On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television THE SAME SIDE OF THE COIN BY MARVIN KITMAN THE 1971 Public Television Conference, held last month at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City, awarded Joan Ganz Cooney its highly...
...My own feeling is that Mort Sil-verstein, producer-writer of "Banks and the Poor," most deserved a medal this year...
...Somebody might think it was trying to tell its producers what they could not say, an indirect form of censorship...
...Not that his qualifications were that crucial...
...So PBS hired the equivalent of an independent research organization—a young university political scientist named Stephen Farber who nobody had heard of as an authority on journalism, television or banking...
...To Farber, the list of 123 congressmen with interests or directorships in banks, put on a crawl at the end of the documentary, was one of the most disturbing aspects of the show...
...How can the 300-odd legislators who don't have bank holdings know anything about the business without having a stake in it...
...A station in Los Angeles, it is said, lost a $50,000 pledge from one potential supporter, a banker...
...One busy morning the literary chap arrived several hours late...
...This was a model documentary in PBS' eyes...
...Kenneth Clark's "Civilisation in the FBI," Kenneth Clark's "Civilisation in the Pentagon," Kenneth Clark's "Civilisation in Imperialistic American Foreign Policy"—all done with his usual witty comments and traditional British understatement—would open first on English television...
...Well, one didn't have to be a graduate student to recognize that...
...The most impressive information revealed by the list, anyway, was the great number of men in Congress who are not personally involved in the industry they are responsible for regulating...
...Basically, PBS wanted a report that would enable it to shriek in dismay: "What...
...On Television THE SAME SIDE OF THE COIN BY MARVIN KITMAN THE 1971 Public Television Conference, held last month at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City, awarded Joan Ganz Cooney its highly coveted first annual Ralph Lowell Medal for "the most extraordinary contribution to public broadcasting...
...I was wondering when they would get around to giving her some recognition for Sesame Street...
...Should Kenneth Clark's documentaries be criticized, the public television establishment could always say it thought it would be interesting for us to see the British point of view...
...Not only that, President Nixon called it a terrific show and sent out a press release saying how much he liked it...
...His documentary, analyzing how banking practices affect the poor, brought to the air last November what the commercial networks call "controversy...
...And when the show actually went on the air, bankers by the dozens lost confidence in public television...
...This had such an impact that the public television establishment has decided not to have any more of that stuff...
...Within a few months Farber's official statement about the shortcomings of "Banks and the Poor" was in hand...
...It's almost as bad as having sponsors...
...Who told you...
...The young fellow said, "Up at Brown, giving a lecture to an English class...
...THE PANIC OF 1970-71 was responsible for the "Standards of Journalism" that PBS tried to get the station owners to adopt at the Waldorf-Astoria...
...At least PBS knew enough not to attempt the content analysis itself...
...Farber added that it was often one-sided...
...It has a duty to perform in the public interest, which includes producing a number of controversial documentaries...
...I have been watching Silverstein's work on public television for years...
...Anything that shakes public television's standing with its establishments is nothing PBS should get involved in...
...This may have been one of the basic problems with "Banks and the Poor...
...It was very fair...
...Indeed, the whole affair had a zany quality: It was as if a man who bought a car that turned out to be a lemon was required to send it to a test laboratory to be told that his car was a lemon...
...The best investigative reporting is almost always one-sided...
...A study of the 487 pages of nominations submitted to the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences earlier this year shows that nothing on tv is too bad to be at least nominated...
...The basic problem, it seems to me, is that public television is working at cross purposes...
...PBS couldn't simply fire the culprits...
...The perfect solution would be for PBS to work out an arrangement whereby the British Broadcasting Corporation did all of its investigative reporting about American society...
...Kenneth Clark is not controversial, even though his Civilisation was one of the most one-sided documentaries ever produced...
...It decided to document what was wrong with the documentary...
...With the loss of hefty donations, The Panic of 1970-71 was on...
...Controversy seems to hit public television in the pocketbook...
...We'd probably have to pay the English people to watch such shows...
...His documentary made the bankers sound like ordinary American businessmen with recognizably human faults, including greed, close-fistedness, un-trustworthiness, and a poorly developed social conscience...
