PBS: Behind the Screen
Jarvik, Laurence
Profits of Boredom: Why PBS Won't Go Away PBS: Behind the Screen Laurence Jarvik Forum / 336 pages /$25 REVIEWED BY Francis X. Rocca 0 ne afternoon in first grade, a girl on the school bus...
...As for the programs without corporate sponsors, big-selling tie-ins, or broad constituencies, Jarvik does not seem concerned that they might disappear without tax-dollar support...
...Of course, cutting off the subsidy won't by itself make PBS any more ideologically balanced than ABC or The American Spectator...
...Julia Child first appeared on it in 1961 to flog her cookbook...
...Commercial considerations have also brought programs to the screen...
...The show had been designed to help kids study, but like everything else on television, it only made them more anxious to leave school behind...
...Will the inevitable cost-cutting mean a shake-up of the network establishment, or are its members as dug-in as tenured university faculty...
...When Newt Gingrich talks about "zeroing out" the federal subsidy to public broadcasting—now 4 percent of the $2 billion annual budget—PBS and its allies accuse him of trying tokill off Big Bird...
...Jarvik sees the earning power of PBS's stars as evidence that they can make it in the open market...
...Monty Python's Flying Circus," and the many popular "Britcoms" like "Absolutely Fabulous" that have followed, are the legacy of a PBS programmer who did not share his colleagues' disdain for comedy...
...The major commercial networks are happy to let public television provide the social services that educators and government officials demand, while making advertising time an even scarcer and more valuable commodity...
...That's not a program many Americans can be very eager to see, and its cancellation depends on more reviews like Jarvik's...
...Even nature documentaries, always among PBS's most popular offerings, predictably extol the virtues of primitive society while warning against the dangers of modem technology...
...Mobil Oil forced "Upstairs, Downstairs," the emblematic PBS miniseries, on network executives who were leery of even the high-toned British kind of soap opera...
...T he Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) was established by Congress in 1967 to fund and regulate public television and radio...
...What worries him is "the danger of a government propagandizing its citizenry...
...The American Spectator January 1997 73 show is a prime exhibit in his case for privatization...
...Jarvik actually finds such commercialism heartening...
...A mandate for fairness was written into its founding legislation...
...Two years later CPB in turn established PBS to organize the distribution of programming...
...Lobbyists for CPB are even demanding a billion-dollar gift, as a "trust fund," before public broadcasting is weaned from the taxpayer's wallet...
...This separation of powers was meant to insulate network executives and producers from government influence, but the eventual result was to lessen their accountability to any standard of objectivity...
...If PBS were to lose government support, it would need to boost its z percent share of the viewership and start running commercials—both unattractive prospects for the rest of the industry...
...Indeed, several studies over the years have found that exposure to Bert, Ernie, and Grover harms rather than helps concentration and other learning skills...
...Today comedy is still not part of the prime-time feed, yet one of the biggest draws of Pledge Week donations is another Britcom, "Are You Being Served...
...One federally funded FRANCIS X. ROCCA is a writer living in New Haven, Connecticut...
...Other news coverage has tended to follow this line...
...The occasional conservative offerings, such as William F. Buckley's long-running "Firing Line" or Milton Friedman's miniseries, "Free to Choose," are token gestures typically banished to obscure time slots...
...That particular miniseries turned out to be the most influential PBS program ever, hastening the downfall of the president and making stars of the network's hosts, Robert McNeil and Jim Lehrer...
...in later years Bill Moyers made a bundle from his (long undisclosed) interest in myth maven Joseph Campbell, whom he lionized in numerous PBS broadcasts...
...A scholar at the Capital Research Center, and a television producer-director with a PBS documentary to his credit, he is an informed and outspoken advocate of privatizing public broadcasting...
...It was this that prompted Bob Dole's denunciation of "Barneygate...
...But as Laurence Jarvik points out in PBS: Behind the Screen, where these programs have their greatest success is in peddling merchandise —toys, books, videos, and the like—over federally subsidized airwaves...
...The PBS establishment, a "top-heavy, expensive, and stifling bureaucracy" according to one of its former presidents, is not the only group interested in keeping things as they are...
...Profits of Boredom: Why PBS Won't Go Away PBS: Behind the Screen Laurence Jarvik Forum / 336 pages /$25 REVIEWED BY Francis X. Rocca 0 ne afternoon in first grade, a girl on the school bus told me about a brand new TV show she couldn't wait to get home to watch...
...and Bob Vila lost his job on "This Old House" for making paid endorsements of home-repair products...
...Making money has been a part of public television from the beginning...
...Jarvik seems to assume that subjecting the network to market forces will turn it into a "free marketplace of ideas...
...Unable to introduce the Pythons into the networks' core schedule, he went into business for himself and sold the show to one local station manager at a time...
...Well, perhaps—yet despite theintroduction's promise to do so, this book offers no coherent proposal of how that might be accomplished...
...This has been the pattern at least since 1961, when the Big Three networks backed the conversion of WNTA into WNDT, New York City's first "educational" station...
...The less sophisticated "Barney" program has actually earned higher marks from education experts...
...After the Nixon administration sought to replace politically charged programming with cultural and educational shows, the "public affairs" division fought back with twicea-day broadcasts of the Watergate hearings during the summer of 1973...
...Since its premiere in 1983, "Frontline" has reliably taken a left-liberal slant, whether showing the brighter side of Soviet Communism or the darker side of Israel's Palestinian policy, sometimes on the basis of highly dubious data...
...But the most popular shows would undoubtedly survive, whether on public or commercial networks, without government funding...
...In his case, PBS officials cited conflict of interest as grounds for the firing when the real conflict was between Vila's interests and the network's: the show's corporate underwriter objected to their star hawking competitors' wares...
...This was the first I'd ever heard of "Sesame Street," and it turned out to be a fitting introduction...
...In two years, products related to the purple dinosaur grossed $500 million, none of it passed on to PBS...
Vol. 30 • January 1997 • No. 1
