Page 422 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Publ c Broadcast ng Serv ce | 01

PBS has positioned itself as the “oasis” of the vast wasteland—a home for tele-
vised art, intellectual culture, education, and quality information in a sea of
mass cultural mediocrity. For almost as long, PBS has also been the principal
target of politically charged disputes over public broadcasting’s performance in
the United States.
In one of the more recent salvos, in June 2006, Republican members of
the U.S. House of Representatives voted to “slash” funding for public broad-
casting. Their decision reawakened a Congressional debate that spilled into
newspaper articles, opinion pages, and talk shows. Because public television
and public radio receive about 20 percent of their funding from annual Con-
gressional appropriations (the rest comes from local and state governments,
corporate sponsors, and private donations), these cultural institutions are
particularly vulnerable to partisan political currents and must “prove” their
value each time the federal purse is opened. Although Congress ultimately
rejected the Republicans’ plan (for now), PBS remains trapped in a cycle of
controversy.

hisTory

Public television arrived late in the United States. Whereas the United King-
dom, Canada, and many other Western democracies developed public service
approaches to broadcasting that were overseen by tax-funded national broad-
casting authorities, the United States took a “free-market” approach to radio
and television. Not everyone supported this path: throughout the 1920s and
into the 1930s, vocal educators, labor unions, and progressive reformers pres-
sured the federal government to allocate a significant portion of the spectrum
to nonprofit channels. The corporate sector’s lobbying power, coupled with a
distrust of “socialistic” activity in the American context, worked against this
possibility, however. The 1934 Communications Act entrusted broadcasting en-
tirely to the commercial market, presuming that private companies could turn a
profit and serve the public interest as well.
In the 1950s and 1960s, fissures in the U.S. approach to broadcasting emerged.
At this time, television culture was dominated by three networks (ABC, CBS,
and NBC), and most programming was geared toward a huge mass audience.
High-placed critics began to protest what they perceived as television’s lowbrow
homogeneity and worried that the nation’s most popular medium did little to
instruct or enlighten citizens. To correct these problems, the prestigious Ford
Foundation invested considerable private resources in National Educational
Television (NET), a small-scale alternative devoted to “respectable” culture
(opera, live plays, British dramas) and information (documentaries, panel dis-
cussions). However, Ford’s pockets were not bottomless and “educational” tele-
vision remained a minor blip on the television landscape. Public investment
was clearly needed to create a public alternative to market-driven commercial
hegemony.
In the 1960s, the case for public television was advanced by many public
figures, including former Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chair-