Who Pays For Big Bird?
Scully, Matthew
Who Pays For. Big Bird? Bewailing the Decay of Public TV By Matthew Scully It's now thirty years since government got into the television business, founding the Corporation for Public...
...In 1967, notes James Ledbetter in his earnest defense of public television, the highest-rated show was Bonanza and of the thirty-four programs introduced that season by NBC, CBS, and ABC, not one concerned public affairs...
...Why such fervor...
...But this goes down as a mark against him because the plan would have solved PBS's infrastructure problems...
...Of course, as a respite from all this intense debate, we will need some levity, but "PBS seems positively frightened of original comedy programming...
...Yes, those tobacco companies have it all too easy...
...The viewer of the News-Hour with Jim Lehrer sits through about a minute's worth of advertising from program underwriters— Fortune 500 giants such as Archer Daniels Midland, AT&T, and PepsiCo— before the news begins...
...What's never clear is how Nixon, in seeking "to minimize public affairs and political programs," could be faulted for politicizing PBS...
...A few philistines might complain that perhaps this is straying a bit from the proper functions of government...
...America was "producing a generation of semi-literate consumers," declared Fred Friendly of the Ford Foundation...
...writing...
...In his final chapter, Ledbetter declares that "the CPB must be liberated from direct presidential control...
...Ledbetter's Made Possible By . . . traces the history of public television from there to the present...
...Corporate underwriting covers 16 percent of PBS's costs, and often comes from each company's advertising rather than charity budget...
...It is the grand paradox of the Media Age that in the mid-1990s, as the United States stood on the edge of a telecommunications revolution," he writes, "one of the highest congressional priorities was cutting off federal funds for public broadcasting...
...The Soviets were watching symphonies and ballet and programs about science, while we frittered away our evenings with Hoss and Little Joe...
...Though the remote control has been passed to a new generation of Americans, "quality television" remains our cause, and we shall not be moved...
...He notes that many sponsoring corporations are themselves beneficiaries of federal favors, so that the whole arrangement is essentially a laundering operation...
...Bewailing the Decay of Public TV By Matthew Scully It's now thirty years since government got into the television business, founding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting...
...This might have led to a useful discussion about PBS as a self-supporting enterprise...
...Ledbetter makes some good points about the way PBS does things, but the effect of his book is a little bewildering...
...Ledbetter cites his own experience as part of the first American generation to be reared watching Sesame Street and to form in adulthood an "addiction" to Bill Moyers's specials and to such news shows as The MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour...
...Throughout this book, everything going on in the world is seen through the prism of PBS...
...He seems never to notice that all of the villains in his story, right up to the Republican Congress in 1997, are the elected representatives of the public that PBS is supposed to be serving...
...Something had to be done...
...PBS should be confronting "thorny modern politics" instead of wasting precious air time on what viewers actually seem to prefer: "long-dead social situations" like the "British costume dramas" Upstairs, Downstairs, or documentaries like The Civil War, exploring well-burnished historical topics...
...Probably he's right and PBS ought to be one thing or the other, not just a more elegant version of commercial TV...
...and "Can It Be Saved...
...At all events, we have been duly warned that without swift and sweeping measures to save it, public television "will not survive the century...
...This document, Ledbetter reflects, "is a quiet manifesto, expressing the belief that government action can and should be catalysts for perfecting the human spirit...
...Years of political pressure, he writes, have "instilled the habits of self-censorship...
...The very popularity of such PBS programs as This Old House, the children's show Barney and Friends, and Ken Burns's documentary on the Civil War has given rise to mass marketing of videos, toys, and other merchandise—a sacrifice, as Ledbetter sees it, of principle to profit...
...These influences are apparent...
...No sooner had LBJ signed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 then he began installing cronies on the CPB board...
...This Public Television Task Force would be administered by "community activists, artists, journalists, broadcasters, labor leaders, and clergy...
