PBS to get Fox-ified

May 2, 2005

To follow up on an item from Saturday guest-poster Morbo, PBS’s future is looking increasingly bleak.

A brief interview with the New York Times Magazine recently highlighted the fact that Ken Ferree, the new Republican president of PBS, doesn’t watch the network he’s taking over.

Today we learn that the problem is even worse than originally feared. While Ferree is hoping to bring in more Republican viewers, new Corporation for Public Broadcasting Chairman Kenneth Tomlinson, a close Karl Rove ally, is starting to lean on PBS to be more conservative.

The Republican chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is aggressively pressing public television to correct what he and other conservatives consider liberal bias, prompting some public broadcasting leaders – including the chief executive of PBS – to object that his actions pose a threat to editorial independence.

Without the knowledge of his board, the chairman, Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, contracted last year with an outside consultant to keep track of the guests’ political leanings on one program, “Now With Bill Moyers.”

In late March, on the recommendation of administration officials, Mr. Tomlinson hired the director of the White House Office of Global Communications as a senior staff member, corporation officials said. While she was still on the White House staff, she helped draft guidelines governing the work of two ombudsmen whom the corporation recently appointed to review the content of public radio and television broadcasts.

Mr. Tomlinson also encouraged corporation and public broadcasting officials to broadcast “The Journal Editorial Report,” whose host, Paul Gigot, is editor of the conservative editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. And while a search firm has been retained to find a successor for Kathleen A. Cox, the corporation’s president and chief executive, whose contract was not renewed last month, Mr. Tomlinson has made clear to the board that his choice is Patricia Harrison, a former co-chairwoman of the Republican National Committee who is now an assistant secretary of state.

Six months ago, at a meeting members of the Association of Public Television Stations along with officials from the corporation and PBS, Tomlinson told them they should make sure their programming “better reflected the Republican mandate.”

He later said he was joking. Yeah, what a kidder.

Strategically, it seems the Bush administration can’t lose here. If the new leadership of public broadcasting is successful in brining in new Republican viewers and donors, the right wins because it will have turned PBS into a reliable conservative outlet, on par with Fox News. If the new leadership is unsuccessful and viewers stop contributing, the right wins anyway — they’ll get to kill PBS.

I wonder if there may a political opportunity here for Dems. I vaguely remember Newt Gingrich trying to cut the PBS budget in 1995, only to face a backlash from those who wanted to “save Sesame Street.” Admittedly, the situation isn’t completely analogous here. The administration isn’t trying to gut PBS; it’s merely trying to make it right-wing.

Any chance there could be a similar backlash to the Fox-ification of public broadcasting? Seems like yet another example of Republican excesses.

I’ve had mixed feelings about PBS for a long time. On the one hand, I appreciate that it is producing quality documentaries, a substantive news program (Macneil Lehrer)and quality cultural programs. On the other hand, it has also seemed clear to me that these efforts partially funded by tax dollars are primarily on behalf of an upper middle class who enjoys that sort of thing. Just as publicly funded museums and opera houses seem to disproportionately benefit one class of people over the others. Which isn’t to say it’s wrong to spend money on such things, but is to say that the apparent class discrimination merits some discussion.

Since having kids, my feelings about PBS have taken a downward turn, primarily because of their obnoxious advertising. You know the kind — when their representative tells the kids listening to go find their parent or guardian because they have an important announcement to make — which turns out to slamming Nick, Jr and the Disney channels as evil commercial television as they tell the parents to give them money. (PBS commercials only look like commercials, they’re actually only corporate sponsorships, which are so much more refined, don’t you think?) Since no television franchise has been more commercially abused than Barney, from PBS, it’s hard to see what makes them superior in children’s television. In fact, the children’s television that they broadcast, overall, has been consistently more sexist and conservative and unimaginative, then the offerings of the other 2 stations. How many girl muppets do you know on Sesame Street?

Conclusions? We’d probably be better off if they’d get out of kids television altogether. Good programs like Arthur would get picked up by the other stations. And perhaps Barney would just go away.

As for adult cultural programs….I don’t know how much the federal government contributes to these, but the disadvantages of having a government connection seem obvious. If PBS were owned by stockholders, an ‘evil’ CEO could surely be avoided? If PBS presented itself exclusively as a producer of quality cultural programs, asking people who care about upper middle class cultural exposure to donate to them through direct mail, the internet, and probably those horrendous pledge drives, they could surely find an operating budget that allowed them to continue to create a number of quality programs each year, and could stop the selling out that has been happening in recent years.

  • I’ll be curious to see just how much backbone the PBS board and administration has to resist this latest potential outrage. If they all resigned en masse in protest, should the wingnut takeover actually happen, it would create quite a stir. And it might awaken a sleeping giant of PBS-oriented voters who haven’t paid much attention as long as their own small niche has been unaffected. With the 2006 election cycle already gearing up, every new vote becomes even more important. We’ll see what happens.

