The Politics of Public Television
http://frontpagemag.com/2010/10/28/the-politics-of-public-television/
by David Horowitz
Oct 28th, 2010
Editor's note: Writing in Commentary magazine in December 1991, David
Horowitz penned a detailed critique of PBS, in which he showed how
public television promoted left-wing politics under the guise of
balanced journalism while escaping accountability from the taxpayers
who subsidized its politically skewed programming. The piece,
reprinted below, remains timely today, as the recent firing of Juan
Williams over seemingly innocuous remarks has once has again revealed
the gulf between the politics of public broadcasting and the public
it allegedly represents.
--
Created by the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, the present system of
public television is by now one of the last E1l Dorados of the Great
Society. From relatively modest beginnings it has grown into a
$1.2-billion leviathan which is virtually free of accountability to
the taxpayers who shell out an annual $250 million to pay for the
system while also enabling it to get matching grants from private
individuals, foundations, and corporations.
Of these private benefactors, the most important historically was the
Ford Foundation, especially under the leadership of McGeorge Bundy
in the late 60's and early 70's. Having helped orchestrate the
Vietnam crusade for both John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, Bundy
became one of a large crowd of liberals to leave the sinking ship of
the policy they had charted. In 1966 he found refuge in the
presidency of the Ford Foundation. Upon taking this new job, Bundy
told intimates that he intended to make public television one of the
special objects of his attention, and he then went on to do so.
To be sure, he had something to build on. Before his arrival, Ford
had already funded many of the hundred or more educational stations
around the country, to the tune of $150 million-a prodigious sum for
that period-and had done much to establish the rudiments of a fourth
national network.
Before Ford entered the picture, educational stations had been
distinctly homegrown, do-it-yourself, garden variety in character.
Operating on an average of only eight hours a day and mainly
associated with universities and schools, they devoted themselves to
no-frills instructional fare, tailored to their respective locales.
Shakespeare in the Classroom, Today's Farm, Parents and Dr. Spock,
Industry on Parade, were typical titles of the programs that were
often "bicycled" from one station to the next, because there was no
"interconnection" link at the time. The unifying factor in all
these educational productions, and the one that distinguished them
most clearly from commercial TV, was their low budgets. It was this
factor that Ford's intervention transformed.
So great was the change that there is no organic relation between the
high-tech professionalism of public television as we now know it and
the modest efforts of the pioneers in the field. An hour of
MacNeil/Lehrer (perhaps the best product of the post-Bundy system)
costs $96,000, while a similar segment of a series like Cosmos or
Masterpiece Theater might cost three or four times that much. These
figures are certainly much lower than those for comparable commercial
shows (partly because of special discount arrangements with unions
and talent), but they are still out of the reach of any university
or community group. ESPITE this change from the early Days,
executives of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) still portray
their network as if it were a decentralized service to diverse
publics, the very incarnation of America's democratic spirit. A
typical statement reads:
PBS is owned and directed by its member public
television stations, which in turn are accountable to their local
communities. This grassroots network is comprised of stations
operated by colleges, universities, state and municipal authorities,
school boards, and community organizations across the nation.
Yet notwithstanding organizational complexities of Rube Goldberg
dimensions, and the lack of a single programming authority, the truth
is that centralized power dominates public television and creates its
characteristic voice. Of the 44 million taxpayer dollars annually
available for programs to the 341 separately-owned PBS stations
across the nation, fully half the total-$22 million-goes to just
two: WGBH in Boston and WNET in New York. (Another $10 million goes
to a group of producers affiliated with WNET, to three other
stations, and to PBS itself, which brings the centralized total to
77 percent of the funds.) This money is then leveraged against grants
from private foundations and other sources by a factor as great as
two, three, or even five times the original amount.
The result is that most major public-television
series-MacNeil/Lehrer, American Playhouse, Frontline, NOVA, Sesame
Street, Great Performances, Masterpiece Theater, and Bill Moyers's
ubiquitous offerings-are produced or "presented" by WNET and
WGBH. Others are produced by a group of stations known as the
"G-7 (after the tag given to the major industrial powers), often
with WNET and WGBH as the dominant partners. *
In creating the new system in the late 60's, its
architects attempted to square the circle of a
government-funded institution that would
be independent of political influence. The result was
a solution in the form of a problem: a private
body-the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
(CPB)-that would distribute the government funds. Compromise was
the order of the day. The
Carnegie Commission (whose report had led to
the 1967 Act) wanted the governing board of CPB
to be composed of eminent cultural figures;
Lyndon Johnson wanted (and got) political appointees. Carnegie
wanted a permanent funding
base in the form of an excise tax on television
sets; Congress said no. But
as a sop to the broadcasters, emphasis was placed on the
private nature
of CPB as a "heat shield" to insulate the system
from governmental influence.
