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The Don't Quote Me archive

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Making waves

With commercial stations going lowbrow, Boston's public broadcasters are fine-tuning their strategies. The question: are WGBH & WBUR doing their duty?

by Dan Kennedy

Emily Rooney is taping the intro to a segment of WGBH-TV's new local public-affairs show, Greater Boston. Or trying to, anyway. It's been a long day. Her feet are killing her. And her first few attempts at hyping an interview with Charles Murray, the controversial academic who's currently promoting his new book on libertarianism, haven't gone particularly well.

After several tries, though, she nails it. "That was warmer," says a voice in the control room. "That was very nice."

She sighs, visibly relieved at getting a break from the unblinking eye of the lens.

Rooney, the former news director of WCVB-TV (Channel 5), may be a respected newswoman, but the debut of Greater Boston last week showed that her transition to an on-camera role is going to take some time. And if Rooney and Greater Boston are struggling to find their voice, so, too, is WGBH.

This is, after all, the first significant foray into local public-affairs programming for WGBH (Channels 2 and 44, plus a radio station) since 1991, when it canceled The Ten O'Clock News. The new show is a huge improvement over the one it replaces, The Group, an unmoderated roundtable discussion that rose from the ashes of the News. ("A tawdry, pathetic little show," huffs one industry observer of The Group, widely derided as "The Grope.") Still, Greater Boston is going to need some work. Week One's topics, which included the Super Bowl and cute animals, were too light and fluffy to qualify the show as a must-watch. And Rooney, who doubles as Greater Boston's executive editor, needs to overcome her on-the-set jitters.

It's crucial that 'GBH get it right. With commercial broadcasters in full retreat from serious news and public affairs, public-broadcasting stations are the last redoubt. Boston's two major public stations -- WGBH-TV and WBUR Radio (90.9 FM) -- are among the most admired in the country. It's by no means clear, however, that the people who run those stations are willing or able to fill the gap created by the commercial stations' retreat into sensationalism and frivolity.

At the moment, the two stations are moving in opposite directions, with WBUR casting its glance well beyond Boston and WGBH finally turning its attention to its own backyard.

Since the 1970s, WBUR has emerged as the most reliable, comprehensive source of news and information on the Boston broadcast spectrum, offering a wide range of national and international news from National Public Radio, the BBC, and other sources. Its local news coverage, though not extensive, is competent and thoughtful. What's come to be the station's signature program, though, is The Connection, a two-hour daily interview and call-in show hosted by that quintessential Bostonian Christopher Lydon. Yet now WBUR is trying to take The Connection national, running the risk of diluting its uniquely local character.

WGBH-TV, meanwhile, has been struggling for decades to define exactly what its local presence should be, starting with the late Louis Lyons reading the news in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, through The Reporters in the early '70s, and, finally, The Ten O'Clock News -- co-anchored, ironically, by Chris Lydon -- whose run from 1976 to '91 was second only to that of Lyons's show. Following a period of retrenchment over the past six years, when the station's only regular local public-affairs shows have been The Group, the black-oriented Say Brother and the Latino-oriented La Plaza, 'GBH is at long last attempting to renew its commitment with Greater Boston.

Both WGBH and WBUR are doing a generally capable job of serving the local community, a concept that is itself more expansive than it would have been, say, 30 years ago: their signals reach well into southern New Hampshire, Central Massachusetts, Cape Cod, and Rhode Island, with 'BUR getting a boost from three small stations on the Cape that simulcast its programming. The challenge, then, is for station managers to serve a community that extends well beyond Boston and its immediate suburbs.

At the same time, though, both operations could be doing more. And given what's happening in elsewhere in broadcasting, it's not unreasonable to hold public stations to a higher standard.

At commercial stations, cost-cutting and competitive pressures have turned local TV newscasts into crime-and-celebrity-drenched triviafests, their rapid pace owing more to MTV than to traditional journalistic imperatives. (New England Cable News deserves some credit for bucking the trend, but not everyone gets cable, and not everyone with cable can get NECN.)

Talk radio, a populist, interactive medium both hailed and feared a short time ago, is shifting from locally based, politically oriented hosts to syndicated entertainers. The only place left on the commercial dial for intelligent talk is The David Brudnoy Show, on WBZ (AM 1030).

The result of these trends is a vacuum -- or, to borrow the language of Newton Minow, the Kennedy-era FCC commissioner, a "vast wasteland" of rapid-fire, context-free headlines, murders, natural disasters, celebrities, and weather. And, of course, all O.J., all the time.

"The deterioration of avowedly commercial TV and radio news adds a special burden to public broadcasting," says Norman Solomon, an analyst for Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a liberal media-watch group. Solomon and others, though, complain that public broadcasters are shying away from this burden.

You'd think public TV would stand as a bulwark of seriousness. But public stations are on the defensive. When attacked by the Republican Congress, they fought back -- effectively -- by putting the emphasis on their excellent and uncontroversial children's programming. Public TV rarely risks anything innovative in news and public affairs; its only nightly news show, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, is a tired, inside-the-Beltway smorgasbord of talking heads. This cautiousness -- and unwillingness or inability to spend money -- extends to local stations across the country.

And WGBH, despite a tradition as the "Tiffany" station in the Public Broadcasting System, is no exception. 'GBH is a national powerhouse, producing shows such as Frontline (the one shining exception to PBS's public-affairs vacuum), Nova, This Old House, and Masterpiece Theatre, filling about one-third of PBS's prime-time line-up. But when it comes to local programming, WGBH's call letters for most of the '90s might as well have been AWOL.

It's a shame, because if any station should take a leadership role, it's WGBH. After all, the station was the leading force in defining the role of public television. (See "Tradition & Tumult," page 15.) Through legislation written by the 1967 Carnegie Commission on Public Broadcasting, which WGBH officials helped create and then dominated, the narrow, educational mission of public broadcasting was replaced with a new philosophy that public television should "see America whole in all its diversity . . . to help us look at our achievements and difficulties, at our conflicts and agreements, at our problems, and at the far reaches of our possibilities."

In the language of the 1990s, that mission might be described as fostering a public conversation; providing a forum in which civil society can express itself. Because the fractured, overworked, stressed-out culture in which we live clearly needs a common ground, a sounding board where we can talk out -- and, it is to be hoped, talk through -- the divisions and the bitterness that have come to define us.

Part 2

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The Don't Quote Me archive

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Dan Kennedy's work can also be accessed from his Web site: http://www1.shore.net/~dkennedy/

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Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com

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