What to do for balance?

Profs prescribe j-training, board appointment reform

Originally published in Current, Sept. 29, 2008
By Mike Janssen

Journalism professors consulted by CPB say it should have a nonpartisan board, clarify the duties of its ombudsman and promote journalistic standards and ethics training for public broadcasters, among their other recommendations about its programming oversight mandates.

Those suggestions appear in four papers submitted to CPB on the subjects of objectivity and balance in journalism and how CPB should encourage these qualities in the programming it funds. The professors also urged pubcasters to promote media literacy in the audience, broaden the range of perspectives in their coverage and make editorial decision-making more transparent to the public.

CPB commissioned the papers in October 2007 and released them to the public last week after sharing them with board members, who discussed them at a meeting Sept. 23 at CPB headquarters in Washington, D.C. The papers are posted on CPB's site.

The exercise is part of CPB’s cleanup from the controversial tenure of former board Chairman Kenneth Tomlinson. Before leaving the board in 2005, the conservative Republican chair launched a secretive campaign to document liberal bias in PBS programming and promote conservative-leaning public affairs programs, including a CPB-funded weekly show featuring the editorial-page staff of the Wall Street Journal. The Journal’s show died within 15 months on PBS, and another hosted by a conservative commentator died within a year when host Tucker Carlson returned to cable news.

CPB Inspector General Kenneth Konz investigated Tomlinson’s actions, found he had violated the Public Broadcasting Act and CPB rules, and advised the corporation to “establish formal policies and procedures for conducting regular reviews of national programming for objectivity and balance,” among other measures.

CPB has addressed most of Konz’s other concerns raised by Tomlinson’s campaign but is still grappling with the balance and objectivity issue. The matter is complicated by the dueling congressional mandates CPB faces: both to ensure balance and to protect public broadcasting from “undue interference,” with a board divided by party affiliation and nominated by the President.

Several professors said in their papers that CPB faces a tall order. Regarding its conflicting roles, the corporation “is in a classic catch-22,” wrote Joel Kaplan, associate dean at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications.

Another problem complicating CPB’s task is that “balance” and “objectivity” are ill-defined concepts that many scholars and journalists doubt can be achieved.

“In this mediascape, it is no longer sufficient to rely upon a legacy concept such as objectivity and balance, which is laden with ambiguity and contention,” wrote Alan Stavitsky and former NPR ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin. “We must re-conceptualize objectivity and balance to account for profound structural and technological change.”

Getler: just change the law

Dvorkin and Stavitsky, who teach at Toronto’s Ryerson University and the University of Oregon, respectively, and co-authored a CPB-funded ethics guide for public radio, were the only paper authors who advised the corporation on changes needed in its own house. The others addressed changes in producers’ and broadcasters’ practices.

In one of the two papers that Dvorkin and Stavitsky wrote for CPB, they said its board — often dominated by Democratic or Republican campaign donors and activists — should be nonpartisan. Pubcasters and concerned members of the public should be consulted for board appointments — and should actively promote candidates for openings, they advised.

“The CPB Board of Directors should be made up of appointees whose commitment to public broadcasting and to public service are seen to be non-partisan and beyond political affiliation,” Dvorkin and Stavitsky wrote. “The presence of partisans sets a tone for the public to question the motives of the Board.”

Dvorkin and Stavitsky also counseled CPB to clarify the role of its ombudsman, Ken Bode; to promote civic education and media literacy in audiences; and “to take the lead in creating institutions and mechanisms for ongoing, systematic journalistic training in ethics and public service values for public broadcasters.”

CPB asked journalism professors to prepare seven papers about aspects of balance and objectivity, and four were written, including the two by Dvorkin and Stavitsky. Kaplan, an associate dean at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications, reports on best practices for assessing objectivity and balance. Talia Stroud and Stephen Reese of the University of Texas at Austin describe how news consumers judge objectivity and balance.

Several journalism groups have proposed to tackle a fifth topic, “Expectations for Objectivity and Balance in Multi-platform Distribution —Traditional and New Media.” CPB has yet to sign a contract with the proposed authors, according to a spokeswoman.

Whether CPB will follow the professors’ recommendations remains an open question. CPB consultant Don Rheem told the CPB Board last week that a national organization has shown interest in working with CPB on an online curriculum for training and ethics. CPB may also convene a national meeting on the subject next year in partnership with another organization.

Rheem also discussed the points of consensus among the papers submitted to CPB. “Almost no one in the journalistic community holds the notion anymore” that balance and objectivity need be achieved within one program, he said. Rheem also suggested that the vast range of perspectives available on digital platforms relieves some of the pressure on CPB to look for balance.

One direct way through the sticky wicket came from PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler, who told Kaplan that the federal legislation requiring CPB to monitor for objectivity and balance should be eliminated.

“Balance is used as a club to subdue really hard-nosed unpopular reporting,” Getler said. “Especially as the public has gotten so polarized, they use these things to just batter you. They use it to try to remove hard-nosed reporting from television.”

But professors also agree that CPB and public broadcasters can do more to encourage programming that is fair, truthful, transparent and informed by multiple perspectives, Rheem said.

Also at CPB Board

Effectiveness v. localism
at odds in Palm Beach

Also originally published in Current, Sept. 29, 2008

Gay Hart Gaines, a CPB Board member from Palm Beach, Fla., revealed her view about the future of the area’s often-faltering public TV/radio combo, WXEL.

In conversation with other board members who questioned the expectation that every station deserves continued CPB funding, Gaines implied that the West Palm Beach station duplicates service with Miami stations and said it should “disappear.”

Murray Green, a retired broadcaster who chairs a local nonprofit seeking to acquire the license from Barry University, sees “absolutely no justification for the Miami station gaining a foothold in this market.” The Palm Beach market has been distinct from Miami’s for some time, Green said in a phone interview. All of Miami’s TV stations except public TV station WPBT have been dropped from the cable system in West Palm Beach, Green said. “At that point we became without question two separate and distinct markets,” he said. “And both demographically and psychographically, we are vastly different.”

WPBT also has expressed interest in acquiring the WXEL licenses.

The license issue reflects not only competition between two metro areas but also between two values endorsed periodically in CPB policies: “localism,” favoring hometown control of stations, and viability, favoring merger of stations that are too small to operate effectively.

Chief Operating Officer Vinnie Curren acknowledged the need to balance efficiency with the objective of local and national service. To that end, CPB has been working with pubcasting g.m.’s who have experience as finance officers. The execs and CPB staffers reviewed audited financial statements from every public TV station, Curren said, and have identified a few dozen stations that are “really leveraged.” CPB is talking with these stations about how to maintain services, he said.

Ahead: Latino StoryCorps,
American Archive prototype

In other news, CPB will:

fund a Latino supplement to StoryCorps. Comparable to StoryCorps Griot, which focuses on African Americans, the next offshoot of the five-year-old oral history project will start next fall collecting life stories from Latinos in both English and Spanish, says independent producer Dave Isay, founder of StoryCorps.
hire a senior v.p. for innovation and diversity. One of the new veep’s jobs will be to diversify CPB’s staff, said President Pat Harrison at the board meeting. The new hire will work with CPB’s radio, television and educational teams and also serve as a liaison to PBS, NPR and the Association of Public Television Stations.
create a prototype of the American Archive and support related local projects. In CPB’s fiscal year 2009, which begins this week, the corporation will create “a functioning prototype with working menus and sample content” to roll out the American Archive, said spokeswoman Louise Filkins. The project aims to digitize and catalog public broadcasting content and clear rights to restore access to valuable programming with lapsed distribution rights.