For Viewers Like You
In the early '70s, even a
novice channel surfer could tell when he had landed on PBS. There'd be a
cheerful chef butchering a Cornish hen, Muppets singing songs about friendship,
two professors and a moderator seated in a bare-bones studio discussing race
relations, a helmeted fat lady singing, a Third Worlder criticizing the First
World in a documentary, and the lions of the Serengeti stalking an impala
herd.
But after
the many-tendriled beast of cable TV conquered the American home, the mélange
of chefs, Muppets, TV talk, and prowling lions came to define not PBS but the
act of channel surfing itself. Of course, video vaudeville wasn't the goal of
PBS's early architects, the culture shapers at the Carnegie Commission and Ford
Foundation who dreamed that an infusion of federal funding would make the "vast
wasteland" of television bloom. How their dream cracked up, resulting in the
pablum of today's PBS, and how PBS became Washington's most politically
skittish organization, is the subject of James Ledbetter's brief history,
Made Possible By ...:
The Death of Public Broadcasting in the United
States .
Public TV was the runt of the post-World War II
telecommunications litter. But it was planned that way. Commercial broadcasters
backed the Federal Communications Commission set-aside of 80 coveted VHF
licenses and 162 UHF licenses nationwide for public-TV broadcasters, but they
did so out of self-interest. Each frequency assigned to a noncommercial owner
meant one less competitor selling advertising. For the same reasons, CBS
pledged a $1-million grant for PBS's debut season, but the industry blocked at
every turn the British model of a full-fledged public network financed with a
hefty tax on televisions.
Ledbetter
argues that public broadcasting's independence was tainted from the get-go by
the "military-communications complex." Military-industrial types, he reports,
had been loitering in the vicinity of educational broadcasting years before the
Johnson administration decided to fund a government-supported system: Officials
from GE, IBM, and the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission sat on the board of
National Education Television, the Ford Foundation-sponsored PBS precursor.
Defense contractors were recruited to explore the then-novel idea of networking
the new system with satellites. And the executives who midwifed PBS included
Vietnam War escalator McGeorge Bundy and former Army Secretary and General
Dynamics CEO Frank Pace Jr.
While I'd love to be able to tell you that PBS
was born in a Seven Days in May -type coup, and that Julia Child, Mister
Rogers, and Jim Lehrer have been slipping us subliminal military propaganda
since the beginning, Ledbetter doesn't develop his idea that the Cold Warriors
co-opted PBS. When the government starts any new enterprise, it always taps the
made guys--not the students of Herbert Marcuse. In fact, had the establishment
not been present at PBS's creation in 1967, President Johnson--a commercial
broadcaster himself (Lady Bird owned broadcast stations in Texas)--would never
have green-lighted it.
PBS took
the public broadcasting handoff from the Ford Foundation, which, along with the
Carnegie Commission, had long exhorted the United States to start a public
system. The Ford Foundation seeded the public-TV idea with $300 million worth
of grants between 1951 and 1976 in the hope that the feds would completely
underwrite it thereafter (just as cities routinely assume responsibility for
museums and libraries once philanthropists found them). In the expansionist
days of the Great Society, the idea of a government-financed TV network devoted
to education, culture, and politics wasn't that wild. Looking back, one
imagines that PBS could have evolved into an American BBC and secured the sort
of government funding that didn't require the scrutiny of annual congressional
appropriations. All this would have required was that its founding bureaucrats
1) make the product seem as innocuous as a museum exhibit and 2) block the
election of Richard Nixon as president in 1968. They failed on both counts.
Instead, in the early years of the public-TV experiment,
PBS (which launched in 1969) and NET (which received no federal funds) aired
the provocative programming they thought was their mission. These unflinching
documentaries of the Vietnam War, shows devoted to militant black politics, and
Naderesque consumer programs (Nader even hosted a show) sealed public TV's
reputation as "left-dominated, elitist, minority-radical," as Ledbetter puts
it. Nothing PBS has aired since comes close to the daring stuff of the first
years.
Nixon
hated PBS no more than he did the commercial networks, but his veto over PBS's
funding and his power to appoint board members to the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting (PBS's overseers) gave him a direct outlet for his hate. He
defunded, jawboned, and intimidated the fledgling broadcaster, and had he not
been distracted by Watergate, he surely would have dismembered it.
Reduced by Washington politicians to a
well-trained dog that sometimes chews on the furniture, PBS steered a moderate
programming course into the '70s. But to remind its masters that it can still
bite--and reinforce conservative prejudices that it's pink--PBS periodically
aired blasphemous dramas ( Steambath , 1973), Mao-symp travelogues
(Shirley MacLaine's The Other Half of the Sky: A China Memoir , 1975),
politically provocative docudramas ( Death of a Princess , 1980), lefty
attacks on agribiz ( Hungry for Profit , 1985), homoerotica ( Tongues
Untied , 1991), and brazen assaults on logical thinking ( The Panama
Deception , 1992).
Public
broadcasting's big transformation came in the mid-'70s, Ledbetter finds, when
U.S. corporations stepped in to fill the financial gap for the underfunded
network. (Yes, underfunded: $1.5 billion doesn't go very far on 350 public-TV
stations.) Dumping their tax-deductible loot by the millions, the corporations
(Archer Daniels Midland, GE, Mobil, Exxon, Chevron, Dupont, Metropolitan Life)
encouraged the sort of shows only a member of the Business Roundtable could
love: centrist news programs, conservative talk shows, Wall Street advice
shows, lions-of-the-Serengeti documentaries, and historical dramas that set all
human conflict in late-19 th -century England.
No wonder, then, that right-wingers think of PBS as liberal
and lefties regard it as a corporate/conservative tool. It's neither and both.
Conflicted over what its true mission is, PBS simultaneously whores for
corporate money and aggressively gathers data on how poor, uneducated, and
blue-collar its audience is. It accepts its role as an elite medium and then
panders for larger audiences with Yanni specials. ( Yanni specials? ) It
runs advertisements for its supporters at the top of shows and strikes business
deals with MCI, TCI, and Disney, but still insists it's not commercial. It
shares hit shows like Bill Nye the Science Guy with commercial stations.
And when it stumbles onto a good subject for a series, like Ken Burns' history
of baseball, it turns the show into a seminar on racism and labor relations,
not the hit-and-run and the spitball.
At book's
end, Ledbetter issues his clarion call for reform, demanding that the PBS clock
be turned back to the '50s, when the philanthropoids first imagined American
public broadcasting. His policy prescription includes reducing corporate
influence, liberating the system from presidential control, democratizing local
stations, serving minorities, decentralizing the Washington-centric service,
and increasing accountability.
What Ledbetter misses is that PBS's time--if it
ever had one--has come and gone. The Internet facilitates the sort of
communications and activism that the Fords and Carnegies prayed PBS would
spark. Commercial channels pour programs down from the heavens that match or
surpass the products of the public broadcasters, who are too cowed to produce
anything as homo-proud as the new Ellen , as racy as Brooklyn
South , or as culturally subversive as The Larry Sanders Show . I ask
you, what PBS newsman out-wings the liberal Peter Jennings?
Oddly, the Newt Gingrich-led
sallies against public broadcasting, which consume many pages of Made
Possible By , have only enhanced its chances of survival. PBS is now viewed
as a federal public-works project, a dispenser of political and cultural pork
to liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans. The Army Corps of Engineers,
the Rural Electrification Administration, and Amtrak have lasted a lot longer
with a lot less going for them.