Congress also limited CPB's mandate, insisting that it be established
on the "bedrock of localism." (The idea of an elite network financed
by the taxpayer would have been political anathema.) To
prevent CPB from creating a centralized "fourth
network," Congress barred it from producing
programs, operating stations, or
managing the "interconnection" between them. In addition to
insisting on the safeguards of a decentralized system,
Congress inserted a clause requiring "fairness,
objectivity, and balance" in all programming of a controversial nature.
Such was the plan; the product proved
otherwise. With Congress having agreed to provide a
fund to finance the stations, Bundy recruited David Davis of
WGBH for the task of connecting
them into a national voice. Together with Ward
Chamberlin of CPB, Davis engineered the new
interconnection, which began operations in 1970 as the Public
Broadcasting Service.
To meet congressional concerns about preserving localism, the new
Public Broadcasting Service was to be controlled by a board of
directors elected by the "grassroots" subscribing stations. But
Ford ensured that they, in turn, would be dominated
by the powerful inner circle of metropolitan stations it
favored. The new PBS president was Hartford Gunn, the manager of WGBH.
While this process was working itself out, political events were
moving in ways that would fatefully shape its future. Until
1968, the disaffected liberals who had a share in
creating public television had been engaged in a
family quarrel with their fellow Democrats. The
Vietnam war had cast them unexpectedly in an
adversarial posture toward the anti-Communist
liberals who remained committed to the Vietnam
policy they themselves had once supported. But in 1968, the
presidency fell into unfriendly Republican hands and, worse
still, into the hands of the man who, since the trial of Alger
Hiss, had been their most hated political antagonist. Now,
with Richard Nixon in the White House, the Vietnam
nightmare no longer belonged mainly to the liberals.
It was in this period that Bill Moyers joined
WNET to begin his intellectual odyssey to the
Left. It was in this period, too, that the Ford
Foundation announced the creation of a news center in
Washington, which would be staffed by
prominent luminaries from the media fraternity,
several of whom the Nixon White House had
identified as political enemies. Among them were Elizabeth Drew,
Robert MacNeil, and Sander Vanocur.
The loading of these cannons was duly noted
by the White House, and in June 1972, Nixon
retaliated by vetoing the CPB funding bill. CPB's president and
several Johnson-appointed board members resigned, and were
immediately replaced with Nixon nominees. For all the good it did
him, Nixon might have saved himself the trouble. Two
weeks earlier, five men had been arrested while
breaking into the Watergate apartment complex in
Washington. By the end of the year, the most
watched show on public-television stations was
the congressional hearing to decide whether to impeach the
President. True to its promise to offer
fare that the commercial channels would not or
could not provide, PBS featured the hearings on prime time
when the networks had turned to
other entertainments. The result was a groundswell of
support from new members and contributors.
Even the more conservative stations, which had
been at loggerheads with PBS, joined hands with
the center to fight the common foe.
Having humbled the President, the Democratic
Congress now rushed eagerly to aid its ally in the
Watergate travails. A significant increase in funds for public
television was authorized and, more importantly, committed three
years in advance. Congress also acted to tie CPB's unreliable hands.
Fifty percent of its non-discretionary program
grants were now earmarked for the stations as
"general support"-a percentage that would rise even higher
in the following decade. The stations, in turn, kicked back a
portion of their grants into
a newly created program fund, further depriving CPB
of influence over the system product.
When the dust had settled, CPB, which Nixon
had tried to make a conservative redoubt, was
discredited and crippled,
while the Ford Foundation's protege, PBS, emerged as the
newly dominant power at the center of the system.
Vietnam and Watergate: public television's birth by fire in the crucible of
these events created its political culture, which today often seems
frozen in 60's amber. The one area of its current-affairs programming
which managed to escape this fate, ironically, is the one where the
battle with the Nixon White House was
most directly joined.
Robert MacNeil, as noted,
was among the liberal journalists singled out by the
Nixon administration as political antagonists. But the program
he launched on WNET in 1975, in collaboration with Jim
Lehrer, turned out to be reasonably fair and
balanced. Originally devoted to a single subject per evening,
The MacNeil/Lehrer Report
provided in-depth analysis that network sound-bites could not
duplicate, and it went on to
prosper more than any other public-television show besides Sesame Street.
