Category: English

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jack McNamara, Senior Lecturer in Clinical Exercise Physiology, University of East London

Your fitness tracker might be lying to you. That 10,000-step target flashing on your wrist? It didn’t come from decades of careful research. It came from a Japanese walking club and a marketing campaign in the 1960s.

A major new study has found that 7,000 steps a day dramatically cuts your risk of death and disease. And more steps bring even greater benefits.

People hitting 7,000 daily steps had a 47% lower risk of dying prematurely than those managing just 2,000 steps, plus extra protection against heart disease, cancer and dementia.

The findings come from the biggest review of step counts and health ever done. Researchers gathered data from 57 separate studies tracking more than 160,000 people for up to two decades, then combined all the results to spot patterns that individual studies might miss. This approach, called a systematic review, gives scientists much more confidence in their conclusions than any single study could.

So where did that magic 10,000 number come from? A pedometer company called Yamasa wanted to cash in on 1964 Tokyo Olympics fever. It launched a device called Manpo-kei – literally “10,000 steps meter”. The Japanese character for 10,000 resembles a walking person, while 10,000 itself is a memorable round number. It was a clever marketing choice that stuck.

At that time, there was no robust evidence for whether a target of 10,000 steps made sense. Early research suggested that jumping from a typical 3,000 to 5,000 daily steps to 10,000 would burn roughly 300 to 400 extra calories a day. So the target wasn’t completely random – just accidentally reasonable.

This latest research paper looked across a broad spectrum – not just whether people died, but heart disease, cancer, diabetes, dementia, depression and even falls. The results tell a fascinating story. Even tiny increases matter. Jump from 2,000 to 4,000 steps daily and your death risk drops by 36%. That’s a substantial improvement.

But here’s where it gets interesting. The biggest health benefits happen between zero and 7,000 steps. Beyond that, benefits keep coming, but they level off considerably. Studies have found meaningful benefits starting at just 2,517 steps per day. For some people, that could be as little as a 20-minute stroll around the block.

Age changes everything, too. If you’re over 60, you hit maximum benefits at 6,000 to 8,000 daily steps. Under 60? You need 8,000 to 10,000 steps for the same protection. Your 70-year-old neighbour gets 77% lower heart disease risk at just 4,500 steps daily.

The real secret of why fitness targets often fail? People give up on them.

Research comparing different step goals found a clear pattern. Eighty-five per cent of people stuck with 10,000 daily steps. Bump it to 12,500 steps and only 77% kept going. Push for 15,000 steps and you lose nearly a third of people.

One major study followed middle-aged adults for 11 years. Those hitting 7,000 to 9,999 steps daily had 50-70% lower death risk. But getting beyond 10,000 steps? No extra benefit. All that extra effort for nothing. Other researchers watching people over a full year saw the same thing. Step programmes worked brilliantly at first, then people slowly drifted back to old habits as targets felt unrealistic.

Most steps happen without you realising it

Here’s something that might surprise you. Most of your daily steps don’t come from structured walks or gym sessions. Eighty per cent happen during everyday activities – tidying up, walking to the car, general movement around the house.

People naturally build steps through five main routes: work (walking between meetings), commuting (those train station treks), household chores, evening strolls and tiny incidental movements. People using public transport clock up 19 minutes of walking daily just getting around.

Research has also found something else interesting. Frequent short bursts of activity work as well as longer walks. Your body doesn’t care if you get steps from one epic hike or dozens of trips up the stairs. This matters because it means you don’t need to become a completely different person. You just need to move a bit more within your existing routine.

So, what does this mean for you? Even 2,500 daily steps brings real health benefits. Push up to 4,000 and you’re in serious protection territory. Hit 7,000 and you’ve captured most of the available benefits.

For older people, those with health conditions, or anyone starting from a sedentary baseline, 7,000 steps is brilliant. It’s achievable and delivers massive health returns. But if you’re healthy and can manage more, keep going. The benefits climb all the way up to 12,000 steps daily, cutting death risk by up to 55%.

The 10,000-step target isn’t wrong exactly. It’s just not the magic threshold everyone thinks it is.

