To hear those who would slash public television funding tell it, PBS programming ought to be full of shows with titles like “Sandinista Chef,” “Wallpapering with $50 Bills” and, for young girls, “Not Shaving Your Legs with host Amy Carter.”
Then there would be the continuing documentary series, “Bad Things about White Guys.”
There are other justifications offered for the current budget-cutting fever, of course, and even public TV officials admit that some of them make sense. But lurking behind all the rhetoric is the view Republican congressional leaders have of PBS as a hothouse for liberalism and elitism.
In House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s phrase, it’s “a sandbox for rich, upper-class people” that produces “biased television” and therefore shouldn’t have its snout in the public feedbag. On the Senate floor, Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) has in years past bemoaned the “unrelenting liberal cheerleading I see and hear on the public airwaves.” Even early in the life of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides funding for public TV and radio stations, President Richard Nixon objected to what he saw as the liberal bias of news coverage.
It’s not only cultural or political conservatives who believe public television is a McGovernnik with his nose in the air. Fueled by years of such criticism, and by PBS’s welcome mat for fussy British dramas and artfully overwrought Italian singing, the perception has gained popular currency.
But does it have anything to do with reality? Any rational look at public television programming suggests not.
Let’s examine, first, the schedule of programs promulgated by the national PBS organization in Washington for local stations to run during the current pledge month, presumably the time of year when the organization is going to do its best to lure its core audience to their screens and their checkbooks.
Early on in pledge period, PBS banked on “Over America,” a compilation of gee-whiz aerial footage of the nation.
Next came “John Tesh Live at Red Rocks with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra.” In it, the “Entertainment Tonight” co-host, a composer of critically lambasted pop, banged away at his piano while Olympians Bart Conner and Nadia Comaneci gymnasticized in synch with Tesh’s flopping blond forelock. The place name “Red Rocks” sounds sort of menacing, and Comaneci used to be a Communist, but the program was American enough-full of enough faux grandiosity-to be a Super Bowl halftime show.
Most of the pledge specials, meanwhile, are music programming, always a public television staple and especially so during periods of pleading.
But for the following-“Glenn Miller’s Greatest Hits,” “The Lawrence Welk Show: Then and Now,” “Frank Yankovic: America’s Polka King,” “Vince Gill in Concert . . .”-which is the more apt description, “elitist” or “determinedly populist?”
One could argue that the pledge-period “Nature” program titled “Ghost Bear” might be some sort of liberal parable in animal show’s clothing: It details the life of one white bear that is part of a 10 percent minority on an island of black bears.
But then you have something called “The Wagner Gala,” for heaven’s sake. Wagner.
Do not adjust your newspaper. The public face of public television, at least during its most significant month, is as warm and fuzzy as a Big Bird suit, as friendly to those who decry the vulgarization of the culture as a fireside chat with William Bennett. Instead of performance artists frolicking naked with foodstuffs in the name of free expression, we get “In the Mood.” And rather than a major orchestra tackling a difficult 20th Century symphony because being exposed to such experimentation is good for the audience, we get an earnest production of a TV star’s musical moonlighting.
There is much more to public television than its pledge programming, of course. And certainly it is possible to believe that pledge deliberately highlights the least offensive shows for reasons including the current political climate and the probability that the people most likely to part with cash are those whose heartstrings are being zinged.
But it is almost impossible to look at that list and conclude that public television sees its audience as anything other than middlebrow and resolutely average.
While Gingrich reportedly has wondered aloud if “some poor worker out there with three kids” is happy paying taxes for shows he doesn’t watch, PBS cites statistics from Nielsen Media Research that suggest the public television audience may well include that lamentable laborer: Viewership over an entire day almost exactly matches the country’s population in categories including income, education, race/ethnicity and even whether they have cable.
In fact, the notion that PBS programming is elitist, while that of commercial networks somehow defines the opposite, suggests an opinion of the populace that itself contains more than a faint whiff of elitism. Is it a given that the average American needs a laugh track to cue him in to where the jokes are, or that he’ll only tolerate documentaries that spend, at best, no more than 20 minutes per topic?
The columnist Nat Hentoff points out that there are “a lot of Americans who have not been to college but who are lifelong autodidacts” and that in the broadcasting realm only the depth of information provided on the public airwaves satisfies their thirst for knowledge.
The public-TV-watching autodidact may be getting in-depth information, but he is generally not getting left-leaning information. Research-and common sense-suggests that most programming on PBS, which gets an increasing proportion of its funding from corporate sources, tends to be centrist.
For all the outcry they have provoked, the shows that have tweaked conservative sensibilities have in truth been far between. Last year, in January, it was “Tales of the City,” a dramatic mini-series based on work by gay writer Armistead Maupin that took heat for portraying gay life, drug use, profanity and nudity. The 1991 documentary “Tongues Untied,” about black gay men, was criticized for similar reasons. (And, as often happens with controversial programs, one-third of public stations would not run it. Many others chose WTTW’s path: airing it outside prime time.)
From such strands comes the suggestion of a tapestry. But in the whole cloth of public television, documentaries treating current public affairs, the category that tends to produce the hot-button shows, aren’t even on that much: They earn only 8 percent of evening airtime, according to one study. The portion of those that provoke any controversy is much smaller still.
