Citizens for Independent Public Broadcasting
Trust campaign launches with foundation backing
CIPB Board member George Gerbner signs declaration at press conference.
Campaign leaders sign declaration of pubcasting independence
Later article originally published in Current, Nov. 29, 1999
With C-SPAN's camera watching Nov. 16, leaders of the new Citizens for Independent Public Broadcasting signed a "declaration of independence" that begins: "We hold these truths, as stated by the Carnegie Commission reports on public broadcasting, to be self-evident . . ." [Text.]
"The time has come to return public broadcasting to its mission to serve as a town hall of the air and a voice for groups in the community that may otherwise be unheard," said Jerry Starr, CIPB executive director. CIPB's aims to stimulate a grassroots movement urging Congress to permanently endow a trust fund to aid public TV and radio--replacing annual appropriations through CPB.
Public TV today practices "self-censorship that would not be tolerated in any other journalistic endeavor," said longtime producer Alvin Perlmutter, a member of CIPB's board. Almost every public TV producer has at some point withheld certain program ideas because they could endanger funding, he said. Signing the document along with Starr and Perlmutter were board members George Gerbner, a prominent communications researcher now at Temple University, and Janine Jackson, program director of the media watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR).
Gerbner, who contends that people communicate most effectively through fiction and nonfiction storytelling, said society is distorted because most of the stories are told "not by someone who has stories to tell, but has something to sell."
Without independent funding--a permanently endowed trust fund is proposed by CIPB--public broadcasting will "sink deeper and deeper into the tar pit of commercialism," predicted former FCC Commissioner Nicholas Johnson, talking via speakerphone from the University of Iowa, where he teaches law.
Will CIPB be politically viable with its "left-leaning" leadership? asked Sasha Samberg-Champion of Public Broadcasting Report. Starr rejected the "left-leaning" characterization, and said CIPB is seeking a wider range of on-air opinion from both left and right.
"What we're talking about would open the doors to all voices," said Perlmutter.
Originally published in Current, Nov. 15, 1999
By Steve Behrens
With backing from progressive foundations, a new national campaign to roll-back government and corporate control of public broadcasting will go public this week in Washington, D.C.
Citizens for Independent Public Broadcasting, proposed three years ago by Pittsburgh media activist Jerold Starr, planned a press debut Nov. 16. CIPB has opened its Washington office with Starr as executive director and with major funding from George Soros's Open Society Institute and the Florence & John Schumann Foundation. At both foundations, CIPB's key contacts are prominent in public TV--OSI fellow Jack Willis, a longtime public TV producer who formerly managed KTCA in Twin Cities, and Schumann President Bill Moyers, one of public TV's leading journalist/producers.
Starr, a professor at West Virginia University, hopes to create a lasting organization that can pursue reforms and build a coalition for the future. "We don't have any expectations of accomplishing legislative change in one year," he told Current. Starr's new associate director is Karen Conner, a former freelance public radio producer who last year served as communications director for the AFL-CIO Building Trades Organizing Project.
CIPB will aim to restructure pubcasting "as an independent public trust, so as to give it the financial security it needs to have greater editorial independence." The group's second "primary objective" will be to "empower community groups to help democratize local public broadcasting stations"--a major calling for Starr in recent years. As a resident of the Pittsburgh area, he has led an ongoing watchdog campaign critical of the past and present managements of WQED-FM/TV--its former focus on national production, its financial problems and governance, and its long-delayed attempt to get out of debt by selling its second public TV channel, WQEX. Starr's forthcoming book is Public Television in the Public Interest: How to Make Public Television Accountable in Your Community. CIPB aims to insulate pubcasting from interference from both business and government. "The American people need and deserve space in our vast system of communications that is not controlled by the imperatives of power or profit," according to the proposal for CIPB.
