Page 425 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2
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0 | Publ c Broadcast ng Serv ce
established itself as the ally of the common people. What scholars call an
“authoritarian-populist tactic” has since been also used by other right-wing cul-
tural reformers, from Pat Buchanan to Ronald Reagan to Newt Gingrich, look-
ing to privatize PBS. Such critics do not really represent the public, which is
rarely consulted and never asked what it might like to see on public television. If
public television is paradoxically “for the people, not by the people,” so too is the
recurring conservative critique of its shortcomings.
Against the neoconservative position, liberal defenders argue that PBS brings
integrity to television by providing a sophisticated alternative to market-driven
infotainment. Unlike pay cable, it also “freely” disseminates enlightenment to the
culturally deprived. According to this logic, PBS deserves public subsidy because
it ensures the survival of “respectable” culture (as defined by educated tastemak-
ers) while also offering the masses an opportunity to pursue informal education
and cultural refinement through television viewing. The fact that most adults
avoid PBS’s curriculum much or all of the time is, significantly, downplayed.
Instead, children’s programs like Sesame Street, which tend to attract a much
larger and more socially and economically diverse audience than does prime-
time PBS, are strategically accentuated in a metaphoric battle to save “Big Bird”
from budget-cutting neoconservatives. The defensive position has succeeded in
preserving a token amount of Congressional funding for PBS. However, it has
also reproduced the system’s internal elitism and therefore constrained thinking
about how PBS might serve a broader range of cultural interests and tastes.
The intellectual/artistic Left’s critique of PBS emphasizes intersecting prob-
lems of political censorship and discrete commercialization. Many activist film-
makers, media reformers, and progressive scholars see in public television an
unrequited opportunity for communicative democracy. Because our corporately
owned media system threatens the free exchange of ideas required of democ-
racy, noncommercial “public” media spaces are paramount to a fair and just po-
litical system. PBS’s potential to provide such an electronic public sphere is said
to have been undermined by its reliance on corporate underwriters who do not
wish to be associated with controversial programming. Corporate funding has,
over the years, led to an overabundance of “safely splendid” programming—
such as imported British costume dramas and nature documentaries—that
crowds out provocative material, contend critics. The watchful eyes of conserva-
tive politicians looking for liberal or unconventional “bias” is another factor in
the difficulties—and sometimes outright institutional censorship—experienced
by independent producers who are deemed too controversial for PBS.
The Left provides a valuable counter-explanation to the “problem” with PBS.
Challenging neoconservatives in Washington, this position maintains that a sta-
ble source of noncommercial funding is what is needed to ensure PBS’s journal-
istic freedom and protection from political bias. However, critics from this camp
tend to oversimplify the role of political economics by presuming that PBS was
(or would be) democratic in the absence of corporate interference. They tend
to overlook the politics of cultural value by replacing “safely splendid” ideals
with their own class- and education-bound view of what counts as worthwhile
television. Progressive intellectuals and “censored” PBS producers often distrust