Once in a while, I go back and reread Timothy Noah’s “Washington Is Not a Swamp” (The New Republic, February 10, 2022)—his essay in praise of the multitude of workers who have staffed the U.S. capital’s public sector agencies and affiliated nonprofits since FDR’s era. I also just started reading Michael Lewis’s Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service. Both writers make the case for the purpose and virtue of public servants who are now vilified by some as a wasteful, deep-state enemy, and dismissed by others as ineffectual gatekeepers controlling access to opportunities and resources.

Their purpose and virtue extend far beyond D.C., to state and local public sector workers throughout the U.S and in many countries. I’ve never quite been part of that culture, but I’ve aspired to its values—and I’ve been close to it through my roles at public universities and government museums, as I am now at IDA.

Documentary filmmaking has been more entwined with the public sector than any other art form (except monumental sculpture, perhaps). Public institutions have been vital in the production and dissemination of documentaries throughout the history of our field. There will always be stories that cannot and should not be commercial, and as such, will depend on institutions of public culture and media. Those institutions are not meant primarily to serve filmmakers; rather, filmmakers and institutions are collaborators in the public interest. We are right to demand a lot from cultural institutions, especially public ones, because they belong to us, as audiences and as citizens.

Ideally, our demands drive positive change, helping public institutions become better versions of themselves—more aligned with their missions and more fit for purpose over time. This is how the process is supposed to work: through sustained engagement and accountability, institutions evolve to meet the needs they were created to serve. But that is not what is happening now, for example, in the United States. It may not be possible now. After decades of attempts by politicians to defund public institutions of arts and media, the risk to those institutions has become existential, and we all need to choose how to respond.

This year, many have been reading and citing Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. The first lesson is “Do Not Obey in Advance,” but as a friend in the documentary field recently reminded me, the second lesson is “Defend Institutions.” Snyder writes:

It is institutions that help us to preserve decency. They need our help as well. Do not speak of “our institutions” unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions do not protect themselves.

Many of our institutions of public culture were founded in certain democracies, under particular, contingent, and unrepeatable historical conditions, in the first decades after WWII. Two things can now be true: (1) given the demands of our present moment, these institutions may not currently be what we need them to be, and (2) if we lose them, we will never get them back.

IDA is a member of the coalition Protect My Public Media. Join us, and, if you’re in the United States, add your voice to the defense of our public media institutions.