--
But MacNeil/Lehrer-along with a few other
"talking heads" shows, most notably Tony Brown's Journal and
William F. Buckley's Firing Line-proved to be the exception. In
other crucial areas of current-affairs programming, a different
standard was set. Especially in film documentaries,
where subjects were treated in a magazine-like setting that
made it possible to tell a story whole and with an
editorial thrust, the political
personality of the system soon showed another, more radical face.
In fact, the protest culture, which everywhere else had
withered at the end of the 60's when its fantasies of
revolution collapsed, discovered a new
base of operations in public television. A cottage
industry of activist documentarians had sprung up
during the 60's to make promotional films for
the Black Panther party, the Weather Underground, and other
domestic radical groups, and for Communist countries like
Cuba and Vietnam. This group now began its own "long march
through the institutions" by taking its political
enthusiasms, its film-making skills, and its network of
sympathetic left-wing foundations into the PBS orbit.
The integration of these radicals into the liberal
PBS community was made easier by the convergence of
political agendas at the end of the Vietnam war, when
supporters of the Communist
conquerors were able to celebrate victory over a
common domestic foe with liberals who had only desired an
American withdrawal.
Another convergence occurred around the post-60's romance
between New Left survivors and the "Old Left"
Communists, whom cold warriors like Richard Nixon had made their
targets. Most liberals shared
the radicals' antipathy for the anti-Communist
Right, along with their sense that any political
target of the anti-Communists was by definition
an innocent victim of persecution.
A Prime Expression of this liberal-Left convergence was The
Unquiet Death of Julius and Ethel
Rosenberg (1974), a two-hour special which attempted to
exonerate the most famous "martyrs"
of the anti-Communist 50's, and which PBS described as "the
kind of programming that we
enjoy presenting [and] hope to continue to present."
What was striking about the film was not just that it cast
doubt on the verdict of the Rosenbergs'
trial; or that it did so even as massive FBI files
released under the new Freedom of Information
Act were confirming their guilt; or even that it went
beyond the airing of questions about the case to imply that
there had been a government frame-up and that the verdict
represented an indictment of American justice. What was most
disturbing
(and prophetic in terms of future PBS productions) was that
the film also amounted to a political
brief for the Communist Left to which the Rosenbergs had belonged.
Thus, the narration introduced the Rosenbergs:
With millions of others they question an economic and politi
With millions of others they question an economic and
political system that lays waste to human lives. Capitalism
has failed. A new system might be better. Socialism is its
name. For many the vehicle for change is the Communist party.
The film then cut to an authority explaining that Communists
were people who "believed that you
couldn't have political democracy without economic
democracy…. Being a Communist meant simply to fight for the rights
of the people…." The authority was the longtime Stalinist Carl
Marzani, a fact that the program neglected to mention.
In 1978, to mark the 25th anniversary of the
execution of the Rosenbergs, PBS ran the four-year-old
documentary again, adding a half-hour
update. The update confirmed just how determinedly ideological
some regions of PBS had become.
The original two-hour program had been based
on the standard argument for the Rosenbergs'
innocence developed in a well-known book by Walter and
Miriam Schneir. In the interim, The
Rosenberg File by Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton had
appeared, based on the new FBI
materials and on original interviews with principals
in the case. While concluding that Julius Rosenberg had
been guilty as charged, the authors-one
of them a former member of the Rosenberg Defense
Committee-were critical of the death penalty and of the
prosecution of Ethel Rosenberg,
against whom they believed no credible case had been made.
Because The Rosenberg File had been so widely
praised as a "definitive" account, PBS executives
asked the producer of the documentary, Alvin
Goldstein, to interview Radosh as part of the "update." Said
Radosh later:
I couldn't believe the final product when I saw it. He cut
out everything I said that contradicted his film, and left
only the parts that supported
his claims: the failure of the government to make its
case against Ethel, the injustice of the
sentence. Whereas our book totally demolished
the argument of his film, viewers watching it
would think I endorsed his claims. Moscow television couldn't
have done better. It was outrageous.
Far from being an isolated example, the PBS
treatment of the Rosenbergs proved typical. Individual
Communists who were later admiringly
profiled on PBS specials included Paul Robeson,
Angela Davis, Dashiell Hammett, Bertolt Brecht,
and Anna Louise Strong. These were amplified
by the collective portrait Seeing Red (1986), a
90-minute celebration of American Communists as
progressive idealists, and The Good Fight (1988),
a nostalgic tribute to the Communists who
volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War.
