and raise the expectations of their listening audience.
It’s easy to be complacent when you have so little competition from the commercial stations that for decades have debased our publicly owned airwaves, free of charge.
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Trillionaires at the Gates
The arrival of our first trillionaire could well mark the date America’s oligarchy becomes unbreakable.
Dec 30, 2025
I wrote my first post for Inequality.org, "Our First Trillionaire: Only a Matter of Time," over 12 years ago. I hoped, at the time, that the post would age poorly. After all, the presence of a trillionaire on American soil would certify that we had unquestionably reached an oligarchic concentration of our nation’s wealth.
Unfortunately, that post has aged remarkably well. If anything, I now see my forecasting as too timid.
Elon Musk’s personal wealth now sits at about $750 billion. That total represents an annual average increase of 23% over the $60 billion Bill Gates fortune of 2013. At that rate of increase, America will boast its first trillionaire at least a decade before 2039, the year I gave CNBC writer Eric Rosenbaum in 2014 as the date our nation would most likely see its first trillionaire.
Back in 2013, I worried mightily that the absence of a reliable mechanism in America’s tax system to limit the growth rate of extreme fortunes would cause the wealth share of the richest Americans to rise to ever-higher levels. Wealth at America’s economic summit, I noted, was growing at a faster rate than the nation’s aggregate wealth, and that rapid growth was bringing a disturbing arithmetic into play.
America now finds itself in a democracy-destroying downward cycle. Extreme wealth begets a political power that begets policy choices that lead to even more extreme wealth concentration.
“If the wealth of one group within a nation grows at a faster rate than the nation’s aggregate wealth,” I pointed out, “that group’s share of the aggregate wealth must increase over time. That’s a mathematical certainty. And the level of subsequent wealth concentration has no limit.”
Our country’s wealth concentration story has played out exactly that way over the past dozen years, as economist Gabriel Zucman has detailed. The nation’s top .00001%—a mere 19 households—has increased its share of America’s wealth from 0.1% in 1982 to 1.81% in 2024. Of the country’s $148 trillion total wealth in December 2024, those 19 households held $2.6 trillion. In the past year, their wealth total has increased to well over $3 trillion.
That increase has produced a stunning annual increase in the wealth share of that ultra-elite group, nearly 7% per year on average. To achieve that rate of wealth share growth, the wealth of our top .00001%—one ten-millionth of America’s households—has had to grow at an average rate nearly seven percentage points above the average annual growth rate of the country’s wealth.
Over a decade ago, I told CNBC that America’s march to oligarchy would revolve around a considerable increase in the concentration of wealth within the billionaire class. Those 19 households in our top .00001% comprise 5% of America’s top .0002% (380 households, or roughly, the Forbes 400). Their share of the wealth of that larger group of billionaires now stands at about 50% today, a quadrupling since 1982.
What has generated America’s increasingly oligarchic wealth concentration? The worst culprit, I’d argue, continues to be a federal income tax system that not only lacks a reliable mechanism to rein in the growth of massive fortunes but does the exact opposite, exacerbating wealth inequality when we most need it contained.
Specifically, our tax system applies an extremely regressive tax rate to capital gains, the principal form of economic income flowing to our billionaire class. The effective annual income tax rate on the capital gains of our richest often runs less than 5%. That reality has baked into America’s cake a continuing concentration of our country’s wealth.
In 2013, with Mexico’s Carlos Slim then the world’s wealthiest person, I contemplated the concentration of power that would accompany the arrival of American trillionaires.
“Unless basic US tax policy changes,” I noted, “the United States will be mathematically certain to reach Mexican-like levels of wealth concentration. The only questions: Who will be our Carlos Slim and how kindly will our trillionaires treat us.”
Indeed, the gap between America’s level of wealth concentration and Mexico’s has closed considerably over the past 12 years. Slim, still the wealthiest Mexican, has seen his share of Mexico’s total wealth fall since 2013. But the share of American wealth held by the wealthiest American—Gates in 2013 and Musk in 2025—has tripled.
