Page 426 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2
P. 426

Publ c Broadcast ng Serv ce  |   0


              rePuBliCans Versus Bill Moyers
              Conservative politicians have long monitored PBS’s public affairs programs with an eye to-
              ward institutional censorship. In the early 1970s, when PBS was just getting started, Richard
              Nixon ordered White House staffers to scour its news and documentary programs for evi-
              dence of political and personal “bias” against the Republican president. More recently, in
              2005, Kenneth Tomlinson, the Republican chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcast-
              ing (CPB), which oversees issues of “objectivity and balance” among other tasks, secretly
              hired a consultant with conservative ties to “conduct an analysis of the political ideology”
              of guests on the PBS program NOW and three other public television and radio programs.
              According to National Public Radio, which obtained the unreleased report, the guests were
              graded not just on their political viewpoints, but on “whether they explicitly supported poli-
              cies of the Bush White House.” The CPB board is appointed by the president; Tomlinson
              was named chairman by George W. Bush.
                Tomlinson complained that Moyers, whose journalistic commentaries have appeared on
              PBS since the early 1970s, was too liberal and “critical of Republicans and the Bush Adminis-
              tration.” In addition to commissioning the study, he hired a senior White House aid to “draw
              up guidelines to review the content of public radio and television broadcasts.”
                David Folkenflik, “CBP Memos Indicate Level of Monitoring,” National Public Radio, June 30, 2005, www.
              npr.org; Michael Sorkin, “Speech at Conference Assails Right Wing,” May 16, 2005, CommonDreams.org
              Newsletter, www.commondreams.org.




              habitual TV viewing and prefer serious information and avant-garde material
              over popular television formats, which they would just as soon leave to com-
              mercial channels. This failure to engage with the possibilities of popular public
              television has made it difficult for the intellectual Left to align itself with ordi-
              nary people in the cultural battle over PBS.


                CaBLE ComPETiTion

                As  commercial  cable  has  developed,  PBS’s  approach  to  quality  and  infor-
              mal education has become somewhat redundant to the niche-oriented goals of
              the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, and the Arts and Entertainment
              Network—as free-market conservatives and Leftist critics point out. The Right
              uses this redundancy as further ammunition in its quest to privatize PBS; the
              Left sees it as another reason to embrace provocative political programming the
              commercial market (no matter how many channels) is unable or unwilling to
              provide. There is another, perhaps more democratic possibility overlooked by
              this stalemate, that involves funding noncommercial versions of popular genres
              and formats, with no expectation of cultural or political enlightenment, along
              the lines of much public television in Britain. However, given the structures of
              U.S. broadcasting and the dominant frameworks for thinking about PBS’s role,
              this is not likely to occur.
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