In a clear violation of PBS's enabling legislation, this
opening to the discredited pro-Soviet Left
was never balanced by any reasonably truthful portrait of
American Communism; nor was it matched by any
provision of equal time to anti-Communists, whether of the Left
or Right. Thus, although there were specials on the personal trials
of American radicals who had devoted their lives to a
political illusion and enemy power, there was
nothing on the tribulations of those former radicals who had
changed their minds in order to
defend their country and its freedom-Max Eastman, Jay
Lovestone, James Burnham, Whittaker Chambers, Bayard Rustin, Sidney Hook.
While PBS searched for silver linings in the dark clouds of the
Communist Left, it found mainly negative forces at work in
those American institutions charged with fighting
the Communist threat, in particular the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA), which became a PBS
symbol of American evil. In 1980, PBS aired a
three-hour series called On Company Business,
which its producers described as "the story of 30
years of CIA subversion, murder, bribery, and torture as told
by an insider and documented with newsreel film of actual events."
The CIA "insider" on whom the PBS film relied
for editorial guidance was Philip Agee, who in
a 1975 Esquire article had written: "I aspire to be
a Communist and a revolutionary." The same year a Swiss magazine
asked Agee's opinion of U.S. and Soviet intelligence agencies. He replied:
The CIA is plainly on the wrong side, that is
the capitalistic side. I approve KGB activities,
Communist activities in general, when they are
to the advantage of the oppressed. In fact, the KGB is not
doing enough in this regard because
the USSR depends upon the people to free
themselves. Between the overdone activities that the
CIA initiates and the more modest activities of the
KGB there is absolutely no comparison.
Agee had been expelled from the Netherlands, France, and
England because of his contacts with Soviet and Cuban
intelligence agents, but the PBS
special identified him only by the caption "CIA:
1959-1969." When Reed Irvine of Accuracy in
Media (AIM) and other critics objected to the
program's "disinformation," they were dismissed out of hand by
Barry Chase, the PBS vice president
for News and Public Affairs. Chase even sent a memo to
all PBS stations describing On Company Business as "a
highly responsible overview of the
CIA's history and a major contribution to the
ongoing debate on the CIA's past, present, and future."
PBS's next summary view of American intelligence was a Bill
Moyers special called The Secret
Government (1987), which insinuated what no
congressional investigation had ever established:
that the CIA was a rogue institution subverting
American policy. The wilder shores of this kind
of conspiracy thesis were subsequently explored
in two Frontline programs, Murder on the Rio San Juan
(1988) and Guns, Drugs, and the CIA
(1988), which leaned heavily on the fantasies of the far-Left
Christic Institute. The Secret
Government was followed by a four-part series called Secret
Intelligence (1988), which, like all three of
its predecessors, rehearsed the standard litany of
left-wing complaints-Iran, Guatemala, the Bay
of Pigs, Chile-and culminated in a one-sided
view of the Iran-contra affair as an anti-constitutional plot.
All these programs judged the CIA to be more of a threat to
American institutions than a guardian of American security. And
while PBS officials
continued to pay lip service to the idea of "balance," no
sympathetic portrait of the CIA's cold
war activities was ever aired, no equally partisan
account of its role in supporting the anti-Communist rebels
in Afghanistan or Angola.
In the absence of countervailing portrayals of
American cold-war policies and institutions, the
indictments presented in PBS documentaries
amounted to an editorial position. In the PBS
perspective, the United States emerged as an imperialist,
counterrevolutionary power whose national-security apparatus was
directed not at containing an expansionist empire but (in the
words of the producers of On Company Business) at
suppressing "people who have dared struggle for a better life."
Ironically, this Marxist caricature received a full-dress treatment
on PBS channels in 1989, the very year the Communist utopia
collapsed in ruins. The American Century was a
five-part, five-hour series written and hosted by the editor of
Harper's, Lewis Lapham, which purported to chart the course of
American foreign policy from 1900. The final segment traced
American cold-war policy from 1945 to 1975. It did not
pay tribute to the heroic efforts of containment
which would soon result in the liberation of millions upon
millions of people from the chains of a tyranny as great as the
world has ever known.
It rehearsed, instead, the same old left-wing
litany-Guatemala, Iran, the Bay of Pigs-to claim
that under the cloak of anti-Communism, third-world progress
had become the victim of greedy U.S. corporations and their
secret allies in the U.S.
government (described by Lapham in relation to Cuba as "the
agent of the reactionary past"). This summary segment of the
series was called Imperial Masquerade,
and it appeared in December 1989
even as East Berliners were tearing down their Wall.