  • PBS has been a dead institution walking for a long time. If my local station wants my money, they are going to have move decisively away from CPB. I don’t see them doing that, and frankly, I would rather they die, than live on as Fox Lite and Airy.

  • Catherine,

    Maybe the fact that you think art and culture are the sole province of the “upper middle class” is part of the problem. Rather, like good manners, appreciation of art, music, literature and good television is not a function of class, but rather a sensibility that is nurtured from the time we are young. And if it isn’t necessarily developed in the home, it can be taught in schools.

    While I was going to grade school in a south suburb of Chicago (which was decidedly not upper middle class), I got to experience the Art Institute, Chicago Symphony, Field Museum, etc. School field trips they were called. I’m not sure if public schools do them much anymore (they don’t here in the SF Bay Area).

    I took my family back to Chicago this past Christmas. A day at the Field Museum (without premium attractions, which cost extra) ran $100 for the four of us.

    Around 1940, NY City mayor Fiorello LaGuardia helped found City Center as a place for all the people of New York to experience the arts. In particular, City Center was the first home of the New York City Opera — what LaGuardia called “the people’s opera.”

    Ask why most cultural institutions now depend on corporate funding or a affluent patrons for their survival.

    LaGuardia would be disgusted by this if he were around today. He respresented the ideal that government has a legitimate role in ensure that everyone, no matter what their economic circumstances, should experience the best of art and culture. It’s a tragedy that government has abandoned this public responsibility, but then again, it’s all too indicative of the times we live in.

    FWIW.

  • Seems Tomlinson demonstrated HE believes in the FAIR doctrine(?), since he had the political leanings of guests tracked on Moyer’s program, so isn’t turnabout fair play? Wasn’t that what the late, lamented regulation was about?

    Use it to push to reinstitute that broadcasting necessity.

    Time to unload on these fascists, or live to regret it.

  • Peter–

    Thanks for the reply. You’ve misquoted me, though.

    You said:

    “Maybe the fact that you think art and culture are the sole province of the “upper middle classâ€? is part of the problem.”

    I said:

    “On the other hand, it has also seemed clear to me that these efforts partially funded by tax dollars are primarily on behalf of an upper middle class who enjoys that sort of thing.”

    I’m not saying that art and culture are exclusively an upper middle-class phenomenon. I’m saying that I believe they are primarily enjoyed by those groups. The question becomes: should we all pay for these services, equally? Possibly. Although some people will use the service often and some will never use it. Although what consitutes art is often in the eyes of the beholder — asking for public funds of what some people regard as junk or pornography is questionable. Nevertheless, there is precedent. Public schools are used equally by all classes, but not everyone has children or uses them. And some people have problems with some portion of the curriculum. So there is an argument to be made against them, but not a very good one, I think. But if there are significant class differences in the users of cultural institutions — and I admit, I don’t have the figures on me — then this could put a different spin on things. The question might become — can the cultural benefits still be enjoyed without public funding, through private fundraising and perhaps a smaller budget? And if they can’t, are the allocation of all entertainment funds being distributed fairly across the culture (I don’t know the costs and rewards and class of football and baseball stadiums.) Or do cultural institutions serve some greater purpose that even people of lower classes might agree makes them worthwhile? I just want it to be fair. And I want art and culture unfettered by the narrow minds that run this government.

  • Here’s how it works:
    – conservatives think they will be able to con others into believing their delusions
    are true if they assert them vigorously enough. In mathematics, this faulty
    practice is in fact called “proof by vigorous assertion”, and it gets you an F.
    – in order to succeed at this, they also need to make intellectual activity
    socially unfashionable and in fact cast it as subversive, since it is the direct
    antidote to attempts at proof by vigorous assertion. They attempt to replace it
    in the public’s behavior with hearty, earthy reductionism and an emphasis on
    turgid vigor. “It doesn’t matter what you use your energy for (we’ll decide
    that) as long as you have lots of it.”
    – conservatives are unable to succeed in applying this program to programmers for PBS
    stations.
    – those programmers analyze the conservative agenda, using objective and unbiased
    criteria, as bequeathed them by their retained capacity for intellectual activity,
    and this analysis leads them to produce programming which exposes that
    conservative agenda and reveals that not only does the emperor have no clothes,
    but he and his entire court need a long scrub with lye soap, as well as an
    exercise program.
    – this exposure in the public arena of the conservative agenda as blatant lies is
    irritating to those who cannot muster more than proof by vigorous assertion (and
    after all, those who can, do, while those who can’t, harass), and so they decide
    that the best course of action, since “the pure play isn’t enough”, is to
    infiltrate PBS, just like any other entity which exposes the deficiencies of the
    conservative mind, and make it more mindful of “tone” and whom it should
    “recognize”, lest it appear insufficiently “connected”.

    Simple, no ?

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