BOOKS
PBS: Problematic Broadcasting System
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Viewers Like You? How Public TV Failed the People The Other Face of Public Television |
PBS is looking especially vulnerable these days. In the fast-changing, multichannel media world it seems to be merely treading water. Most of its shows have been around for decades. Its audiences are shrinking. Memberships have hit a plateau. Underwriting is down. And it’s being assailed on all sides, both inside and outside the public television system. Some complaints about public TV have been heard for years: Conservatives think it’s too liberal. Liberals think it’s too conservative. Populists think it’s too elitist. Culture mavens complain it’s not elitist enough. Even The Wall Street Journal thinks PBS is getting too commercial.
Unlike public radio, which has found an important and successful role for itself providing its fast-growing audience with what is now the nation’s best source of broadcast news, public television’s dilemma is that everyone has a different view of what its role should be. Some say that in the digital age, PTV should return to its original mission as ETV, and provide education and training on the air. Others want it to be more innovative, experimental, and cutting-edge, a source for quality, noncommercial, independently produced cultural and information programs. Minorities argue it should basically serve their special needs and provide opportunities for those denied access to mainstream media. Public television’s loyal station members see it as the high-road alternative to an otherwise tawdry commercial TV world. Others say, who needs taxpayer-supported public television now that we have all those commercial and pay channels?
Most recently, Representative Billy Tauzin, chairman of the House committee that controls public broadcasting’s federal dollars, took offense at PBS’s beloved Sesame Street, attacking its plan to introduce an HIV-positive Muppet in its programs for AIDS-ravaged South Africa. Tauzin and several congressional colleagues dispatched a threatening letter to PBS expressing concern that innocent young American children might be exposed to the infected TV puppet and wanting to know how much federal money was being spent on this “inappropriate” new Sesame Street character. In a response hardly calculated to shore up confidence in public television’s political independence, PBS assured Congress it would not “incorporate an HIV curriculum . . . into [Sesame Street’s] protected, safe, education rich environment” in this country, lamely explaining that AIDS is less of a problem here than in South Africa.
Two recently published books add new complaints to public television’s list of woes. Viewers Like You? by Laurie Ouellette, who teaches media studies at Rutgers University, offers an academic, thoroughly researched, although narrowly and at times maddeningly doctrinaire “cultural studies” analysis of PBS. The author attacks public television’s elitist, reformist, upper middle-class, Eurocentric, eat-your-spinach-because-it’s-good-for-you mentality. PBS public affairs programs like Washington Week and the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, she says, reflect the “cultural habits of well-educated, white male opinion leaders.” With their calm, rational, informed talk, she charges, public TV programs defend “a racist capitalist society” and preserve public order. As a result, “public television does more to perpetuate cultural injustices than to ameliorate them.” In a characteristically opaque passage, Ouellette argues that public television should put on “programs that people like to watch . . . mandated to represent racial, class, gender, and sexual diversity” that maintain “standards of social and ethical accountability that are negotiated by audiences themselves.” Even Sesame Street, she writes, is a product of “humanitarian noblesse oblige” that tends “to encourage volunteerism but maintain the dominant power/knowledge hierarchies” in our society.
The Other Face of Public TV: Censoring the American Dream, by Roger P. Smith, a veteran public-affairs producer for both public and commercial television, argues that public television is nothing more than a “decorous government information service,” politically supine, bureaucratic, propagandistic, and dull. For him, Washington Week and NewsHour are no more than tepid, talking-head “examples of Washington examining its navel.” Smith advocates a billion-dollar trust fund for public television to insulate it from the control of politicians. However, the annual income from such a fund, about $50 million, is a pitiful fraction of what is needed to run public television today and hardly enough to insulate it from political control.
Further, Smith’s book is bedeviled by errors, meandering diversions, and sloppy editing that undermine his points. For example, he calls the respected magazine editor Clay Felker a “Nixon hatchet-man” who instituted “an inquisition of noncommercial broadcasting” in his role as the president’s principal TV adviser. Smith probably meant to vent his ire at another Clay — Clay Whitehead. He attributes a quote to one of “the journalists of my acquaintance,” “The New York Times Editor-in-Chief Hodding Carter,” who, of course, never held that job. Perhaps Smith meant Turner Catledge, another Mississippian who was, indeed, a Times editor. He describes the current Corporation for Public Broadcasting chief, Robert Coonrod, as a “former CPB President.” And in a mystifying and notably unhelpful departure from all precedent, the book’s index lists the people mentioned in its pages in alphabetical order by their first name. So Felker can be found under Clay, Carter under Hodding, Orwell under George, etc.
I agree with both authors that public television suffers from too much conventional, establishment thinking; timidity in the face of controversy and pressure, and an excessively elitist, “we’re good for you” attitude. If PBS only had a sense of humor and encouraged more independent creativity and originality, its programs would serve audiences far better. But neither Viewers Like You? nor The Other Face of Public TV offers coherent, practical suggestions about how to make that happen.
I sympathize with public TV’s leaders who are mired in a bureaucratic, underfinanced system and have to serve too many masters and satisfy too many expectations. If I were writing a book about how to fix public television, I’d urge — at the risk of alienating academic cultural theorists — that it continue to take the high road in this new multichannel digital age and concentrate on four critically needed areas:
1. Become the nation’s premiere forum on democracy. Every week, do what none of the hundreds of existing broadcast and cable TV channels does. Examine in lively, fair-minded, provocative, clear, in-depth prime-time documentaries the great public issues of our time, such as education, race, campaign financing, welfare, immigration, aging, social security, health insurance, taxes, the environment, homeland security, defense, human rights, business and labor, terrorism, globalization, foreign policy. Provide room for all responsible viewpoints, even if they’re outside the mainstream. And before every election make lots of free time available to all major local and national candidates.
2. Continue to be the primary source of quality educational children’s programs.
3. Take full advantage of the new digital telecommunications technologies to focus on lifelong education and training. Help transform education in its broadest sense in this nation. Adventurous public television stations in places like Kansas City, Nebraska, Connecticut, Washington, and elsewhere are launching promising new initiatives. They are opening up exciting new avenues for education and training in their communities; putting school curricula on line; serving as outlets for their universities, libraries, and public health centers, and starting impressive new civic engagement efforts.
4. Deliver a strong, entertaining strand of arts and cultural programs featuring star-filled original productions of the great American dramatic repertoire, plays by Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, William Inge, Arthur Miller, August Wilson, Tony Kushner, Wendy Wasserstein, Edward Albee, and others, mixed with the best of talented new playwrights. Add off-center stuff outside the dominant culture for spice and diversity.
If PBS starts showing more spine, innovation, and imagination, and finds ways to take better advantage of the diverse creative talent available throughout the nation, perhaps it would improve its chances of getting the public funds it needs to bring out the best in our society.
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