What started as a Japanese company’s clever marketing trick has accidentally become one of our most useful health tools. Decades of research have refined that original guess into something much more sophisticated: personalised targets based on your age, health and what you can actually stick to.

The real revelation? You don’t need to hit some arbitrary target to transform your health. You just need to move more than you do now. Every single step counts.

Jack McNamara does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Sweet spot for daily steps is lower than often thought, new study finds – https://theconversation.com/sweet-spot-for-daily-steps-is-lower-than-often-thought-new-study-finds-261605

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Rosa Busquets, Associate Professor, School of Life Sciences, Pharmacy and Chemistry, Kingston University

When actor Orlando Bloom revealed recently that he’d undergone a procedure to have his blood “cleaned”, many people raised eyebrows. The Pirates of the Caribbean star had turned to a treatment known as apheresis – a medical process in which blood is removed from the body, centrifuged or filtered to extract certain components, then returned in an attempt to flush out microplastics and other toxins.

Apheresis is typically used to treat conditions such as autoimmune diseases or abnormally high levels of blood cells or proteins. Its use as a detox for microplastics, however, is scientifically unproven.

Still, Bloom said he suspected his body had absorbed plastic through daily exposure, and wanted it out of his system.

He’s probably right about the exposure. Scientists have found microplastics – tiny plastic fragments less than 5mm in size – in our air, water, soil, food and even inside human tissue. But when it comes to removing them from the bloodstream, that’s where the science gets murky.

As researchers studying microplastic contamination, we’ve examined this issue in the context of dialysis – a life-saving treatment for patients with kidney failure. Dialysis filters waste products like urea and creatinine from the blood, regulates electrolytes, removes excess fluid and helps maintain blood pressure.

But our study found that while dialysis is a medical marvel, it can also have an ironic downside: it could be introducing microplastics into the bloodstream. In some cases, we found that patients undergoing dialysis were being exposed to microplastics during treatment due to the breakdown of plastic components in the equipment – a troubling contradiction for a procedure designed to cleanse the blood.

Apheresis is closely related to dialysis: both involve drawing blood from the body, circulating it through plastic tubing and filters, then returning it – so both procedures carry a similar risk of introducing microplastics from the equipment into the bloodstream.

What are microplastics?

Microplastics are plastic particles that range in size from about 5mm (roughly the length of a grain of rice) down to 0.1 microns – smaller than a red blood cell.

Some microplastics are manufactured deliberately, like the plastic microbeads once common in facial scrubs. Others form when larger plastic objects degrade over time due to sunlight, friction, or physical stress.

They’re everywhere: in the food we eat, air we breathe and water we drink. Plastic packaging, synthetic clothing such as polyester, and even artificial lawns contribute to the spread. Car tyres shed plastic particles as they wear down, and food heated or stored in plastic containers may leach microplastics.

One estimate suggests the average adult may ingest around 883 microplastic particles – over half a microgramme – per day.

So far, large-scale epidemiological studies have not established an association between microplastic exposure and specific diseases. Such studies are needed, but yet to be completed.

However, early research suggests that microplastics may be associated with inflammation, cardiovascular conditions, and DNA damage – a potential pathway to cancer.

What remains unclear is how microplastics behave inside the body: whether they accumulate, how they interact with tissues, and how (or if) the body clears them.

The irony of filtration

It’s tempting to believe, as Bloom seems to, that we can simply “clean” the blood, like draining pasta or purifying drinking water. Just as a sieve filters water from pasta, dialysis machines do filter blood – but using far more complex and delicate systems.

These machines rely on plastic components, including tubes, membranes and filters, which are exposed to sustained pressure and repeated use. Unlike stainless steel, these materials can degrade over time, potentially shedding microplastics directly into the bloodstream.

Currently, there is no published scientific evidence that microplastics can be effectively filtered from human blood. So, claims that dialysis or other treatments can remove them should be viewed with scepticism, especially when the filtration systems themselves are made of plastic.

While it’s tempting to chase quick fixes or celebrity-endorsed cleanses, we are still in the early stages of understanding what microplastics are doing to our bodies – and how to get rid of them. Rather than focusing solely on ways to flush plastics from the bloodstream, the more effective long-term strategy may be reducing our exposure in the first place.