And we saw the accompanying concentration of power become vividly visible at President Donald Trump’s second inauguration. On the inaugural stand, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg all sat center stage.
We see that same concentration in the funding of our politics. In the 2024 election, reports Americans for Tax Fairness, our billionaires collectively accounted for $2.6 billion of the $15.9 billion in total political spending, a total lopsidedly on the Republican side.
Musk alone spent about $277 million in 2024, a tiny one-thousandth of his net worth at the time, but nearly 2% of total political spending in a nation of 340 million people. At his current level of wealth, Musk could drop $1 billion by himself into the 2026 election without breaking much of a financial sweat.
But those numbers only hint at the political power our richest now wield. Billionaire control over our nation’s major media outlets far exceeds the influence of direct billionaire political spending.
The six billionaires with wealth over $200 billion all control either a major media outlet or a major social media platform. Musk, of course, owns Twitter. Zuckerberg, through Meta, controls Facebook and Instagram. Bezos owns the Washington Post. Larry Ellison’s son, David, holds a controlling interest in Paramount, the media giant that owns CBS and is seeking to acquire control of Warner Bros. Discovery. The Ellisons also have their eyes on the US operations of TikTok. Larry Page and Sergey Brin remain the largest shareholders of Alphabet, the corporate colossus that controls Google and YouTube.
What does that billionaire lock grip over our largest media translate into? Everything from a Washington Post editorial page that rails against wealth taxation to the placing of America’s most respected weekly network TV news show, "60 Minutes," in the censorious hands of the right-wing ideologue Bari Weiss.
America now finds itself in a democracy-destroying downward cycle. Extreme wealth begets a political power that begets policy choices that lead to even more extreme wealth concentration. The challenge of breaking that cycle could hardly be more daunting.
The arrival of our first trillionaire could well mark the date America’s oligarchy becomes unbreakable. Let’s not let that happen.
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CBS Killing a '60 Minutes' CECOT Segment Shows Why We Must Back Independent Media
If we want to get responsible media that does its job in reporting on the deeds and misdeeds of the rich and powerful, we need to look to fundamentally restructure the media.
Dec 23, 2025
If anyone doubted that the rich would use their control of the media to push their agenda and silence dissent, CBS removed it with its decision to censor the scheduled "60 Minutes" broadcast on CECOT prison. CECOT is the notorious maximum-security prison in El Salvador where President Donald Trump has sent a number of the people that he has deported. There have been numerous accounts of torture and abusive treatment in the prison, which presumably would have been highlighted in the segment.
CBS, under its new ownership, decided that we shouldn’t see the "60 Minutes" segment, or at least not the one its team had prepared for broadcast last night. Apparently, they were worried it would offend the Trump administration.
According to a leaked account, Bari Weiss, the right-wing zealot that the new ownership put in charge of CBS News, decided that the program could not air without an interview with Stephan Miller, Trump’s deporter-in-chief. The producers of the show had apparently already reached out to the White House, as is their standard practice, but they refused to comment, presumably choosing to instead attack the broadcast as unfair and unbalanced after it ran.
Weiss is insisting that the program include an interview with Miller, giving him an effective veto over when and if the program airs. If we ever do see the segment, it will likely include other edits to make it more Trump friendly.
We do need to come up with ways to support independent media and not just complain about right-wing Trump sycophants taking over the media we have.
There can be a tendency to exaggerate the courage and independence of the pre-Trump media, but news shows like "60 Minutes" have done much great reporting over the years, breaking stories that the rich and powerful would prefer to see buried. This will no longer be the case.
Whining Is not an Effective Media Strategy, Nor Is Taxing the Rich
I have been getting regular fundraising notices from Robert Reich, whom I greatly respect, complaining about the takeover of the media by rich Trumpers. Reich is right, but the moral of his story is that we have to increase taxes on the rich.