The study, underwritten by Chicago’s MacArthur Foundation, came out in 1993 and was conducted by Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, a progressive media watchdog group. FAIR is no fan of the Right, or even the center, but its methodology suggests a strict effort to protect itself from charges of bias.
It tallied shows and the people who appeared on them by category rather than by trying to decide where on the political spectrum their content or statements fit.
During 1992, the group studied six weeks of evening (6 p.m. to midnight) programming on public television stations in 10 cities, including Chicago, that reached 24 percent of the U.S. population.
It found that about 59 percent of airtime was devoted to shows that fit into a “non-public affairs category,” including arts, nature, science and hobby programs like “Nova,” “Masterpiece Theatre” and “The Victory Garden.”
Thirty-three percent of public TV airtime during the study period went to public affairs, a category that included news (12 percent, most of it the nightly “MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour”); current public affairs documentary (8 percent, including the investigative series “Frontline”); and business and financial (5 percent, mostly “Nightly Business Report” and “Wall Street Week”). Seven percent was local programming.
Telling was FAIR’s look at who appeared as outside sources on 15 regular public-affairs shows. Although the fuss prompted by public television programs dealing with homosexuality might lead you to think otherwise, not one of 1,644 sources appearing in 423 stories was a representative of a gay or lesbian organization, according to FAIR’s study.
Indeed, FAIR found that the vast majority of source airtime-83 percent-went to the usual suspects: corporate and government officials and “professional experts” such as academics and journalists. “Citizen activists,” including representatives of labor, feminist, environmental or racial/ethnic groups, earned just 7 percent and members of the general public 4 percent of time.
The study also counted how many Republican vs. Democratic politicians appeared. “Even `Frontline’ (53 percent/47 percent) and `Listening to America’ (64 percent/36 percent), two programs that were the focus of political pressure from Republicans, made use of Republicans more frequently than Democrats,” the study said.
“Frankly,” contends FAIR founder Jeff Cohen, “I don’t like the fact that the tax money subsidizes the corporate voices that you can hear on any commercial station day after day. (CPB) has become a bad use of public funds, but for exactly the opposite reason of what the right wing says.”
If you think public television news sources are a homogenous group-and to some extent this is merely a reflection of the culture-look at the hosts of the major shows: John McLaughlin, William F. Buckley of “Firing Line,” Louis Rukeyser of “Wall Street Week” and Tony Brown.
It’s hard to find an openly liberal regular host on the PBS schedule.
“P.O.V.,” or point of view, the summertime documentary film series meant to provide a forum for individual filmmakers, is probably the PBS program that most consistently expresses a viewpoint from left of center, with “Sesame Street” a close, if fairly unobjectionable, second.
What comes after that? Bill Moyers? He’s former press secretary for Democratic President Lyndon Johnson, but he’s an irregular presence, even more so now that he’s doing regular commentaries on “NBC Nightly News.” And his programs have tended to be more esoteric than political categories can grasp.
“Frontline?” The investigative series this year has featured topics including “Death of a Porn Queen,” a critical look at panhandling and an examination of research into the impact of TV violence that concluded it is inconclusive. Its late February show on Rush Limbaugh played it right down the center. The handling of Limbaugh and the choice and treatment of the other topics come across more as good journalism than propaganda.
The signature big documentaries? Henry Hampton’s “Eyes on the Prize,” about the civil rights movement, chronicled a cause that was progressive in its day, but you would be hard-pressed to find a conservative who’d speak against it now. Ken Burns’ “Baseball” had a lot of former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, but it had a lot of most of its talking heads, and giving a Democrat enough rope to become tedious hardly helps his cause. Recent multipart documentaries have included an exploration of the five senses and a history of American cinema.
When congressional conservatives talk about trimming CPB’s sails-the current recommendation, from a House committee, is to cut 15 percent next year, 30 percent the year after-they keep thoughts about programming bias to themselves. (And it should be pointed out that before the Republicans took control, President Clinton had recommended, and the Democratic Congress approved, a 7 percent CPB funding cut).
“Public broadcasting can best be described as one of government’s ornamental activities,” said Sen. Larry Pressler (R-S.D.), a leading opponent of federal broadcast funding. “Pleasant but not essential.”
One could say the same thing about libraries and national parks. Yes, some cable channels do good nature programming and documentaries and even fussy British dramas. But only three-fifths of American homes have cable. No one matches public television for quality and parent-friendliness of children’s programming. And it is impossible to imagine a local network affiliate setting aside 30 minutes each night-to say nothing of paying the production costs-for a local public affairs program like WTTW’s excellent “Chicago Tonight” with John Callaway.
Still, there are valid criticisms of public television. Too many parts of the nation have overlapping service. Some executives will allow there is budgetary fat that can be trimmed. The service probably ought to get a bigger cut of the merchandising from wildly popular programs such as “Barney & Friends” and “Sesame Street.” And news programs being underwritten by corporations will always raise uncomfortable questions of independence.
But being liberal or elitist no more belongs on that list of faults than reruns of “Family Feud” do on PBS.