...You get the impression that no issue today is more urgent than the survival of public television and that for three decades PBS has been at the center of culture...
...If Ledbetter were making an argument against subsidies in general, he'd have a fine case in point...
...What he calls "clobbering" most of us would call accountability...
...Just a little overwrought, as are chapter titles like "Embracing the Enemy," "What Is To Be Done...
...which sound like something from Lenin or Thomas Paine...
...Nixon, for example, rejects a plan to centralize telecommunications under the federal government...
...What was purposefully planned as a commercial-free environment ironically now sells itself as a preferred media buy...
...Oddly missing from this critique of vulgar commercialism, however, is Bill Moyers, the pioneer of PBS-for-profit whom Ledbetter elsewhere extols for "commentary and reporting on great questions of policy and intellect surpassing anything that commercial television could imagine...
...Equally unseemly are the on-air exhortations to the five million PBS "members" who donate some $400 million a year...
...His heroes are invariably the executives, producers, artists, and intellectuals striving valiantly to resist "outside interference...
...But I believe Ledbetter could here cite the Comedy Clause of the Constitution, under which we all enjoy the right to the very best in original satire...
...What America needs is more political panel shows, more national self-analysis, and more subsidies for our struggling class of pundits...
...It seems unlikely that the American viewing audience would suffer an intellectual breakdown if it were subject to an original satire of network television like HBO's Larry Sanders Show, or an animation delight like Fox's The Simpsons...
...Drastic" budget cuts by Congress in 1995—by which Ledbetter means that the CPB got $37 million less than it requested—have made it more reliant upon corporate underMatthew Scully is a writer living in Virginia...
...Let us sink as one into our couches, demanding nothing less than excellence...
...The taxpayers would gladly give their money to PBS's artists, newsmen, and intellectuals— only too grateful to provide a creative outlet to these national treasures...
...Memo by memo, fiscal year by fiscal year, the book follows PBS in its struggle to stay true to this lofty aim while beset on every side by petty politics...
...If the medium is to provide a sustained, intelligent, critical look at American soci-ety—as its founders certainly intended for it—it must examine the actions and faults of America's most powerful institutions: government, finance, insurance and real estate industries, oil companies, media, tobacco and agriculture, lobbyists and federal bureaucracies, pharmaceutical companies, auto makers, and the military...
...More convincing is Ledbetter's case against corporate financing, though here again you have to really cherish your TV to care much...
...PBS is supposedly committed to free speech, yet ever since 1967, "its taxpayer subsidy has repeatedly been used as a club with which to clobber that very commitment...
...Made Possible By . . . is a painstaking account, the result of going to presidential libraries and poring over every memo, report, budget, or transcript related to public broadcasting...
...A media columnist for the Village Voice, Led-better remains an ardent believer in the enterprise, but he fears the corruption of PBS (and National Public Radio, to which he devotes a chapter) by the lure of commercial profit...
...The author's whole critique seems to arise from a couch-centered vision of the world, in which the two great forces in human affairs are government and TV His protagonists are the fathers of PBS, visionaries like McGeorge Bundy at Ford and the authors of Public Television: A Program for Action, a report by the Carnegie Commission...
...Ledbetter seems to operate mostly on the customer-is-always-wrong principle...
...Then Nixon "deliberately plotted to . . . quash public TV content he and his allies disliked...
...At the time, PBS was airing such programs as Soul!, hosted by a Black Panther and an expose entitled The Banks and the Poor...
...His solution is to create some sort of new task force to be subsidized by a permanent tax on the telecommunications industry...
...With government providing just a quarter of the CPB budget, PBS and NPR have leaned more and more on corporate charity...
...An editor at Harper's warned, "The best brains in television, its best hours, and its best dollars are dedicated to making the American people fat, dumb, and happy—at a moment when the Soviets are straining all their resources to make their people lean, smart, and tough...
Vol. 3 • November 1997 • No. 10
