We live in an age where it is hard to know who to trust, where social media bans trusted journalism, and where unregulated Artificial Intelligence controls your search engines. 

In Canada, we have seen hundreds of local news outlets shut down and thousands of journalists fired. These are the people who hold power to account and there are fewer and fewer every day. It was with this in mind that I watched with dismay the situation in the U.S. where the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) voted to dissolve itself after nearly 60 years last month. My reaction wasn’t shock (although I am saddened as it produced such important shows like Sesame Street and Nova); it was confirmation that we are entering the next phase of media.

CPB didn’t collapse because people stopped listening to public radio or watching public television. It collapsed because the political structure designed to protect public media was dismantled, piece by piece, until it could no longer function as intended. When Congress tore up CPB’s funding, its board concluded that remaining in place — defunded and exposed — would risk political misuse and legal vulnerability. Dissolution is an act of responsible stewardship.

This wasn’t a failure. It was the end of a system once designed to keep public media independent, stable, and accessible — particularly for local and rural communities in the United States.

Canada is not the U.S.. But if we assume that difference alone protects us, we are missing the lesson and heading down the same path.

Canada’s Debate Isn’t Abstract — It’s Already Playing Out

In Canada, threats to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC/Radio-Canada) have become a recurring political theme. Calls to defund, shrink, or fundamentally reshape the public broadcaster — especially its local and regional services — have been a part of the mainstream conversation for years. What receives far less attention is what is happening outside the CBC.

This vulnerability is now being compounded by provincial policy. Ontario’s Bill 33, which alters the governance and funding environment for post-secondary institutions, introduces new uncertainty around student levies — the primary financial backbone for many campus stations. While the bill is not about broadcasting, its downstream effects are significant. When democratically determined student fees become easier to freeze, reduce, or challenge, campus media loses the one stable revenue source it has relied on for decades. 

I’ve watched stations confront impossible choices: invest in backup power or pay staff; maintain training programs or keep transmitters on the air; plan for emergencies or focus on short-term survival. This isn’t resilience. It’s a managed decline.

When Journalism Education Disappears, So Does the Pipeline

At the same time, education funding struggles are dismantling another part of the ecosystem: journalism and broadcasting education.

In just under a year, nearly half of Canada’s broadcasting and journalism programs have closed or downsized. Local reporting has declined, particularly outside major urban centres, and although the Local Journalism Initiative supports dozens of journalists in “news deserts”, it’s treading water, not swimming. This is happening just as misinformation accelerates, AI-generated content becomes harder to detect, and public trust in information systems is under strain.

When formal education pipelines weaken, community media increasingly becomes the place where people learn how journalism actually works — how to verify, how to interview, how to broadcast responsibly. When both education and local media are allowed to erode, the loss isn’t cultural. Maintaining community media infrastructure costs far less than rebuilding it after it disappears. Again, our eyes look to the south.

Why Community Media Still Matters — and Why It’s Overlooked

Community and campus media are often spoken about as legacy institutions. That’s a mistake. In practice, these stations:

-train new journalists, producers, and media workers
-serve as trusted local sources during emergencies and crises
-broadcast in multiple languages and reflect local realities
-provide human editorial oversight in an increasingly automated media environment
-maintain locally governed platforms at a time of global consolidation

Emergency broadcasting only works if people are already listening. Trust can’t be switched on during a crisis. It has to be built beforehand — locally, consistently, over time. And we know local, community media is the most trusted source of news in Canada, according to Stats Canada data.

There’s also a growing digital dimension. Community media represents a form of digital and cultural sovereignty: Canadian-controlled platforms, accountable to communities rather than algorithms. In an era of AI-generated content and digital systems and platform dominance, that matters even more when foreign entities can turn us off on a whim (ie. Meta’s response to Bill C18 by blocking news on Canadian platforms and banning community radio stations outright). AM and FM signals provide a last lifeline to communications and must be maintained. 

Canada Still Has a Choice

The U.S. experience with CPB shows what happens when public-interest media is left politically unprotected. Once the scaffolding is gone, it doesn’t come back easily. What replaces it is not neutrality or balance, but fragmentation and polarization. Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel can tell you that. 

Canada still has time to choose differently, but needs to act immediately.

Individuals and organizations can support local stations directly — by donating, partnering, and buying advertising that sustains independent outlets. Governments can act with intention: by committing to stable, core funding for community media, much like it does for the CBC, but at a fraction of the cost. This can be done by recognizing these stations as part of our emergency communications infrastructure, and by using government advertising to reach Canadians where they live while sustaining local, independent platforms without editorial interference.

It needs protection from neglect and the capacity to do what it does at its core, service the community without censorship or capital motives.

The United States has shown us what happens when that protection disappears. Canada should pay attention — while the signals are still on the air.