Support public media

Healthy communities stand on a foundation of trust. Trust springs from knowing your neighbors and their concerns, knowing that officials and institutions are honest and reliable, and knowing there are forums where your voice can be heard. Trustworthy information is vital in emergencies. Trustworthy journalism is essential when change comes so fast it’s hard to keep up.

For decades, New Hampshire Public Radio and New Hampshire PBS have earned Granite Staters’ trust by delivering independent journalism, emergency services, and educational and public affairs programming. Always for free. Always in the public interest. Filling gaps that commercial media cannot address.

Now, though, these bedrock New Hampshire institutions are at grave risk.

The White House wants to eliminate federal support for public media. Congress will vote soon on a proposal to slash millions from NHPR and NHPBS’ budgets. About 6% of NHPR’s annual budget and 18% of NHPBS’ is at risk. This funding sustains our statewide emergency alert system, local watchdog reporting and shows like Morning Edition, PBS News Hour, Granite State Challenge, and Civics 101.

These cuts would deliver a devastating blow to public media nationwide and to local news, information and educational services that hundreds of thousands of New Hampshirites rely on. And while NHPR and NHPBS are hardly the only institutions facing steep reductions, we are the ones that keep Granite Staters informed about the scope of change and its effects on you.

Now is the time to speak up for public media. Talk to your friends and family about the value public media brings to your life and your community. Raise your voice by contacting your representatives in Washington. Go to ProtectMyPublicMedia.org to find easy links.

A free press is essential to a healthy democracy. Together we can keep New Hampshire strong.

Jim Schachter and Peter Frid

The writers are president and CEO of New Hampshire Public Radio and president and CEO of New Hampshire PBS, respectively.

A model for kidnapping

I have a fear about the model ICE agents have been using to arrest people — unmarked cars, no personal identification on uniform for the public to see, sometimes masked, often hooded, individual arrested without Miranda rights is immediately shackled, placed in the unmarked car and whisked off to somewhere unknown to anyone who might know them including their family or legal representation.

What is to stop human traffickers, or anyone really, from following the same model? People observing the “arrest” will assume they are ICE agents. All the traffickers need do is target someone who looks Hispanic or Middle Eastern.

Michael Saracino

Claremont

The issue of our time

Because we have elected to the most powerful position in the world a narcissist bereft of conscience and empathy but endowed with boundless arrogance, and because this man is running roughshod over the planet, we are beset with an array of daunting problems — including the threat of serious damage to our environment. But global warming, the great overarching issue of our time, was hardly a consideration in that election.

In his book “If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal,” Justin Gregg employs the phrase “prognostic myopia” to describe the idea that while humans are capable of making predictions about the future, we are conditioned by evolution to focus on the present. Does that explain why so many people are blithely carrying on their lives as usual, seemingly oblivious to our climate emergency and the prospect that their grandchildren will exist in a hellscape? We seem to lack concern about our personal contributions to global warming and lack the commitment to fight collectively to save our environment. History will not be kind to us.

David M. Lemal

Norwich