The view of America as an evil empire was
powerfully reinforced by
PBS's treatment of post-Vietnam Communism in other
documentary pro-grams. In 1975, PBS aired China Memoir, a piece
about the Maoist paradise by the actress Shirley
MacLaine. So wide-eyed was it that PBS's own chairman
was forced to concede that it was "pure propaganda." China
Memoir was followed by The Children of China (1977), which was
praised by Communist officials who thought it would help
Americans to "understand the new China." The "new" North Korea
and the "new" Cuba were also
the focus of promotional features in North Korea (1978), Cuba,
Sport and Revolution (1979), Cuba: The New Man (1986), and Cuba-In
the Shadow of Doubt (1986), about which the New York Times
commented: "At its best, the documentary has a
romantic infatuation with Cuba; at its worst, it
is calculated propaganda."
As the locus of the cold war shifted to Central
America in the 1980's, documentary after documentary appeared
on PBS celebrating the Sandinista dictatorship in Nicaragua
and the FMLN terrorists in E1l Salvador. These included From
the Ashes . . . Nicaragua Today (1982), Target
Nicaragua (1983), and El Salvador, Another Vietnam? (1981). The
producers of these programs, all presented by WNET, were the
radical
activist filmmakers who had come in from the 70's cold
(among them: World Focus Films of Berkeley, the Women's Film
Project, and the Institute for Policy Studies).
As with its celebrations of
American Communism, PBS showed no eagerness to balance this
advocacy with other views. In 1983, the American Catholic Committee
offered WNET a program critical of the Marxist regime, Nicaragua: A
Model for Latin America? The Catholic film was based
on documentary footage and dealt with government repression
of the press, the Roman Catholic
Church, and independent labor unions. WNET
rejected the film, on the ground that it had "a better
way to handle this information."
And indeed in 1985, a Frontline program called Central
America in Crisis did take a critical look
at the various sides of the conflict, while in 1986,
Nicaragua Was Our Home-a film focusing on
the plight of the Miskito Indians-was aired in
response to the protests over WNET's previous offerings. But
for the most part, the "better way"
to handle information about Nicaragua turned out to be pretty
much the way it had been handled before.
In 1984, for example, the Frontline series featured Nicaragua:
Report From the Front whose
message (in the words of the New York Times reviewer John
Corry) was: "Sandinistas are good:
their opponents are bad. There is no middle ground." The same
wisdom was the message of two subsequent Frontline reports: Who's
Running This War? (1986), which portrayed the contras as
Somocistas bent on violating human rights, and
The War on Nicaragua, which was named one of "The Worst Shows
of the Year" in 1987 by the liberal critic of the San
Francisco Chronicle, John
Carman, who called it "shoddy, unfair, and manipulative journalism."
Nor did the PBS approach to Communist movements alter when addressing
the conflicts in other
Central American countries. Thus Guatemala: When the Mountains
Tremble (1985) was panned by the New York Times as a
"vanity film" because
of its agitprop character, and the Washington Post's
TV critic, Tom Shales, summed it up in the following terms:
The film is bluntly didactic and one-sided in portraying
Guatemalan rebels as noble freedom
fighters and Guatemalan peasants opposed to
the present regime as the victims of repression, torture, and squalor.
At least four of the programs on Central
America which PBS chose to air during this crucial
decade before Communism's collapse were the
work of a single director and radical ideologue,
Deborah Shaffer, whose "solidarity" with the
Communist dictators of Nicaragua, and their guerrilla allies in
El Salvador and Guatemala, was a proudly displayed item in
her curriculum vitae. Her most celebrated documentary, Fire
From the Mountain (1988), an aggressive promotion of
Sandinista myths, was based on the autobiography of
the Sandinista secret-police chief, Omar Cabezas, while her
other films-El Salvador: Another
Vietnam? (1981), Witness to War: Dr. Charlie
Clements (1986), and Nicaragua: Report From the
Front (1984)-all reflected her commitment to the
politics of the Central American guerrillas.
In 1988, the Congressional Oversight Committees for Public
Television, led by their
Democratic chairmen, Representative Edward Markey and Senator
Daniel Inouye, institutionalized this revolutionary front
inside PBS by authorizing the transfer of $24 million of CPB
monies to set up the Independent
Television Service (ITVS) as a separate fund for
"independent" film-makers. Representing the independents in
testimony before the committees were Deborah
Shaffer's producer, Pam Yates of Skylight Productions, and
Larry Daressa, co-chairman of the National Coalition
of Independent Public
Broadcasting Producers. Daressa, who later turned up
on the ITVS board, was also the president of
California Newsreel, flagship of the radical film
collectives and producer of such 60's classics as
Black Panther and The People's War, a triumphalist view of the
Communist conquest of Vietnam.