Bloom’s story taps into a growing public unease: we all know we’re carrying the burden of plastic. But addressing it requires more than wellness trends: it calls for rigorous science, tougher regulation, and a shift away from our reliance on plastic in daily life.

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Rosa Busquets receives funding from UKRI, in a UKRI/ Horizons Staff exchanges Clean Water project (101131182). She is honorary Associate Professor at UCL and Honorary Professor at Al-Farabi Kazakh National University. She is panel member of the UNEP EEAP, where is work group lead in a field that includes microplastics. She is also funded by DASA.

Luiza C Campos is a Professor of Environmental Engineering at University College London.

– ref. Orlando Bloom tried to ‘clean’ his blood to get rid of microplastics – here’s what the science says – https://theconversation.com/orlando-bloom-tried-to-clean-his-blood-to-get-rid-of-microplastics-heres-what-the-science-says-261203

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Valentina Rossi, Postdoctoral researcher, Palaeontology, University College Cork

A delicate, innocuous little fossil reptile known as Mirasaura grauvogeli – “Grauvogel’s wonder reptile” – is forcing a rethink about the evolution of skin and its appendages such as feathers and hair.

These newly discovered fossils, from the Middle Triassic (247 million years old)
Grès à Voltzia site in northeast France, preserve evidence of some of the most astonishing soft-tissue features described to date in ancient reptiles. We are two of the authors of a new paper on these finds, published in Nature.

These fossils show that the tree dwelling Mirasaura had a large and startling crest along its back. The crest is formed by elongated appendages that are neither scales, feathers nor hair.

Until now, complex skin outgrowths such as feathers were thought to have evolved only much later – in birds, dinosaurs and pterosaurs. This probably occurred through a single origin in the common ancestor of these animals. In all other types of reptile, the only skin outgrowths present are scales.

Mirasaura has overthrown this paradigm in sensational fashion. Compared with the size of its body, the long blades of its tall dorsal crest are enormous. Closer inspection reveals this crest comprised individual, overlapping appendages, each with a narrow central ridge and a lobed outline, similar to the shaft and form of feathers.

However, the fossil structures seem to lack the fine branching architecture that characterises most feathers in modern birds. What’s more, Mirasaura is not related to birds, dinosaurs or pterosaurs, but instead belongs to a very ancient group of reptiles, the drepanosauromorphs, that are known only from the Triassic.

The soft tissues of Mirasaura are preserved as a thin brown film, rich in fossil melanosomes – cell structures that contain the pigment melanin during life. Research by our team at University College Cork and others has revealed widespread preservation of fossilised melanosomes in ancient vertebrates. These pigment granules can actually be used to reconstruct melanin-based colour patterns in extinct animals.

Our team’s research has shown that fossil melanosomes can also help reconstruct the soft tissue anatomy of fossil animals, because melanosomes from different body tissues have different shapes and sizes. Our comprehensive examination of the fossilised soft tissues in Mirasaura, coupled with rigorous statistical analysis of the preserved melanosomes, reveals that their geometry is consistent with melanosomes in feathers, but not with melanosomes found in hair and in reptilian skin. This strongly suggests the Mirasaura skin appendages share common developmental features with feathers.

Were the Mirasaura structures feathers, then? The solid, continuous blade of soft tissues either side of the central shaft shows no evidence for branching, which is a defining characteristic of most feathers in birds, dinosaurs and pterosaurs. The water is muddied, however, by the simple unbranched structure of some peculiar feathers in birds – such as the bristles of the turkey’s “beard”. Similar unbranched filaments are known in many dinosaurs and pterosaurs, and are widely considered to represent simple feathers.

Certain dinosaur fossils even have flattened, strip-like feathers that lack branching but possess a central shaft, considered by some experts to be an unusual – extinct – feather type. Whether the resemblance between these fossil structures and the Mirasaura skin outgrowths is superficial or belies closer evolutionary ties remains to be seen.

