I noted last week that PBS is poised to broadcast a one-hour special on the separation of church and state, “The Wall of Separation.” By all appearances, it sounded like a propaganda piece for the religious right. Indeed, the program is a production of Boulevard Pictures, which is led by an evangelical Christian who believes that Christians have an obligation to “shape the culture” and “spread the faith,” and the program itself was written and directed by an activist who did movie reviews for a Christian Reconstructionist website.
Confronted with questions, PBS Vice President John F. Wilson defended the decision to air the program, arguing that it serves the network’s “mandate to present a diversity of viewpoints on issues of public importance.”
This week, in response to pressure, PBS responded in more detail. PBS’s ombudsman, Michael Getler, devoted a column to the controversy.
Getler writes, “The interviews in the film, in terms of time on screen and numbers, seemed to me to tilt clearly in favor of those who see a danger in the “wall of separation” metaphor used by Jefferson….” He points out that the narrator “time and again, conveys the theme of this film — that God is the necessary foundation of society’s law and government.” Getler even calls the treatment a “heavy-handed hammering away by the narrator.”
Getler goes off the rails when he tries to defend the program. “My sense,” he writes, “is that people can take from this film whatever they wish. It can be a useful reminder of the context of our founding documents and a way of looking at that context — and at the intent of the framers of the First Amendment as assessed in the dominant view of this film — that challenges the more common view….Or it can be viewed as sophisticated propaganda, as some critics already have….”
I’m all for spirited debate. When it comes to law, political science, and religion, there are a nearly endless supply of ideas and perspectives. Let a thousand flowers bloom.
But facts are stubborn things, and “Wall of Separation” is not history. It’s a religious-right-style interpretation of history, presented by PBS to its viewers as fact.
Indeed, PBS’s ombudsman seems to realize that this film is driven by a religious agenda, and made by religious activists, who brush over details in order to make a religious point. He seems to believe airing misleading information, intentionally, is consistent with “diverse” programming. That’s absurd.
In principle, what’s wrong with religious people putting together a video to share their ideas, even wrong ones? Absolutely nothing. PBS, however, has certain responsibilities to its viewers when airing historical specials like these. If the network is offered propaganda, and the network knows it’s propaganda, then it should know better than to air it as objective and reliable information.
My friend Barry Lynn put it this way:
What Getler fails to grasp is that the perspective offered in this film has been debunked. Getler notes that during the film, the narrator says, “The United States is a society based on the rule of law. And our Founding Fathers believed that if they did not base their laws on a higher authority, then whoever was in power would determine what the law said. They called this ‘tyranny.’ Their higher authority was the Law of God — the Ten Commandments.”
Legal historians have researched this issue time and again. They found no references to the Ten Commandments during the debate over the Constitution. Furthermore, there is no reference to “higher authority” or “the Law of God” in the Constitution, a wholly secular document.
I suspect PBS knows all of this, but doesn’t care. By airing far-right pseudo-history, the network can say, “See? We’re not liberal after all.” If that means deceiving viewers, so be it.
When Corporation for Public Broadcasting Chairman Kenneth Tomlinson, a close Karl Rove ally, took over PBS, he told the Association of Public Television Stations along with officials from the CPB and PBS that they should make sure their programming “better reflected the Republican mandate.”
We’re still seeing the results of Tomlinson’s agenda.