Cash and carry

The real scandal in public broadcasting is the way corporations influence what gets run -- and what doesn't

by Dan Kennedy

For what is supposed to be public television's signature news program, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer certainly has a knack for pulling in big bucks from private interests.

One recent evening, viewers had to sit through no fewer than six commercials -- er, underwriting credits -- before Lehrer's elfin face finally appeared. First, WGBH-TV (Channels 2 and 44) flogged The News-Hour's local sponsors, Biogen, BankBoston, and CIT Group ("money well managed"). Next, the corporations that actually fund the program were credited: the brokerage firm Salomon Smith Barney, Travelers Insurance, and, of course, The NewsHour's largest and most important angel, Archer Daniels Midland, "supermarket to the world."

Public broadcasting is under renewed attack this summer for exchanging fundraising lists with political parties and even, in at least one case, an individual candidate. WGBH president Henry Becton, under fire since the Boston Globe first revealed that his operation had solicited Democratic contributors in violation of station policy, has apologized in a Globe op-ed and on 'GBH's own Web site. (Disclosure: I am an occasional paid guest on 'GBH's Greater Boston.) Conservative Republicans on Capitol Hill, for the first time since the funding wars of 1995, are threatening to cut public broadcasting's budget.

The outrage voiced by critics is not misplaced, but it is misdirected. The problem with public broadcasting is not merely that it has been caught in bed with political parties, but that -- as the list of NewsHour sponsors suggests -- it raises money from a wide range of well-heeled special interests. The public-broadcasting airwaves do not belong to solely to the public, as the pioneering visionaries of the mid-1950s had originally hoped, but, rather, to the likes of Dwayne Andreas, the recently retired founder of Archer Daniels Midland, a politically wired agribusiness giant best known for the $100 million fine it paid in a 1995 price-fixing case. Thus it's hardly a surprise that the news program ADM pays for is a cautious, centrist, Beltway-oriented talking-heads show whose slogan could be "Rock Chairs, Not Boats."

Becton Beam'd The image the WGBH Educational Foundation likes to project is profoundly not about making waves. The tenure of president Henry Becton has, nevertheless, been marked by controversies -- which were revisited, in the wake of the fundraising scandal, in a July 16 column by the Boston Globe's Alex Beam, never shy about poking public broadcasting's bubble. To wit: * 'GBH's much-protested decision, in 1991, to cancel The Ten O'Clock News, which resulted in anchor Chris Lydon's eventual emergence as "the Babe Ruth of Boston public broadcasting," as Beam put it, at WBUR Radio, 'GBH's rival. * The also-much-protested 1995 cancellation of Ron Della Chiesa's MusicAmerica show, on WGBH Radio, in favor of The World, a foreign-news show that Beam called "goofy and irrelevant." * 'GBH's messy public battle over the $8 million will of Margret Rey, the co-creator of Curious George. Becton personally involved himself in trying to undo Rey's decision to give some of her money to religious charities rather than WGBH -- a "PR Waterloo," wrote Beam, who concluded: "Maybe it's time for new judgment at the top." -- DK

It doesn't have to be this way. In 1967, the Carnegie Commission on Public Broadcasting recommended that the Public Broadcasting System be funded through a tax on the sale of TV sets. Such a tax would have ensured a steady, dependable flow of money that would have insulated public broadcasters from both political and commercial pressures. But the tax went nowhere; public broadcasters instead have had to rely on annual subsidies from a meddlesome Congress and on an ever-expanding array of fundraising activities, including corporate underwriting and the merchandising of Teletubbies -- a British import designed, as a recent article in the American Prospect argues, not to educate children but to reach into their parents' wallets. The pressure to raise money has been especially acute since 1995, when public-broadcasting advocates barely staved off an attempt by the then-ascendant Republican Congress to "zero out" public funding altogether.

Now a group of progressive media activists is working on a proposal to restore the "public" to public broadcasting by eliminating corporate funding for individual shows and boosting the amount of tax money public broadcasters receive. Headed by West Virginia University sociologist Jerry Starr, whose book on his battles with Pittsburgh's public-television operation will be published by Beacon Press next year, the fledgling organization -- Citizens for Independent Public Broadcasting -- includes figures such as Jeff Cohen, executive director of Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR); Danny Schechter, who's fought to get documentary series he's produced, such as South Africa Now and Rights & Wrongs, on PBS; and Robert McChesney, a prominent public-broadcasting critic who's a professor at the University of Wisconsin.

The Starr group's principal recommendation is to raise $1 billion a year -- about half the operating expenses of the 1000 public TV and radio stations -- through a tax on commercial broadcasters. That's far more than the $250 million the stations currently receive, although considerably less than the funding levels in other countries. (In his 1997 book Made Possible by . . . : The Death of Public Broadcasting in the United States (Verso Books), James Ledbetter reports that, in 1993, Japan, Canada, and Britain all spent more than $30 per citizen on public broadcasting, and the US spent just $1.09.) Starr advocates continuing to allow public stations to solicit funds from state and local governments, viewers, foundations, and even corporations, although he would ban the practice of corporate sponsorship for individual shows.