Intriguingly, research on the developing chick embryo shows that feathers can lose their branched structure when certain genes are manipulated. We are currently examining in greater detail the morphology and composition of the Mirasaura structures to help us interpret their anatomy more definitively.

Irrespective of what type of skin outgrowth they represent, our analyses of the anatomy of Mirasaura consistently position it, as well as other drepanosauromorph reptiles, at the base of the reptile tree. This supports data from developmental biology indicating that the genetic basis for the growth of complex skin appendages probably originated in the Carboniferous period, over 300 million years ago.

Mirasaura therefore provides the first direct evidence that complex skin appendages did appear early during reptile evolution, and are not unique to pterosaurs, birds and other dinosaurs.

We owe these new insights to painstaking conservation efforts, which serve as a reminder of the critical importance of natural history collections in conserving our natural heritage.

The earliest discoveries of Mirasaura remains were unearthed in the 1930s by fossil collector Louis Grauvogel. After decades in the Grauvogel family, these specimens were donated to the State Museum of Natural History Stuttgart in 2019, where careful preparation revealed their true significance.

Now, the Mirasaura specimens force us to accept that even before the age of dinosaurs, reptiles were evolving striking anatomical traits normally associated with much younger fossils. This adds an intriguing dimension to future research into the origins of feathers, prompting palaeontologists to consider fossils from more diverse reptile groups – and from time periods before the appearance of dinosaurs and their direct ancestors.

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Valentina Rossi research is funded by the European Research Council. She is affiliated with University College Cork (UCC)

Maria McNamara receives funding from the European Research Council and Research Ireland.

– ref. Mysterious fossil may rewrite story of skin and feather evolution in reptiles – https://theconversation.com/mysterious-fossil-may-rewrite-story-of-skin-and-feather-evolution-in-reptiles-261695

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Rebecca Anne Barr, Associate Professor in English Literature, University of Cambridge

British satirist Cold War Steve has published a series of images based on the British painter William Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress (1733-35). Hogarth’s 18th-century original charts the catastrophic decline of an affluent young man, Tom Rakewell. Cold War Steve’s 2025 reimagining substitutes the foolish rake with the US president, Donald Trump.

Hogarth’s eight densely packed images are a forerunner of the modern comic script, a kind of condensed graphic novel. The works swarm with life and hidden meanings for viewers to decode.

Tom starts out in high life, flashing his cash and enjoying himself. But he is rapidly drawn into a vortex of late-night drinking, gambling and prostitution. Desperate to save himself from extreme poverty, he sells himself in marriage to an older woman (no cougar, alas, but a rather decrepit heiress).

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But he still cannot control his behaviour. Tom is eventually imprisoned for debt, loses his mind – either to syphilis or sorrow – and dies in Bedlam, the notorious 18th-century madhouse.

Hugely popular and culturally influential, A Rake’s Progress is a modern morality tale. It’s a warning against the perils of self-indulgence, and a devastating critique of those too wealthy and foolish to care about the damage they do.

Political satire as tragicomedy

Keeping close to the original narrative, Cold War Steve uses the 18th-century paintings as backdrops, while altering the object of the satire by making Trump the main target. Renamed Trump’s Progress, this is a pointed political satire, directed at those in power.

Steve’s is a 21st-century reimagining, not a pious homage. Instead, Trump’s Progress has an irreverent punk aesthetic: a horde of Trump-supporting celebrities (such as Don King, Hulk Hogan and Liberace) are photoshopped into his digital canvases, cavorting crazily alongside Trump as he moves from his immense wealth to political pre-eminence.

Both funny and dark, this is political satire as tragicomedy. The contemporary satirist takes Hogarth as precedent, suggesting a bad end lies in store for the president.

Just as the 18th-century rake ends up in the madhouse, Cold War Steve ends his sequence with an aged Trump lying in a prison cell. Trump is tended to by Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his daughter Ivanka, while his other erstwhile friends look less than pleased to be incarcerated along with him.

Hogarth was a key figure in 18th-century culture. His images of late-night drunkenness , sleazy politicians, and the cheek-by-jowl of luxury living and extreme poverty encapsulated the irrepressible messiness of modern life.

