Saving PBS From the GOP

[question everything]

latimes.com

JONATHAN CHAIT

Saving PBS From the GOP

Cut the strings of government funding before right-wingers can destroy public broadcasting.
Jonathan Chait

May 6, 2005

(snip)

The chief hack in question is Kenneth Tomlinson, the Republican-appointed head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which controls NPR and PBS. Tomlinson has carried out a low-grade ideological purge, reportedly discouraging journalists there from any projects considered too hostile to business or the GOP. He has proposed placing several fellow Republican loyalists in key positions at the corporation. Tomlinson told the New York Times, "I frankly feel at PBS headquarters there is a tone-deafness to issues of tone and balance." Everybody favors "balance," of course. The trouble is figuring out what that means. Tomlinson seems to prefer a particularly skewed kind. He has appointed a pair of ombudsmen who can report on the networks' political bias. One of them is William Schulz, a full-blooded movement conservative.

The other ombudsman is Ken Bode, formerly of NBC News and CNN. Bode is obviously the "liberal" choice to balance off Schulz. And I wouldn't be surprised if, in the privacy of the voting booth, Bode — like most elite journalists — pulls the Democratic lever most of the time. But if Bode is a liberal, he is not a liberal in anything like the way Schulz is a conservative. Like most news reporters, he at least tries to be painstakingly evenhanded. (You know, reporting things like "Sen. Jones says that lower taxes and higher spending will result in a budget deficit, but Sen. Smith insists it won't. Back to you, Jim.") Bode even wrote a newspaper column endorsing archconservative Republican Mitch Daniels for governor of Indiana.

Likewise, Tomlinson has chosen to balance off the documentary news program "Now" with a new program featuring punditry from conservative members of the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Tomlinson explains, " 'Now' is provocative. The Wall Street Journal program is provocative. Paired together, they create the perfect balance situation." Again, the equivalence is absurd. "Now" may tilt left in its choice of topics, but it practices real journalism: digging up facts, giving both sides their say, and so on. The Journal editorial page feels absolutely no need to constrain itself that way. Neither "Now" nor the Journal editorial page are balanced, in the same sense that neither Margaret Thatcher nor Paris Hilton are virgins.

(snip)

The irony is that, if Gingrich had succeeded, PBS wouldn't be in these straits today. The only reason PBS has to have GOP partisans scrubbing it of any faint signs of residual liberalism is that it has to answer to the federal government. That made sense in the 1960s, when PBS was founded. There were only three broadcast networks, which forced them to cater to the broadest possible public taste. PBS needed taxpayer support in order to provide programming for a smaller, highbrow audience.

(snip)

When Gingrich and other conservatives promoted this plan 10 years ago, liberals railed that it was an effort to kill public broadcasting. But the only real way to kill public broadcasting is to subject it to political manipulation. And the only way to guarantee that doesn't happen is to free public broadcasting from the government.


http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-chait6may06,1,2894274.column

Also at

http://www.startribune.com/stories/1519/5396443.html

[Moochy]

1. Kenneth Y. Tomlinson: Confusing Liberalism with Journalism

Check out this guys' interview with NPR's show On the Media.

http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/transcripts_050605_cpb.html

He comes across as a real charmer.. (not)

[punpirate]

2. With declining revenues from the government...

... most of that money has been made up by "corporate partners."

Divorcing the CPB from government spending won't relieve it of the charter obligations for its boards to be picked by politicians. If Congress could manage to do so--make CPB entirely separate from government in all ways--then public broadcasting would simply become another commercial network. It's been close to that ever since the `70s, when its nickname was the "Petroleum Broadcasting System."

[question everything]

3. Personally, I'd rather watch PBS program with occasional commercials

than be subjected to the never ending talking during "pledge week."

They have really interesting program, saying that if we want to watch such programs we need to donate, yet, the recipe is 12 min program and 20 min talk.

This is when I curse and just turn it off. A&E and HIS and others have now taken over some of what used to be their signature programs and probably can do more if PBS will cease to exist.

[SmokingJacket]

4. But... then it wouldn't be PUBLIC broadcasting, would it?

I guess, ideally, it should be entirely donor-supported. Perhaps some television bandwidth should be set aside for such a venture.

But the whole point of PBS was -- I thought! -- to have a place to produce educational programming without having to cater to commercial interests.

When it was good, it was very very good. Damn. I remember watching the Odyssey and the Iliad being read out loud on public tv when I was a kid, and watching Nova, and the gardening and painting shows. And NPR twenty years ago was GREAT.

Sigh.