Biting the hand that had fed him and his
ideological comrades so generously, Daressa attacked
PBS for knuckling under to "corporate interests":
Independent producers have found themselves
progressively marginalized in this brave new
world of semi-commercial, public pay television. Our diverse
voices reflecting the breadth
of America's communities and opinions have
no place in public television's plans to turn
itself into an upscale version of the networks.
We have found that insofar as we speak with an independent
voice we have no place in public television.
But as one veteran member of the public-television community
scoffed on hearing this testimony:
These people are not "diverse," they're politically correct. Nor
are they "independent." These are the commissars of the political
Left. These are the people who basically owned the
Vietnamese and Cuban and Nicaraguan franchises, who got so
close to Communist officials
and guerrilla capos that if you wanted to get
access for interviews or permission even to bring
camera equipment into the "liberated zone" in
certain cases, you had to go through them.
Nevertheless, Congress authorized $24 million
in public funds to the artistic commissars of the
ITVS, thereby providing the extreme Left with an
institutional base in public television.
All during its tenure, the Reagan administration battled
Soviet-backed Marxists in Central America and the Sandinista
dictatorship in Nicaragua. Yet there was no direct
White House response to the PBS attacks on its Central
American policies, or even to PBS's
propaganda war in behalf of the Communist enemy.
Far from attempting to control public television
through CPB, as the Nixon administration had
(unsuccessfully) done, the Reagan White House
even reappointed Sharon Rockefeller, a Carter nominee
and liberal Democrat, as CPB chairman. Penn James, who handled
White House appointments, recalls:
Our intention had been to remove her
as chairman, just as we tried to do with every other
agency. But when we announced our intention, her father, Senator
Charles Percy, was outraged. He went storming over to the White House
and told the President: "If you want my cooperation on the Foreign
Relations committee, you'd better reappoint my daughter." So we did.
But with Reagan's reelection and her father's
defeat, Rockefeller was replaced as chairman by
Sonia Landau. The following spring, a Reagan
appointee, Richard Brookhiser, offered a modest
proposal to the CPB board. Brookhiser suggested that CPB
undertake a scientific "content analysis"
of the current-affairs programs it had funded to
see if they were indeed tipped to one side of the
political scale. The board would be "derelict," he said, if it
did not try to assure the "objectivity and
balance" of its programming as the 1967 Act had mandated.
It seemed a straightforward request, but the
reaction was almost entirely negative. Charges of
"neo-McCarthyism" were hurled in Brookhiser's
direction, and PBS vice president Barry Chase scolded:
It is inappropriate for a presidentially appointed group to
It is inappropriate for a presidentially appointed group to
be conducting a content analysis of programming. It
indicates that some people
on the CPB board don't fully understand the
appropriate constraints on them.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times,
Bruce Christensen, president of PBS, was less restrained:
In 1973, President Nixon in fact tried to kill
federal funding for public television through
his political appointees to the board, and the kind of
chicanery that went on at the time. They didn't do a "content
analysis." Content analysis seems to
me a little more sophisticated way of achieving those ends.
Such accusations were sufficiently intimidating to stall the
proposal. Brookhiser could not secure
enough support even from the Reagan-appointed
majority to get approval. Meeting in June, the
CPB board decided to postpone its decision on
the study until September. But before it could do
so, a new controversy erupted, which demonstrated just
how weak the conservatives' influence on
public television was, and how powerful their
liberal adversaries had become.
The casus belli was a nine-part series on Africa presented by
WETA. The Africans had been underwritten by more than
$1 million in grants from PBS, CPB, and the
National Endowment for the
Humanities (NEH). When Lynne Cheney, the
chairman of NEH, received an additional request from WETA for
$50,000 to promote the series, she
decided to screen it. Her response was outrage:
I have just finished viewing all nine hours of The Africans.
Worse than unbalanced, this film
frequently degenerates into anti-Western diatribe…. [One entire
segment, Tools of Exploitation] strives to
blame every technological,
moral, and economic failure of Africa on the
West. …. The film moves from distressing
moment to distressing moment, climaxing in
Part IX where Qaddafi's virtues are set forth.
Shortly thereafter, pictures of mushroom clouds
fill the screen and it is suggested that Africans
are about to come into their own, because after the
"final racial conflict" in South Africa, black
Africans will have nuclear weapons.