Hogarth reflected Britain’s aspirations to liberty and progress, but also its ongoing struggles with consumerism, luxury, corruption, and greed. These are issues that dominate our present day too, and give Hogarth’s satires an urgent and unsettling relevance.

This is not the first time Cold War Steve has used historical images from the 18th century to indict the present. In a recent article, I explored how Hogarth became a powerful visual source for the satirist during the COVID-19 crisis.

In May 2020, Steve published an update of Hogarth’s famous print, Gin Lane. The original shows London as a drunken dystopia, as the poor turned to cheap imported gin to ease their daily grind.

But Cold War Steve’s version dramatically altered the image’s moral message. By populating the city street with members of the Tory party and Britain’s business elite, he accused the government of gross moral negligence in treating the pandemic as an opportunity to make money.

The choice of Hogarth is not accidental. Not merely familiar to students of art history, Hogarth has a cultural legibility that makes his work an influential satirical template for artists who want to comment on the social malaise of their times.

Being in conversation with Hogarth gives contemporary works added gravitas. The veteran cartoonist Steve Bell created numerous parodies of Hogarth throughout his time at the Guardian and other publications.

In 2016, English artist Thomas Moore created a version in which the 18th-century gin craze has been replaced by the obesity epidemic. Hogarth’s impoverished city street is now full of fast food shops, pubs and pawnbrokers. The manic energy and cultural anxiety of Hogarth’s satires resonates with our own accelerated culture and widespread sense of moral and social decline.

In his study of the cultural afterlives of the 18th century, scholar James Ward has shown that postmodern popular culture often invokes Hogarth to question the assumption that our distance from the past is the same as progress.

By splicing together images of the past with the present, Cold War Steve’s visual satires make the serious political point that society has failed to progress since the enlightenment. In his eyes, the vices that Hogarth showed ravaging his society are still part of a culture of political shamelessness, personified by Trump.

Steve’s energetically subversive reworking of 18th-century material shows how Hogarth’s satires continue to be understood and appreciated by diverse audiences.

Former prime minister Boris Johnson portrayed Hogarth as a patriotic British product. But by successfully translating Hogarth’s satires for a transatlantic audience, Cold War Steve shows that his appeal transcends both national and political divides. Current politics might be almost beyond parody on both sides of the pond, but Steve’s bleak humour shows us that satire is thriving.

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Rebecca Anne Barr does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Trump takes lead role in Cold War Steve’s reimagining of Hogarth’s 18th-century satire, The Rake’s Progess – https://theconversation.com/trump-takes-lead-role-in-cold-war-steves-reimagining-of-hogarths-18th-century-satire-the-rakes-progess-261701

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Nando Sigona, Professor of International Migration and Forced Displacement and Director of the Institute for Research into International Migration and Superdiversity, University of Birmingham

The letter that arrived for eleven-year-old Guilherme in June 2025 was addressed personally to him. The UK Home Office was informing him that he and his eight-year-old brother Luca must return to Brazil. Their parents, an academic and a senior NHS nurse, both long-term UK residents with valid visas were not included in the order.

“Whilst this may involve a degree of disruption in family life,” the letter stated, “this is considered to be proportionate to the legitimate aim of maintaining effective immigration control.”

The family’s difficulties with the Home Office began after the parents divorced a few years after arriving in the UK. Mother and children arrived in the UK as dependants on the father’s visa. After the divorce, the mother secured her own skilled worker visa, while the father was granted indefinite leave to remain in 2024.

Under current rules, skilled workers must wait five years before applying for settlement. For the children to qualify for settlement, both parents must be settled or one must have sole responsibility – neither condition applies here. Only after media attention did the Home Office reconsider the decision.

This case is just the latest example of how barriers to migrants’ family life are embedded in the UK’s immigration system – something I have been studying for years. The Labour government’s recently announced immigration plans extend and bolster these barriers.

Current rules require migrants to earn at least £29,000 to sponsor a spouse or child – a figure set to rise to £38,700 in early 2026 after changes introduced by the last government. The newest immigration plans propose doubling the path to settlement from five to ten years. And they restrict the rights to family reunion to only “nuclear” families: divorced parents, adult children and extended kin are left out.

