Christopher Schroeder

Category: community and culture

  • A Better Response?

    WBEZ as was predicted held a pop-up fundraiser this week.

    This station and National Public Radio have been citing the $1.1 billion loss to their member stations. This money had already been authorized for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and included in member station budgets, but Congress at Trump’s request eliminated this funding as a part of its recent recision.

    In response, too many public media representatives are talking about losses by focusing on the economic effects. Too few are offering inspiring, imaginative, and innovative visions of the way that public media will continue to exist.

    The problem isn’t acknowledging the economic effects, which is understandable. Rather, it’s that only doing so is failing the public at the time it most needs public media.

    These cuts have been threatened for years. This attempt increasingly seemed likely to be the one when conservatives withdrew public funding.

    Public media representatives in other words have had ample opportunity over many years to envision alternatives, and the worst has happened, which is actually an opportunity. Now is the time to offer an independent and bold vision for the future of public media not just to reassure existing donors but also to attract new supporters.

    I would actually welcome a forceful articulation for full public funding (e.g., McChesney 2008). At the very least, I encourage public media leaders to offer bold reimagings of public media today.

    Such an approach would transform what the current administration and congressional Republicans expect to be a devastating cost into a potential catalyst for greater independence. As such, it would announce that public media will no longer be dependent upon political whims.

    These observations come from a strong public media supporter. My biggest donations for example go to WBEZ, and I switched newspaper subscriptions after Chicago Public Media announced its new partnership with the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper.

    That explains my dismay over a recent Sun-Times subscriber survey. This request asked for feedback about which scenarios, such as fewer publication days or less opinion writing, would cause us to cancel our subscriptions.

    These seemingly fearful responses offer the wrong, and opposite, message. Public media are needed today perhaps more than ever.

    Facts are increasingly threatened. The information environment is increasingly polluted. Reason, deliberation, and other democratic, and American, values are endangered species.

    Leading in good times is easier. Leading in challenging times however offers good leaders chances at greatness.

    These public media leaders must speak to all of us, including existing donors and the general public. They must encourage us to imagine with them a better public media tomorrow.

    That is how I hope we endure the challenges confronting public media today.

  • Play Ball

    Baseball begins again today.

    The All-Star break for many fans is the unofficial halfway point in the season. The actual midway point at least for the Chicago Cubs came fifteen games earlier.

    The Cubs entered the break in the NL Central first place. This team also has the second-best NL record, and the third-best of all MLB teams, and three Cubs players were chosen for the all-star team.

    Most teams know by this point whether they’re sellers or buyers before the trade deadline later this month although the current wild card format can complicate such conclusions. Regardless, all teams have a few more days to lock their rosters for the remainder of this season.

    These all-star breaks always surprise me. Teams have had occasional off-days, so that isn’t the issue. Rather, it’s the accumulative five days total that seems so significant.

    Days one and two require me to find something else to structure my days. Day three or four usually finds me thinking beyond baseball, and the days after the season ends.

    That for most teams usually comes in September, which always feels too soon. Some teams will play into October, but the rest are storing equipment, washing uniforms, and doing whatever else must be done, including spending their days somewhere besides baseball stadiums.

    All teams will be done, and dormant, by the middle of November as the Midwestern air carries a consistent chill, the mornings bite a bit, and summer shorts are also washed, folded, and shelved. Halloween will have given way to Thanksgiving, which is followed by the Christmas and New Year’s holidays.

    The next two months are usually barren, fallow times. Little pulls my attention beyond the walls of warm buildings, where I spend most of my time.

    My mind will eventually return to baseball. At some point, I’ll count the weeks until pitchers and catchers report, which I will dutifully report.

    That and more I know is soon to come. For now, the season resumes, which will be enough.

    Players return to diamonds and roadtrips. Some, like the Cubs, will count every win and loss, which will be compared other teams’. Others, such as the Chicago White Sox, will count the number of games until the 162 merciful conclusion.

    Only a few teams will amass enough wins — that once was 100 but often fewer will do — to get into the playoffs. At that point, most bets are off, or at least must be reconsidered.

    And once again I’ve been reminded that all this ends, that this too shall pass, and that baseball season one day at least for me will never begin again. I might not know when that will be but can be confident that it will occur, which is a useful reminder, especially this year as I consider an encore career or complete retirement.

    This break reminds me that none of this lasts forever, and that today is all that matters. That is terrifying yet invigorating, somehow melancholic and beautiful at the same time.

    And I can root for the Cubs again today, return to Wrigley once the days cool, and this year reclaim my hope for October baseball once more.

  • Quite Careless Indeed

    Sarah Wynn-Williams’s (2025) book Careless People is offered as a memoir of her six years at Meta (Facebook), but it focuses as much on the people whose decisions created this company, such as Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and Joel Kaplan, who was reportedly hired to appease the Trump administration.

    Wynn-Williams, a former New Zealand diplomat, wanted to work for Facebook she explains because she believed in its potential and its power. She also recognized that this company needed a global perspective to maximize this potential for positive impact, and was eventually offered a position, which she developed in a way that allowed her to become central to its global policies.

    This focus as much as anything explains the emergency injunction won by Meta to prevent Wynn-Williams from promoting her book although that according to some only increased its sales. If so, this response obviously backfired, but that likely means more money for Wynn-Williams but does not increase the likelihood of the public benefits she once identified.

    Wynn-Williams generally knows how to tell engaging stories. Some moments are uneven, but many are engaging. I consistently wondered what happened next, and what some of these powerful yet peculiar people would say or do.

    She also if this account is accurate has admirable attributes, such as confidence, motivation, and resilience. These seem even more so in contrast with her shortcomings that she details, such as the time she stopped in the middle of labor with her feet in the stirrups to draft a requested talking points memo, and insisted despite her husband’s and doctor’s requests upon sending it before returning to the task at hand.

    This and other moments might make some question Wynn-Williams’s judgment. Perhaps most alarming was her willingness to stay in her position despite the political, social, and individual harm, such as blatant sexual harassment, that she witnessed and even experienced. These decisions some could suggest might have condoned such conditions no matter how often she cited the need of her family for health care or any increased capacity to change the company as a company insider.

    Wynn-Williams’s relationship with Meta ends when she is fired. She insists that she had wanted to leave and had been searching for another job, but some might wonder whether she would have ever left on her own volition. Such critics could cite her decision to relocate reportedly at Zuckerberg’s request, which as she admits affects not just her but also her family, or her concerns about the economic consequences if she did.

    Wynn-Williams also offers what could be considered a cautionary tale for those who might still be techno-optimists. She isn’t wrong to imagine the potential power in social media and other digital technologies. At the same time, she depicts the risks of being naive about surveillance capitalism, and especially its ability to disable this potential and exploit users.

    That perhaps is a bigger problem. Despite her engaging stories, she hasn’t provided a narrative. Many moments are engaging although according to some contain little new information, but these together are never quite connected into a sequence of events that ultimately offers useful insight about not just this author but also if readers are lucky the times or world in which we live.

    This flaw can be found even in its title, which refers to Tom and Daisy and their relationship in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1925) canonical The Great Gatsby. In it, Tom and Daisy are indeed careless, and even entitled, but Mark, Sheryl, and Joel in contrast seem more than careless, and rather self-absorbed, exploitative, and even ruthless in this book.

    A question I have after reading it is whether Wynn-Williams could be considered part of this problem.