Cheney told WETA that not only would she not finance the
promotion of the series, but she wanted the NEH
credits removed from the print. "Our
logo is regarded as a mark of approbation, and
NEH most decidedly does not approve of this film."
Cheney's position was in striking
contrast to PBS's defense of the series,
which was to disclaim all responsibility for the
product that bore its imprint. Said Christensen:
We don't make the programs at PBS, and we
have no editorial control ultimately over what
is put in the program…. Until a series is
delivered to PBS for distribution, we have no
editorial input or oversight over the producer or
anyone connected to the project.
It was an evasion that the bureaucratic
complexities of the system made possible. True, PBS did
not actually "produce" programs and, in that
most technical sense, could not be held responsible for
what was in them. But this was to beg
the question. As "gatekeeper" for the national
distribution of programs, PBS daily rejected projects simply
on the grounds that they "did not
meet PBS standards." A thick
volume of "Standards and Practices" was, in fact, distributed
to independent producers warning them that public
television had to "maintain the confidence of its
viewers," and that, consequently, producers had
to adhere strictly to the official PBS guidelines
for quality. Moreover, once a series like The Africans
was aired, it bore the PBS logo, and was
promoted and distributed by PBS on cassette and
often in companion book form, with educational
aids, to schools and libraries. Such activities constituted
an active endorsement and, like the decision to air the
programs in the first place, was not merely an
imposition, as Christensen implied.
In seeking support from the press and Congress, however, PBS
executives deployed a
more persuasive argument than their own impotence. For NEH or
PBS to exert any judgment on the quality of The Africans, they
claimed, would be to engage in a form of censorship.
NEH, Christensen told
the Los Angeles Times, is "not the Ministry of Truth," and
warned that if Cheney were to insist
on entering the editing room "there will be no
NEH funding in public television."
This line of reasoning was more effective but no less
spurious. It simply ignored the right (let alone the
obligation) of a funder to impose guidelines and conditions
on the recipients of its gifts.
It also ignored the fact that CPB's own standard
contract with producers stipulated that it would
be allowed to see rough cuts and make changes it
regarded as necessary. Christensen's argument
also ignored PBS's own responsibility-emphasized by
PBS officials on other occasions-for the
character of programs they distributed and promoted.
With PBS again polarized as the public's David against the government
Goliath, Brookhiser's proposal was doomed. A move by 57 House
members to stimulate an inquiry into the matters that
Brookhiser had raised was easily rebuffed by the
appropriate committee head, John Dingell. To consolidate these
victories, PBS appointed a committee to review its own
procedures. Stacked with
an in-house majority, the committee avoided any
systematic review of programming, and concluded with a pat on its own back:
PBS's procedures … have encouraged programs of high quality that
reflect a wide range of
information, opinion, and artistic expression
and that satisfy accepted journalistic standards. The fact that
business would proceed as usual became quickly apparent. In the fall
of 1989, WNET presented a 90-minute documentary about the Palestinian
intifada entitled Days of Rage. It turned out to be a catalogue of
horror stories about the Israeli occupation,
featuring interviews with
Palestinian moderates and Israeli extremists, and omitting
any mention of Palestinian terrorism.
During the battle over Days of Rage, WNET
was besieged by public protests and membership
cancellations but held fast to its decision. Reflecting later
on his role in airing the program, WNET
vice president Robert Kotlowitz displayed an attitude that was
both perverse and at the same time
characteristic of that of other public-television officials:
I thought the intifada program was a horror. It was a horror. And I
wasn't happy with having it on the air. But I'm still happy that we
made the decision to go with it.
It was, by any standard, an extraordinary admission for a
professional journalist. One would
be hard put to imagine, for example, a CBS
executive first acknowledging a story's indefensibility and
then claiming an achievement in running it.
In trying to understand this attitude, as well as the
generally leftist bias of PBS, it is necessary to recognize that
the entire public-television community (and that includes its
friends in Congress) operates out of loyalty to
what insiders refer to as the "mission." Simply put, the
mission is a mandate to give the public
what commercial television, because it is "constrained by the
commercial necessity of delivering
mass audiences to advertisers," allegedly cannot
provide. The words belong to the current president of
PBS, Bruce Christensen, and are contemporary. But they could as
well have been taken from the Carnegie Commission report of
25 years ago. The mission is what makes public television
"public." It is its life principle and raison d'être.
It is what justifies the hundreds of millions of
government and privately contributed dollars
necessary to keep the system going.
