CPB ponders advice on balance mandate
CPB continues to wrestle with how it should monitor public broadcasting programs for “objectivity and balance” — a task made even thornier by the challenge of defining those terms in the first place.
Board members, meeting Sept. 23 in Washington, D.C., will review white papers by journalism authorities who were commissioned to address the subject. The corporation also consulted with the Pew Research Center’s Project on Excellence in Journalism about methods of content analysis.
Meanwhile, one of CPB’s few public answers to pleas for balance — the hiring of ombudsmen to assess broadcasters’ performance — has become less visible. Ombudsman Ken Bode hasn’t written his online column since December as he waits to see how CPB’s work on the balance issue could affect his role.
Each of the four commissioned papers addresses a subject defined by CPB in a set of seven requests for proposals issued in October 2007. CPB still seeks authors for three topics that attracted no proposals.
Journalism teachers, CPB Board members and others acknowledge the difficulty of the balancing act that Congress has assigned to CPB. The Public Broadcasting Act mandates that the corporation protect public broadcasting from political interference and ensure political balance in programming. Meanwhile, its Board of Directors is politically appointed, nominated by the White House and confirmed by the Senate, and filled with partisans.
As CPB juggles its potentially conflicting roles, it risks ringing alarm bells among programmers, journalists and the public who are wary of the government exerting political influence on public broadcasting. Alarms also can go off for others who oppose spending tax money on media, especially if they find the material controversial.
Even defining the goal of objectivity in a new-media environment is complicated, says CPB Board member Ernest Wilson, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. Fifteen years ago, when Congress mandated programming reviews, “the definition was not the same as in 2008,” Wilson says.
The issue lingers on the cleanup list given to the CPB Board by the corporation’s semi-independent inspector general in November 2005 after the exposure of former board Chairman Kenneth Tomlinson’s covert campaign to correct what he saw as liberal bias in public broadcasting.
Finding that Tomlinson violated the Public Broadcasting Act and CPB rules, Inspector General Kenneth Konz recommended dozens of measures to prevent future abuses, including: “Establish formal policies and procedures for conducting regular reviews of national programming for objectivity and balance."
Three years later, the task is unfinished, but some stakeholders are watching. In August, Republican Congressman Eric Cantor (Va.) wrote a letter to CPB Board members urging them to resolve the matter. A pro-Israel media watchdog, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, commended Cantor for writing the letter, which neither the Congressman’s office nor CPB would release to Current. CAMERA often criticizes NPR for what it sees as bias against Israel in its reporting on Israeli-Palestinian conflicts.
On guard for Trojan horses
Given clashing mandates by legislators, CPB turned to academics for help. In August CPB staffers met with about a dozen journalism teachers at a conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication in Chicago.
Educators who took part said they feared that the “balance and objectivity” campaign could be a “Trojan horse” disguising a political agenda, says Charles Self, outgoing president of AEJMC and a director at the University of Oklahoma’s journalism school.
“We were really anxious that we not get involved in something that would be interference in the function of public radio and public TV,” says Self, who attended the meeting.
The teachers also questioned the use of the terms “balance” and “objectivity” in defining CPB’s role. Many j-professors are skeptical that journalists can achieve true “objectivity,” Self says, because the term implies that reporters can completely put aside their personal views. Educators were more comfortable with terms such as “impartial” or “dispassionate” to define goals for public media’s journalism.“
When Fox News is using ‘objective’ and ‘balanced,’ obviously it’s not a term that’s neutral anymore,” Self says.
The AEJMC attendees also encouraged CPB to suggest to Congress that lawmakers expand their priorities to promoting high-quality journalism within public broadcasting rather than focusing too narrowly on matters of fairness and balance.
CPB execs asked the educators where they should send the RFPs on objectivity and balance, Self says, and they seemed receptive to the educators’ comments. Overall, the teachers “felt very good” about the meeting, he says.
Ombud: limited role for CPB
The range of topics pinpointed in CPB’s requests for proposals highlight the complexity of the subject. Several academics agreed to take on the questions outlined. Jeffrey Dvorkin, former NPR ombudsman and now a professor at Ryerson University in Toronto, joined Al Stavitsky, a professor at the University of Oregon’s J-school, to submit papers on two subjects: “Objectivity and Balance: Conceptual and Practical History in American Journalism” and “Concepts in Tension: The Challenge of Ensuring both Objectivity and Balance and Editorial Independence.” Dvorkin and Stavitsky previously co-authored an ethics guide for public radio.
Joel Kaplan, an associate dean at the Newhouse School at Syracuse University, wrote about best practices in assessing objectivity and balance. Talia Stroud and Stephen Reese of the University of Texas at Austin also contributed a paper, but Stroud declined to say which subject they addressed. As Current goes to press, CPB and the authors are still editing the papers.
Last year CPB consulted with the Project for Excellence in Journalism about methods of analyzing programming for balance. PEJ is familiar with the territory — its studies of media reportage have included PBS’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.
One method of content analysis involves reviewing the topics news programs cover and determining whether the reporting shows range and balance, says Tom Rosenstiel, PEJ’s director. “That I think you can quite effectively do and in a way that people of differing points of view would agree on,” Rosenstiel says.
But assessing whether reporting on a controversial subject features a wide enough range of viewpoints is more difficult, Rosenstiel says, and PEJ does not attempt such studies. These could require a monitor to review numerous sources quoted in a broadcast program, for instance, and define their political leanings.
Ken Bode, CPB’s ombudsman and former host of PBS’s Washington Week in Review, says that CPB, as a nonjournalistic organization, is in “an awkward position.” CPB ought to watch for unfair reporting within public broadcasting and withhold further funding from the guilty producers, he says, but “CPB should not get into the business of anything being vetted” in advance.
Bode has written occasional reports assessing public broadcasting shows since his hiring in 2005, but his latest column on CPB’s website is dated December 27, 2007. The ombud says he has pulled back from his job as CPB deals with the issue of balance. He still watches PBS and listens to public radio regularly, judging fairness in what he hears and sees, but nothing this year has seemed “tremendously out of balance,” he says.
“I really think that CPB ought to be not a terribly active presence but only step in when needed,” Bode says.
Web page posted Sept. 16, 2008
Copyright 2008 by Current LLC