These changes are aimed at reducing migration and restoring “public trust”. But in practice, they make family unity a luxury — harder to achieve for low-paid migrant workers and even for working-class British citizens with foreign partners.

Read more:
‘Just the rich can do it’: our research shows how immigration income requirements devastate families

The price of family life

Recent research my colleagues and I conducted — based on over 50 interviews with migrant domestic and food delivery workers and other experts — shows how the immigration system fractures families and puts children at risk.

Faith, a Zimbabwean domestic worker, explained how she was unable to bring her eldest daughter to the UK due to age restrictions on dependant visas. Her daughter was later trafficked into the UK and, though she eventually rejoined her mother, hasn’t recovered from the trauma of separation: “She’s struggling to sleep, can’t eat … always emotional, saying she feels dizzy, scared to be around people.”

Faith had been trapped in an abusive relationship for a long time because her visa was tied to her partner. When she eventually left her partner, her visa was withdrawn – leaving her in breach of immigration rules. Her younger child was placed in care while Faith was detained for breaching the terms of her visa.

Jamal, a food delivery rider from Eritrea, had a similar experience of legal dependency. He came to the UK on a dependant visa linked to his British wife. After their relationship deteriorated, his ability to remain in the country was threatened: “If we have problems, she can cancel my visa. This was her weapon.”

Susan, a Zimbabwean woman working in the care and cleaning sector, moved to the UK to look after her adult daughter who had cancer. When her six month visitor visa expired, she applied for asylum, but her application was refused and eventually she was detained for almost a month.

She faced deportation but was released after a legal aid lawyer helped her submit strong evidence of her daughter’s condition. Reflecting on her experience, she explained: “When it benefits them, they say I’ve had no contact [with my family in the UK]. When they want to deport me, they say I have family to return to [in Zimbabwe].”

Immigration status doesn’t just define one’s own legal position, it can determine who gets the right to have a family in the UK and who does not. While some of our interviewees secured status through a partner’s EU citizenship and reunited with family members already in the UK, others who rely on temporary visas are excluded.

Changes to the immigration in recent years have placed a higher value on how migrants can contribute or provide “value” – seeing them as workers (or students) first, not members of families. Many are allowed in the UK for a limited time and without the right to bring with them even the closest family members. The effect is particularly harsh on women in domestic work, whose visas are short-term and not renewable.

Many interviewees reported that immigration barriers delayed or obstructed their children’s education or healthcare. Samantha’s daughter waited over two months for a school placement because their legal status was still pending. Adriana was charged £8,000 for NHS maternity services because of her undocumented status, which restricts access to free healthcare to GP and emergency care.

Even in less extreme cases, legal insecurity takes a toll. Children grow up hearing their parents talk about “papers”, “Home Office letters” or the risk of being “sent back”.

That the Home Office sent a removal letter to an eleven-year-old is not a clerical error. It is the system working as designed. And even when public outrage forces a reversal — as in Guilherme’s case — the wider machinery of enforcement continues.

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Nando Sigona is Scientific Coordinator of “Improving the Living and Working Conditions of Irregularised Migrant Households in Europe” (www.i-claim.eu), a three-year six-country research project, funded by the European Commission’s Horizon Europe and UKRI.

– ref. How the UK’s immigration system splits families apart – by design – https://theconversation.com/how-the-uks-immigration-system-splits-families-apart-by-design-261134

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Colleen Murrell, Chair of the Editorial Board, and Full Professor in Journalism, Dublin City University

Donald Trump’s campaign against the “fake news” media continues largely unchecked, with a decision that is expected to reduce reporting and close down some local news stations around the US.

This follows a House of Representatives decision on July 18 to agree with the Senate and slash US$1.1 billion (£813 million) funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which manages the money for National Public Radio (NPR), the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and their member stations. These cuts will affect the next two years of their operations.

There are fears that some local and rural stations will be forced to lay off staff and may even have to close, if they haven’t amassed significant cash reserves or receive other funding. Don Dunlap, the president of KEDT-TV/FM in Texas, said in an interview: “There are ten public TV stations in Texas, and we’re thinking probably six of them will close down within a year.”

