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In December 1973 the public television current affairs programme, The Open Mind, held a special edition devoted to what its main guest, the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr, dubbed the “imperial presidency”.

The televised roundtable discussion was well timed. Escalating oil prices from the Opec crisis were wreaking havoc with the global economy, the Watergate scandal was blazing in Washington, and Richard Nixon was looking increasingly Richard II-like in the Oval Office as he attempted to pull off what Schlesinger called an “escape from accountability”.

Fast forward to today, and it is hard not to feel trapped in deja vu. Oil prices have spiked again, the Epstein scandal is reverberating, and there is a new imperial president in the White House displaying utter disdain for norms of accountability, from snatching national leaders and launching wars without congressional licence to threatening the rule of law itself.

The return of the imperial president poses both a challenge and an opportunity for the show on which that 1973 discussion took place: The Open Mind. As it approaches its 70th anniversary next month, it stands as the polar opposite of Donald Trump and his Maga revolution.

One way of thinking about The Open Mind is to see it as a sort of media representation of Michelle Obama’s refrain: “When they go low, we go high.” Where Trump communicates through erratic all caps posts on his Truth Social feed, The Open Mind deals in unashamedly low-key conversation and in-depth policy debate.

While Trump unleashes justice department prosecutions against his political enemies, rejoicing at the death of the former FBI director Robert Mueller, The Open Mind tries to bridge the partisan divide and revive what residual consensus and mutual respect remains. It is as calm as Trump is shrill, and as contemplative as the president is impulsive.

If that sounds old school, that’s because it is. The Open Mind has been serving up its recipe of sarcasm-free, reflective discourse for seven decades with remarkably little change in formula.

If longevity is any measurement of success, it has worked. The show is the longest-running series in the history of American public media, predating even the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and its radio equivalent, NPR.

Only five existing TV news reports can boast a longer run – Today on NBC, the same network’s Meet the Press, CBS News’s Face the Nation, and the nightly news programs on CBS and ABC.

In today’s fast-moving and ever-changing media environment, such endurance is remarkable. So how has it done it?

How has The Open Mind’s fusion of what the media writer Margaret Sullivan has called “low-snark and high substance” survived for so long, even as the world around it has fragmented into so many 30-second TikTok videos?

I put the question to Alexander Heffner, the show’s current host and only the second in its 70-year history. Being the front guy of The Open Mind, it should be no surprise that his answer is not confined to an easy soundbite.

“I think it’s a combination. Our initial mission still stands, arguably more so now than ever before,” he says.

“And on top of that the show has prescience. We try to grasp the importance of modern trends early, whether it was Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement in the 1950s, pandemic preparedness 10 years ago, or the rise of populism today.”

The mission to which he is referring was coined by the founder and first host of The Open Mind who happens to have been Alexander’s grandfather, Richard Heffner. He helmed the program for almost six decades until his death in 2013, at which point the show passed like a stately home to the grandson.

The elder Heffner set the ambition of the show when he launched it on 7 May 1956 with a discussion – aptly as it now seems – on the powers and problems of the presidency. The debut was broadcast in the midst of the re-election bid by incumbent president Dwight Eisenhower and his vice-president, one Richard Nixon.

Born in the infancy of television itself, The Open Mind can claim several seminal moments of the fledgling medium. It convened the first broadcast interview with King in February 1957, just as the pastor from Montgomery, Alabama, and leader of its bus boycott was starting to emerge on to the national stage.

Among its other groundbreaking broadcasts, Malcolm X was a guest in 1963, Gloria Steinem spoke on feminism in 1983, and George Soros described the joys of being a billionaire giving away his money in 1997.

After the younger Alexander Heffner succeeded as host he carried on the tradition, with conversations with Bernie Sanders on inequality a month before the Vermont senator announced his first presidential run in 2015, and John Fetterman talking about rust-belt populism while the now senator from Pennsylvania was still mayor of Braddock (population 1,700) in 2017.

Richard Heffner set out the vision of the show at the very beginning in eight carefully chosen words. You will still find them to this day emblazoned as the catchphrase on its website: “A thoughtful excursion into the world of ideas.”

“That’s what we’ve been testing all these years,” the younger Heffner says. “I think that founding mandate holds up: to be open-minded, to provide a platform for experimentation when it comes to our evolving moral values, to be receptive to the idea that we are protean.”

Public media has been especially vulnerable to Trump’s assault on the press, which he demonises as the “enemy of the people”, because it has historically been partly dependent on federal funding. In July, Trump in effect ended government support for public broadcasting, slashing more than $1bn from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) which duly voted itself out of existence earlier this year.

In Heffner’s analysis, Trump’s attack on the CPB was a thinly veiled attempt to destroy public broadcasting itself. In that regard, he is confident that the president has failed.

“The idea that if you kill CPB you can kill PBS, that has proven not to be true. PBS is thriving, with a thriving viewership, and where Trump has left a hole in funding, private and philanthropic foundations are stepping in.”

In this brave new world, Heffner argues, independent producers are all the more important in thwarting Trump’s attack and resisting the capitulation that has been displayed by some commercially controlled networks such as CBS. The Open Mind has never drawn federal funds, basing itself on the support of foundations and individuals committed to exploring public policy as a means of bolstering democracy.

“People are continuing to seek out the integrity of news that’s not based on shareholder profit, and that’s why there will continue to be a hunger for what we do,” he says. “Most corporate media players are under constant pressure to appease their shareholders, and that means mergers and acquisitions that have to be approved by federal regulators.”

That in turn gives Trump leverage. In the latest threat, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the Trump loyalist Brendan Carr, has warned commercial broadcasters that they could lose their spectrum permits unless they bend the knee in their coverage of the Iran war.

To usher in the 70th anniversary, Heffner is preparing a series of episodes to launch in May that he is calling Mayors of the World. In each he spends time with a local elected leader who is exploring new ways to boost civic engagement and improve people’s lives.

By setting out alternative perceptions of public life, and paths towards the reinvigoration of democratic values, the series implicitly rebuffs Trump’s grandiose narcissism and his rejection of traditional American diplomacy and dialogue.

“When Trump was re-elected in an even more fervently antagonistic and divisive climate, I began to look for leaders who are trying to preserve and rejuvenate democracy. That seems increasingly relevant as the US looks more and more like a global pariah,” Heffner says.

He is profiling mayors in Athens, the birthplace of democracy; Cologne in Germany; Santiago, Chile; and Toronto, among other cities. He hopes the series will act as an inspiration and as an antidote to what he regards as a particular American failing.

“There continues to be tremendous complacency in America,” he says. “Complacency about the hijacking of our media, about kidnapping Maduro and launching the war with Iran without Congress’s authorisation.”

The Open Mind is all about respectful conversation in a cacophonous world. But its host still knows how to land a punch.

“It’s not the media that’s the true enemy of the people. It’s complacency.”