"Program development should be guided principally by mission and by concept, and not by where the money might come from to produce the program," Starr says. "When corporations give to the symphony or the opera, they don't tell the conductor what the program should be."

The idea behind the Starr group's proposal is that, by changing the funding mechanism, it will become possible to change the programs as well. Take away corporate sponsorship of individual shows, and it may become easier for independent producers such as Schechter to win airtime for programs that aren't corporate-friendly. "The funding imperative seems to have taken over the energy of most PBS programs. Getting money to fund projects is critical as to what gets programmed and what doesn't," says Schechter. His company, New York-based Globalvision, is currently struggling to fund a series based on Benjamin Barber's 1995 bestseller on the struggle between religious fundamentalism and economic globalism, Jihad vs. McWorld.

Of course, Starr's timing could be better. In light of the scandal over politically tinged fundraising, the impetus in Congress has been not to increase money for public broadcasting but, rather, to cut. Representative Billy Tauzin (R-Louisiana), chairman of the House subcommittee on telecommunications, who had been pushing for a substantial increase, has made it clear that he feels personally betrayed by the list-brokering antics of WGBH and other public stations -- especially since public broadcasters have approached Democratic contributors more frequently than Republicans. "It undermines not only the good work of the last few years, but it reinforces all those ugly perceptions of public broadcasting having a favorite national party and a favorite political philosophy," Tauzin recently told National Public Radio. "That cannot stand."

Colin Crowell, legislative aide to Representative Ed Markey, a Malden Democrat who once chaired the subcommittee on telecommunications and is now the ranking minority member, is sympathetic to the idea of a dedicated revenue stream for public broadcasting. Indeed, Markey and Tauzin have proposed an interest-paying trust fund to remove public broadcasting from the whims of Congress. But it's a lot easier to talk about a trust fund than it is to get the money needed to set it up. "First, it's always difficult to get a Republican Congress to tax anything," Crowell says. "Second, the National Association of Broadcasters is not just going to shrug its shoulders and say, `Hey, that's fair.' "

And as Tauzin suggested in his NPR interview, the fundraising controversy has been manna for public broadcasting's critics on the right, who have long argued for the elimination of all federal subsidies. Following the revelations about WGBH, L. Brent Bozell III, head of the ultraconservative Media Research Center, wrote that PBS is a "liberal monstrosity." That is, of course, a ridiculous charge. Though Frontline, the national documentary series that WGBH produces, occasionally does some real muckraking, PBS's public-affairs presence is defined by centrist and conservative-leaning shows such as The NewsHour, Wall Street Week, The McLaughlin Group, and Washington Week in Review. Besides, most of PBS's line-up consists of its excellent children's programming and apolitical fare such as This Old House, Masterpiece Theatre, and The American Experience.

William Hoynes, a sociologist at Vassar College, found in a new study that the real bias in public broadcasting is not toward the left but, rather, toward business interests. By pressuring Congress for further cuts, PBS's conservative critics drive public broadcasters into an even tighter embrace with corporate funders, thus strengthening that bias. Yet at a time when commercial media are dumbing down even as they are proliferating, public broadcasting's unique mission -- to serve the public's needs -- is more important than ever.

"Even with the explosion of the Web and the explosion of satellite and cable, all of these media are primarily commercial. Public broadcasting needs to be both saved from itself and strengthened," Hoynes told the Phoenix. (The complete text of Hoynes's report, The Cost of Survival: Political Discourse and the "New PBS," can be found on FAIR's Web site, www.fair.org.)

Which brings us back to The NewsHour, caught between the need to keep the money flowing from its financial angels at ADM and the need to mollify its subsidy-voting supporters in Congress. It is, Robert McChesney argues, akin to Chinese-style "market Stalinism," and it's entirely incompatible with hard-hitting reporting. "If they did real journalism there," McChesney says, "you can bet your bottom dollar that within two hours of that going on the air, you'd have the phone lines from Washington heated up to red-hot levels."

At WGBH, staffers are still wondering where it all went wrong -- how a simple decision to trade fundraising lists with the Democratic National Committee blew up into yet another crisis for PBS. Of course, it didn't help that 'GBH let the details trickle out rather than fully disclosing what it knew as soon as possible. One insider describes the mood as "stunned disbelief that this has become such a big furor," "genuine concern and embarrassment," and "underlying arrogance."

In a way, you can't blame 'GBH. For years, Congress has been telling public broadcasters to be entrepreneurial -- to go forth and raise money any way they could, and not to expect taxpayers to subsidize them forever. Fundraisers rent lists from for-profit and nonprofit organizations -- including political parties -- all the time. What 'GBH and other stations did was stupid because it was politically insensitive. But it was hardly a scandal.

To find the real scandal in public broadcasting, all you have to do is turn on your TV. And watch the underwriting credits roll.

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

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

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Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here

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