Experts are warning that in national emergencies such as wild fires and floods, local news media are “absolutely essential services” – and that they may not be able to help keep citizens well informed in future. “Nearly three-in-four Americans say they rely on their public radio stations for alerts and news for their public safety,” NPR’s CEO Katherine Maher said .

Trump has had these media outlets in his sights for a while, claiming they are a waste of taxpayers’ money and are ideologically biased against Republicans – a claim denied by NPR and PBS.

Read more:
PBS and NPR are generally unbiased, independent of government propaganda and provide key benefits to US democracy

Public broadcasting regularly sends out alerts related to extreme weather and emergency news. This appears particularly pertinent after the recent Texas floods which killed 135 people. Kate Riley, CEO of America’s Public Television Stations, said local news outlets provide “essential lifesaving public safety services, proven educational services and community connections to their communities every day for free”.

Republican senator from Alaska Lisa Murkowski said she recently received a tsunami warning from her local radio station after an earthquake. Murkowski has tried to introduce an amendment to reduce the cuts to local stations.

The more-than-1,000 NPR stations around the US are vulnerable precisely because significant funding comes from federal sources. According to figures from news organisation Politico: “Approximately 19% of NPR member stations count on CPB funding for at least 30% of their revenue.”

Ed Ulman, president and CEO of Alaska Public Media, told Politico that over a third of public media stations in his state will shut down “within three-to-six months”. He has begun a renewed public funding campaign on social media.

Even at well-funded TV stations such as Arizona PBS, owned by Arizona State University and run by its Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communications, some curtailing of plans is afoot. The station provides daily programming to the region, and has trained generations of journalism students to enter careers in TV and radio. Following the announcement of these federal cuts, I spoke to Scott Woelfel, the station’s general manager, who said:

Arizona PBS will lose about US$2.3 million per year over the next two years. That represents around 13% of our total budget. While that is a significant percentage, its loss will not prevent us from operating. In fact, we prepared a reduced budget in the likely event that the rescission would occur, and have been operating under it since July 1 … It contains cuts across the board in an equal amount to the lost revenue.

Following these federal cuts, 60% of the station’s funding will derive from charitable giving, 16% from corporate support and a further 24% from state grants for education services. Woelfel doesn’t plan on making any staff cuts, but said some unstaffed positions will remain open indefinitely – and that the station will be “delaying major new initiatives until new funding is found”.

What happens next?

Overall, these cuts are likely to create additional “news deserts” – regions of the US which don’t have access to important local news and information.

After President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 into law to give funds to public broadcasting, he said: “While we work every day to produce new goods and to create new wealth, we want most of all to enrich man’s spirit. That is the purpose of this act.” But such touching sentiments now seem old-school in this era of Trump’s loud media wars.

In the past week, the US president has also announced he would sue “the ass off” Rupert Murdoch, founder of News Corp, and the Wall Street Journal, which News Corp owns. This follows the WSJ’s publication of a story concerning a 2003 birthday letter framed around the outline of a naked woman that Trump allegedly sent to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Trump said the letter was fake. His US$10 billion lawsuit also takes in the WSJ’s owner, Dow Jones, and two of its reporters.

As Trump pushes forward with significant changes to the media landscape, he is no doubt hoping that friendly television stations such as Fox News – also a part of Murdoch’s empire – as well as his influencer following will stay loyal to his brand.

His Maga followers will undoubtedly be supportive of budget cuts and his anti-PBS and NPR statements. But when it comes to reporting from a flood or fire, influencers tend not to be on the ground supplying local residents with up-to-date information. Voters may find those important, and sometimes life-saving, services hard to replace.

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Colleen Murrell received funding from Irish regulator Coimisiún na Meán (2021-4) for research for the annual Reuters Digital News Report Ireland.

– ref. Trump’s budget cuts could shut down local news outlets and reduce reporting on emergencies – https://theconversation.com/trumps-budget-cuts-could-shut-down-local-news-outlets-and-reduce-reporting-on-emergencies-261493