...Then, with the usual fanfare, public television here would announce that it was buying several BBC reruns for the next season...
...Us guilty of one-sided reporting...
...The copy chief asked...
...The bankers are also frequently the money men behind the home-improvement companies that have been known to fleece their customers...
...He told us, for example, that self-respecting banks and savings and loan associations sometimes finance the finance companies that lend money at high interest rates to the very poor people the banks turn away as bad credit risks...
...The controversial thesis of Silver-stein's documentary was that banks have been taking advantage of the poor...
...Naturally, when for some reason PBS and local station managements showed the documentary in advance to banking groups across the nation, the bankers shrieked...
...It presented both sides—con and pro —of the drug abuse problem...
...The Public Broadcast Service (PBS), sponsor of the conference for the 204 noncommercial station managements it supplies with programs, was so turned off by the experiment that it refused to allow the producers (NET) to nominate "Banks and the Poor" for an Emmy...
...Liebling worked on the copy desk of the Providence Evening Bulletin with another young literary chap...
...That would be suspect...
...His list may be third-rate journalism, or even fourth-rate, but it is definitely not fifth-rate...
...But public television is supported by the financial and political establishments that are prime targets for documentaries...
...The veteran copy chief genially inquired, "Where the hell have you been...
...Mike Connors was nominated for his acting in Mannix...
...Golly gee, that will never happen here again...
...Other corporation presidents also joined the financial protest...
...One-sided documentaries about banking are bad...
...Consequently, Silverstein didn't bother to give us the other side...
...That would look too much like censorship...
...The list of congressmen," the secret report explains, "has the heading 'congressmen with bank holdings or serving as directors.' This is tantamount to saying: 'congressmen with speeding convictions or murder convictions.' . . . Everyone is lumped together as though all were guilty of some heinous crime...
...Those who saw the draft of the "Standards of Journalism" say it was inaccurate, incomplete, unobjective, unbalanced, and unfair...
...Silverstein's complete failure to recognize this is the mark of fourth-rate journalism...
...Silverstein undoubtedly assumed we all knew that bankers are benign, kindly, humane, helpful men—standing somewhere between doctors and social workers in the ranks of professionals who want to be our friends...
...While everybody agrees Sesame Street is a lot better than the other kids' programs on the tube—such as Lucy, The Newlywed Game and Peyton Place—some people at the conference felt the extraordinary Great American Dream Machine could have used the encouragement this year...
...Charity, they say, begins at home...
...Nothing, the tv commercials have been telling us for years, makes the average banker happier than the privilege of watching our money so we can all sleep better at night...
...The compiling of the list, Farber adds, was "fifth-rale journalism...
...The spectacle of an organization that has been in the business of distributing programs for less than two years setting itself up as a judge of journalistic standards reminds me of a story A. J. Liebling used to tell about the early days of his newspaper career...
...Nevertheless, the executives at PBS were very disturbed by Silver-stein's show...
...One point in Farber's report deserves special comment...
...The rationale, perhaps, is that people might lose faith in banks and start stuffing their money under mattresses...
...I was telling them all about newspaper work...
...It said that Silverstein's documentary was filled with sarcasm and irony...
...Sandy Koufax for his sports reporting, and so on...
...Thus, PBS' disdain for what many critics regarded the best documentary of the year arouses curiosity...
...Drawing from the lessons of "Banks and the Poor," this document set forth guidelines on accuracy, completeness, objectivity, balance, and fairness...
...And it could always fall back on the disclaimer that any similarity between the opinions expressed by the BBC and those of PBS are purely coincidental...
...Many episodes of The Young Lawyers (abc) and Storefront Lawyers (CBS) this season made the same points...
...Actually, Silverstein should comment on it, but since the report was secret and Silverstein hasn't seen it yet, I will take this opportunity to answer one of Farber's charges for him...
...It even misspelled the name of Walter Lippmann...
...The public television establishment, I have noticed from time to time, seems to love programs that always give both sides to an issue, like The Advocates, even when there is only one side...
...The experimental two-hour show is being cut back to an hour next season, despite rave reviews...
...Banks and the Poor" was scratched from public television's list of Emmy nominees and replaced by a program called "Turned-On Crisis...
Vol. 54 • May 1971 • No. 10
