"There is no 'public' broadcasting in the U.S.," said
Loyola University Prof. Lee Artz, who berated the field for ignoring
working-class audiences. To make matters worse, recent mega-mergers
in the corporate media world make public broadcasting's responsibilities
even more pressing, and its problems even more worrisome, critics
say. "What our conference-goers, in the main, were saying
is that today's broadcasters are very good and very realistic
about hitting the market that's there for them," conference
organizer and media scholar Michael McCauley told Current. "But
we can do more."
Public TV, rather than radio, drew the most criticism. A sharp
and funny anecdote came from Amy Goodman, host of Pacifica's Democracy
Now, who said she got sick of commercials when she was watching
TV with her niece. We don't have to watch all these ads, Goodman
told her niece. Let's turn to PBS. The reply: "But this is
PBS." The system's worst enemies aren't on the outside, Goodman
said: "Public broadcasting is providing the greatest threat
to public broadcasting."
Speakers said they understood the pressures on public broadcasters,
but weren't willing to forgive sins committed in the name of branding
and market placement. "The decisions public broadcasters
have made have often been problematic," Hoynes told Current.
"The strategy that's evolved in the last five years to market
the PBS brand, engage in joint ventures, and really cash in on
the audience will undermine public broadcasting in the long run.
I think it's a wrong-headed approach, although I understand why
they pursued this strategy."
Cutting
the purse strings
If low funding is the problem, then more funding is the obvious
solution. "If there's one theme that comes from the conference,
it's that eventually the funding has to change," McCauley
said. Some activists, including Starr and the CIPB, are already
rallying for a trust fund to support
public broadcasting, a model originally proposed by the Carnegie
Commission in 1967 and defeated in Congress several times
since. CIPB's proposal for a Public Broadcasting Trust that dispenses
$1 billion a year "would take [public broadcasting] off the
federal dole, remove corporate advertising, stop the desperate
search for money, and free public broadcasting to pursue its mission
with editorial integrity," explains the group's website.
The trust overseen by a nine-member board would replace CPB and
absorb the satellite distribution systems now run by PBS and NPR.
Half the trust's money would be earmarked for national
program production, routed through divisions including a Television
Program Department and a Radio Department. The other half would
go to local stations for local program acquisition. The yearly
$1 billion could come from an investment of the current budget
surplus. CIPB also recommends drawing funds from spectrum fees,
sales of digital TV sets, sales or transfers of commercial broadcast
licenses, or the auction of the digital spectrum.
Such taxes would probably draw fire from commercial broadcasters,
who have lobbied powerfully against such trust-fund structures
in the past. Starr acknowledged his group has an uphill climb.
"That's why we're proceeding slowly," he said. "Eventually,
over time, we'll grow in strength and have a Congress that will
be willing to invest in democracy." Starr also cites a poll
paid for by the Open Society Institute, a funder of his organization,
which says that 79 percent of adults favor taxing commercial broadcasters
to support public broadcasting.
CIPB is also working on setting up local chapters
that encourage communities to become active at local stations
by attending board meetings and asking for a wider range of programs.
The organization has a database to foster these groups, and is
developing partnerships with educators, public interest groups
and other organizations to encourage more activism focused on
public broadcasting.
"As people come into a closer relationship with their stations,
they also come to understand how the whole service would be vastly
improved if it had independent funding," Starr said. CIPB
offers a publication on the subject, How
to Make Public Broadcasting Accountable to Your Community: A Manual
for Activists. Academic proponents of a public broadcasting
trust say broadcasters also need to show support. "They have
to move away from this commercial model and really join with those
who are arguing for independent, long-term funding," Hoynes
said. "I think that should really be priority No. 1 internally."
"We're
your friends"
Will public broadcasters join the push for reform? Many community
broadcasters, video activists, and LPFM proponents are already
on board, and added their voices to the progressive chorus at
"Public Broadcasting and the Public Interest."
Other practitioners, however, left the conference feeling like
punching bags, raising questions about future ties between reformists
and pubcasters. Conference speakers called them to task for targeting
affluent audiences or airing mainstream programming at the expense
of minority views. Broadcasters responded that the bitter realities
of funding force them to make choices. "I don't know that
the conference really was able to come to grips with the differences
between the practice of public broadcasting and the theory of
public broadcasting," said Arlen Diamond, general manager
of KSMU in Springfield, Mo., in an interview with Current. Like
other managers, Diamond says he faces a dilemma: should his station
try to serve a variety of interests, as critics advocate, and
risk alienating core NPR listeners? "You can't have it both
ways," he said.
Rhonda Morin, media coordinator at Maine Public Broadcasting,
felt that academics were speaking too broadly of public broadcasting
and not looking at individual television and radio stations. "I
felt like they were making an assumption that PBS was public broadcasting,"
she told Current. "It's not the only entity."
Starr, who
screened a CIPB video called Put the Public
Back in Public Broadcasting: If We Don't Do It, Who Will?
that focused mainly on PBS, admitted that the video's original
script touched on radio, but it proved to be harder to characterize
on screen and was edited out.
Morin and other broadcasters also wished that more people from
their profession had been at the conference. "We had some
people who had their toe in the water, and a couple of people
who had had bad experiences [in the field]…but they're hardly
what make up the width and breadth of public broadcasting,"
said Alan Chartock, executive director of WAMC in Albany, N.Y.
"That is where I think it went wrong…. By and large,
the people who run public radio around the country are socially
conscious and fairly progressive folks who I think would have
every reason to resent the way they were being characterized."
Though few representatives from NPR and PBS attended the conference,
critics say they do want pubcasters on their side. "I'm disappointed
if public broadcasters at the conference perceived themselves
as the enemy," Hoynes said. "The criticism is not as
much of the individual as it is of the structure."
But activists say strengthening ties with broadcasters has been
difficult. "What we've discovered, by and large, is that
their wagons are already circled," Starr said, calling public
broadcasters "people in a perpetual state of crisis."
"Then, we come on the scene, and no matter what language
we would have used, we would have been seen as independent and
potentially hostile."
"We're really your friends," McCauley said, referring
to pubcasters. "We want to see this enterprise live."
