The Year The System Broke

And What It Means For Independent Documentary

This past year, opponents of public media finally got what they wanted.

“Conservative presidents and Congresses have tried to get rid of public media since President Lyndon Johnson created it in the late 1960s,” wrote one of the authors of the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025”—a 900-plus page policy agenda that included a section on defunding public media.

It cost a reported $22-million to put together—which is a good budget for a PDF. You could make somewhere between 20-40 independent documentaries for PBS with that money. Or you could cover half the cost of a Melania Trump documentary.

But for the backers of “Project 2025” it was money well spent. Along with getting other policy priorities through, the Trump administration and his allies in Congress “clawed back” previously approved funding of $1.1 billion for the Corporation For Public Broadcasting (CPB).

In August, CPB announced an “orderly wind-down” of its operations. Everything downstream from CPB - PBS, NPR and the many public stations throughout the U.S.—in both urban and rural communities—were dealt devastating blows.

The Cato Institute called this “a hard-won victory…while the programs are not formally abolished, they have now been defunded for the next two years—a precedent-setting shift in public policy.”

And for the ecosystem that has historically supported independent documentaries, the defunding triggered an era of fragmentation. A veteran public media attorney I have worked with calls it the “balkanization” of public media.

Facing existential threats, ITVS, American Documentary/POV, the member organizations of the National Multicultural Media Alliance, and Firelight Media - have all responded in different ways.

The below is by no means a comprehensive list, but is rather a set of highlights that from my vantage point as a working independent filmmaker offer insights into where the organizations that support independent documentary within public media are headed:

• The Independent Television Service (ITVS) which was created in 1988 after a near decade of organizing of independent filmmakers and their allies has pivoted, in part, to vertical video—14 years after the launch of Snapchat in 2011.

  • This is part of the Independent Lens Creator Lab, “a six-month program for six standout vertical video makers, offering up to $36,000 in production funding, as well as mentorship and industry support, to develop bold new storytelling approaches.”

• POV/American Documentary which was created in the same year as ITVS, is pivoting to YouTube with support from former legacy station leadership. There are many reasons why YouTube is a favored audience-reaching method for documentaries (including more on that below.) It is certainly less regulated than broadcast television—but that can be a double-edged sword. We have seen how public interest journalism and documentary can be sidelined by tech billionaire owners. And with every new delivery/distribution method, you still need sustained audience engagement and marketing resources.

• In October, I moderated a panel with most of the leaders of the five organizations that make up the National Multicultural Media Alliance at the Hot Springs Doc Filmmakers Forum. On the panel, the organization leaders all spoke to the need of communicating more transparently to the makers and communities they serve.

  • Meeting the moment, the Center for Asian American Media launched the Building Bridges Documentary Fund, “which will award a total of $1 million and wraparound services to support 13 documentary film projects intended to represent a fuller spectrum of the U.S. Muslim experience.”

• Firelight Media launched the "inaugural Firelight Fund, “a rapid-response initiative that will deploy $580,000 in unrestricted grants to Black, Brown, and Indigenous documentary projects.”

  • Here’s Loira Limbal, President & CEO of Firelight Media on the fund: “the elimination of federal support for public media has created a manufactured crisis for documentary filmmakers, especially those from Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities who have historically relied on public media and CPB-funded initiatives.”

• Stations: At least one station has announced that they are dropping PBS programming. And even the big stations like ‘GBH’ (in 2020 they rebranded, dropping the “W”) have shed staffers and issued an announcement that they would “move away from original documentaries”.

  • One of the casualties of these cuts was World Channel, a documentary and public affairs series. Here’s filmmaker and independent producer James Rutenbeck on what this loss means:

    “WORLD was a rare example of public media living up to its original mission, welcoming emerging voices and filmmakers from underrepresented communities…the fact that [it] could be eliminated with such ease reveals how limited that commitment truly was.”

Where Do Independents Go From Here?

For good reason, many have pointed to the award-winning public affairs series Frontline as an example of success amidst the fragmentation. The series nabbed an Oscar last year and has skillfully met audiences where they are-specifically YouTube. I watch the series regularly (on YouTube, not the PBS app) and count friends and colleagues among the show’s producers.

But, there is a basic distinction between Frontline and the independent documentaries you see on POV, Independent Lens, along with other series that showcase independent work. In the latter, filmmakers largely control the editorial and creative decisions in their work, including copyrights to their films (this is the case in the majority of films I made that were distributed through these series.)

Much of this has to do with how these different public media series were created. Last year, I did an extensive interview with Marc Weiss, the innovative creator of POV, who explained it to me this way:

[In the late 1980s] “the relationship with independents [and public media] was a little complicated…[Former Frontline Executive Producer David] Fanning ultimately shaped each thing that went on in the air, and it had to meet his standards. Which, and his stands were very good, but it was much more in the tradition of the network documentaries, the CBS, ABC, NBC documentaries of the 50s and 60s.”

In 2026 and beyond, independent or even NonDé (although I think Ted Hope’s label has been less applied in documentary circles so far) filmmakers should take a page from the robust and successful organizing of the late 1980s independent film movement that created ITVS and POV.

A broken system can be remade or re-imagined by the the cooks who actually make the food. And making a system more relevant and exciting to audiences and communities will help to steer resources back into public media.

Here’s Kartemquin founder Gordon Quinn on how independents need to approach the system (both then and now):

“Somebody asked [me], ‘what is it that PBS really wants?’ And I said, that’s the wrong question. ‘How are you going to make PBS into what you want to do?’ We have leverage with public television — leverage that we don’t have with Netflix.”