While taxing the rich more is something we should do, along with taking away the patent and copyright monopolies that make many of them rich, and corrupt bankruptcy laws that give us private equity billionaires, along with a few other changes, we have to go much further to get back impartial media.
The huge gaps in wealth and income create an enormous power imbalance, and plausible changes in tax policy will do little to rectify the situation. If Elon Musk’s fortune was cut in half to $200 billion, he would still have a ridiculous amount of political power. The same applies to the rest of the crew of billionaires.
If we want to get responsible media that does its job in reporting on the deeds and misdeeds of the rich and powerful, plausible reductions in inequality (and how do we get those?) will not be sufficient. We need to look to fundamentally restructure the media.
When the right owns all the major news outlets and social media platforms, the idea that the truth will magically overcome their lies is not the sort of argument that can be taken seriously.
This is not as far-fetched a goal as it may sound. We will not get the current Congress, or even one with a Democratic majority in 2026, to take the lead in pushing for responsible media. But we can have initiatives at the state and local level to build up independent media that is not owned and controlled by the rich and very rich.
My preferred route is a system of individual tax credits, say $100 per person, to support the person’s favorite news outlet(s). This would be a credit, not a deduction, and fully refundable, so even the poorest person gets the same amount as Elon Musk. There could be different conditions attached to receiving the credit. In my view, the material supported should be freely available outside a paywall; but that’s something that could be decided by the state or local governments implementing the system.
The best model for those envisioning this system would be the charitable contribution tax deduction. The difference is that this would be a credit, with every person getting the same amount regardless of how much their income is.
We may already have a foot in the door on this. Katie Wilson, the newly elected progressive mayor of Seattle, is a big supporter of this system. She will have a full agenda as mayor, and faces a budget shortfall, but if stars align right, perhaps this system will be put in place.
Other states, like California and New York, have sought to support local media with a tax on Google and Meta, which have gobbled up much of the advertising revenue that had formerly supported news outlets. This money would then be used to subsidize subscriptions, an inferior approach in my view, but still a way to support independent media.
This system of individual tax credits may seem far away from the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars that support major news outlets like CBS or CNN. While it may be difficult to pay the multimillion-dollar salaries that top news anchors get through this system, it could support a huge amount of important journalism.
Many people will choose not to use their credits or use them to support slop or perhaps more right-wing MAGA screeds. But suppose 10% of the population, 25 million people, used their credits to support serious investigative reporting like what is done by outlets like ProPublica, the American Prospect, the New Republic, and on good days the New York Times.
That would provide $2.5 billion a year in revenue, roughly 100 times the budget of ProPublica. It could help to support hundreds of smaller outlets.
And even if most of this money goes to support local news outlets, they can band together to support national and international reporting. This has been the story of the Associated Press for 180 years.
The idea that a progressive stronghold, like Seattle, may adopt a modest proposal to support local news, may seem like chump change in a world where the mega rich tech oligarchs are throwing around billions to buy news outlets like cheap candy, but it is a hell of a lot more promising than whining. And it is not the only thing we can and should do to counter the corruption of the media by the Trump brigade.
It would be great to reform Section 230 so we don’t give Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg special protections that news and print outlets don’t enjoy. Obviously, this will not happen with a Republican Congress and Donald Trump in the White House, but we should at least highlight this utterly absurd subsidy that we give to these right-wing mega billionaires.
It would also be good if progressives stopped viewing it as gauche to file defamation lawsuits. That doesn’t mean absurd multibillion Trumpian lawsuits directed against every news outlet that criticizes someone, but it does mean suing to counter the damage of outright lies, such as the ones now being promoted against Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
I know the standard line is that we counter lies with more speech; but save that for the kindergarten class. When the right owns all the major news outlets and social media platforms, the idea that the truth will magically overcome their lies is not the sort of argument that can be taken seriously.
Anyhow, that is a longer story. But we do need to come up with ways to support independent media and not just complain about right-wing Trump sycophants taking over the media we have. My scheme is on the table. Let’s hear others.
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