But the mission is also what provides a rationale under
which extreme Left viewpoints have a
presumptive claim on public air time. This is the
rationale that justifies the indefensible propaganda of
programs like Days of Rage and the promos
for Communist guerrillas in Central America. It is the
rationale under which a partisan journalist like Nina Totenberg,
who was involved in the leak that nearly
destroyed Clarence Thomas, could be
assigned by PBS as its principal reporter and
commentator on the hearings triggered by that very leak.
Just how much a part of the ethos of public
television this attitude has become can be seen in
a recent controversy involving Bill Moyers, who
has been praised as a "national treasure" by the
present PBS programming chief, Jennifer Lawson. Moyers had
come under fire as the author
of PBS's only two full-length documentaries on the Iran-contra
affair, The Secret Government (1987) and High Crimes and
Misdemeanors (1990).
Critics (of whom I was one) questioned whether
these programs met the standards of fairness and
balance that public television was legally supposed to honor.
Moyers's response was a tortured invocation of
public television's mission:
What deeper understanding of our role in the world could
we have come to by praising Oliver
North yet again, when we had already gotten five full days
before Congress, with wall-to-wall
coverage on network, cable, and public air-waves, to tell
his side of the story? In fact, it hardly seems consistent
with "objectivity, balance, and fairness" that the other
side of his story got only two 90-minute documentaries on public
television. [Emphasis added.]
For anyone not steeped in Moyers's own political
mythology this was an eccentric view of what
had taken place. North, of course, had not produced his own
network documentary. He had been
hauled before a congressional committee largely
made up of political enemies who were bent on exposing him
as a malefactor and on discrediting
the administration in which he had served. Yet
because he had turned the tables on them and emerged from
his ordeal with a positive approval rating,
Moyers blithely and blandly assumed that
the commercial networks had been telling only
North's "side of the story." Therefore the mission of
public television was not to present a balance of views
within its own schedule, as its enabling
legislation required, but to attack North more
successfully than the stagers of the hearings had managed to do.
Quite apart from its absurdity, Moyers's position reveals how
out of date is the concept that
originally inspired public television. For the fact that
the Iran-contra hearings, which attempted to
impugn the integrity and even the legitimacy of
the Reagan presidency, were aired on all three
networks, not to mention C-Span and CNN, means just the
opposite of what Moyers seems to think it means. It means that
public television can no longer position itself as the
only channel on which
anti-establishment views can be broadcast.
Recognizing this occupation of its point on the
spectrum, public television has sought a new
space by positioning itself even more firmly on the Left.
There is also, perhaps, another factor at work here-bad
conscience. This bad conscience stems,
first, from PBS's increasing reliance on
big corporations in its search for funds. Thus, between
1973 and 1978, corporate "underwriting" of
public television went up nearly 500 percent. By the
1980's, corporate sponsorship accounted for almost as much of
the public-television budget as its entire federal subsidy.
Worse yet for the liberal
conscience, the leaders in this trend, contributing
more than half the total support, were big bad oil
companies like Mobil, Exxon, and Gulf.
But even more significant is the degree to which, with the
advent of cable, commercial stations have
begun to compete directly with PBS. The Arts &
Entertainment network (A&E) was started by the
head of PBS's cultural programming, and its
schedule-whether showing European movies, or
serious drama, or biographies of historical figures-is
comparable to anything PBS can offer.
Another cable channel, Bravo, features drama
from Aeschylus to O'Neill, film from Olivier to Bufiuel, and
music from Monteverdi to Messiaen.
The Discovery channel now repeats the nature shows that
made PBS's early career, while C-Span
provides 'round-the-clock political interviews and
discussions at the most serious level, including
live sessions of Congress, and political conventions and
meetings. The one PBS feature that these channels do not
offer is the monotonous diet of left-wing politics.
But if left-wing politics is PBS's ill-conceived solution to
its identity
crisis, it is also in the last analysis the key to its
financial unease. For as the country has become more
conservative, PBS's radical posture has
alienated a major part of public television's audience
of supporters as well as its Republican constituency in
Congress. Indeed, it is only because
Congress has remained stubbornly Democratic against the
conservative tide that public television
is not in even deeper financial trouble. But the
current situation is inherently unstable and will remain
so as long as public television fails to live
up to its statutory mandate by presenting a fair balance of
views reflecting the broad interests of
the population that is being taxed to help support it.
--
*The other five G-7 stations are WETA (Washington, D.C.),
WTTW (Chicago), WQED (Pittsburgh), KCET (Los Angeles), and
KQED (San Francisco).
.
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