The group proposes to replace CPB with a new Public Broadcasting Trust, endowed adequately by congressional appropriation to spend $1 billion a year on public TV and radio. This would more than replace the present $300 million appropriation to CPB, plus nearly as much donated by corporate underwriters. Corporations could make contributions for general support but not for specific programs, and the underwriters would receive only brief acknowledgements on-air. The trust would be backed with an endowment from taxes on communications companies, such as taxes on spectrum auctions or station sales.
Instead of being run by CPB's board of presidential "political patronage appointments," who have "not been consistently protective" of pubcasting's mission, Starr said, the trust would be overseen by a nine-member board appointed in several ways: three appointed by reps of public broadcasting, three by education and two by the President's Commission on the Arts and Humanities. PBT's managing director would be the ninth trustee and would be elected by the other eight.
Details of the nominating process have not been worked out, Starr said. CIPB started with a proposal drafted a decade ago by the Working Group for Public Broadcasting organized by former newspaperman and CPB program executive John Wicklein, Starr said. Though CIPB leaders bring various populist and left critiques of pubcasting, they appreciate the value of its achievements and its extensive infrastructure. In contrast, some younger critics of the system have given up on it and put their hope in the Internet, public access cable, or other new technologies. That's okay for them, Starr said. "But I would never want to abandon the wonderful resource already available to us. The laws are on the books. To me, it's the most interesting place to start."
Starr began discussions that led to CIPB at the Media & Democracy Congress in 1996 and held an organizing meeting at the second Congress, two years ago. Willis became involved at that point, and Moyers expressed interest after seeing a CIPB proposal, Starr said.
Most members of CIPB's Board of Directors have criticized pubcasting's centrist and middle-class ways: Starr; Nolan Bowie, senior fellow at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University; Daniel del Solar, an independent producer who previously managed Philadelphia's WYBE-TV and once was CPB's training director; Temple University Prof. George Gerbner, a major figure in TV/violence research who founded the Cultural Environmental Movement media reform group; and Janine Jackson, program director of the progressive media watchdog Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR).
Also: former FCC commissioner and University of Iowa College of Law Prof. Nicholas Johnson; longtime public TV producer and Moyers colleague Alvin H. Perlmutter; and filmmaker/lecturer Barbara Trent, producer of the Oscar-winning "Panama Deception" (1992), "Coverup: Beyind the Iran-Contra Affair" (1988) and other documentaries.
A broader assortment of academics and media people serve on CIPB's National Advisory Committee. Some are longtime producers for public TV: Danny Schechter, co-founder of Globalvision and co-producer of Rights and Wrongs: Human Rights Television, and former New York Timesman Hedrick Smith, producer of six PBS primetime series. Others, like Smith, are former newspapermen active in journalistic issues: former Berkeley journalism dean Ben Bagdikian; prominent ex-newspaperman Bill Kovach, who now runs the Nieman fellowships at Harvard; and John Wicklein, a former CPB programming executive. Included are a present station chief and a former one: Wick Rowland, president of KBDI, Denver, and former communications dean at the University of Colorado; and Jack Willis, ex-president of KTCA, Twin Cities.
Also on the advisory panel are: pubcasting historian Robert K. Avery, FAIR founder and Fox News pundit Jeff Cohen, Howard University communications dean Jannette Dates, prominent author/social critic Barbara Ehrenreich, communications attorney and minority media specialist David Honig, and Public Television for Sale author William Hoynes of Vassar College.
Also: Nancy Kranich, president-elect of the American Library Association and specialist on freedom of information; University of Illinois Prof. Jerry Landay, a former ABC and CBS correspondent; Edward McClarty, academic and former chair of the California Public Broadcasting Commission; and psychiatry professor and race relations expert Alvin Poussaint.
CIPB opened offices last month in downtown Washington: 1029 Vermont Ave., N.W., Suite 700, Washington, D.C. 20005. Phone: (202) 638-6880. Fax: (202) 638-6885.
Web page revised Jan. 23, 2000
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