Study nudges public TV to remember its mission
Originally published in Current, July 6, 1998
By Steve Behrens
A well-connected public-interest advocacy group this week will call for a citizen forum to help reinvent public TV, which it contends is too timid about controversy, muddled about its mission, and more interested in alliances with media corporations than the nonprofit world.
Center for Media Education, an active, foundation-backed Washington advocacy group that pushed for the FCC's three-hour educational kidvid minimum for commercial TV, planned to release its report July 6.
Gary O. Larson, a former National Endowment for the Arts executive who wrote the American Canvas study for NEA last fall, prepared the CME report, Fulfilling the Promise: Public Broadcasting in the Digital Age [full text on CME web site].
Despite the title, Larson examines only public TV and doesn't deal with public radio.
The report underscores a view of several public-interest reps on the Gore Commission that public TV needs to be reformed or redirected if it is to receive subsidies from commercial broadcasters or other advantages in the digital TV era.
"This is too important an issue to let public television decide for itself," says Jeff Chester, executive director of CME. "We have to inolve the public at both the community and the national level."
"I don't see PBS as defining itself as a truly noncommercial alternative," says Chester. "If they see themselves as a less-commercial A&E or History Channel, they're missing the boat."
Larson comments in the report: "The real casualty of the congressional attack ... has been to the spirit of public broadcasting, in which the vision of its founders, and even the ameliorative instincts of the various commissions and task forces that have studied public broadcasting over the years, have been all but extinguished. In their place is a businesslike pragmatism perfectly in sync with the times, but sadly at odds with a more expansive view of the future."
Public TV's ongoing budget squeeze has created "a brand of entrepreneurial survivalism that is almost certainly at odds with the founding principles," the report says. The field must "resist the aggressive product-licensing and marketing arrangements that already threaten to tarnish" its reputation in children's TV.
At the same time, the report acknowledges that proposals for a trust fund and spectrum fees don't have adequate political support. But it makes no specific recommendations for funding mechanisms.
Public TV needs "a much more clearly articulated vision for the digital future," the report says. Instead, it asserts, the field maintains a "restricted, single-service image" dating from the 1960s, quoting University of Colorado scholar and onetime PBS planner Willard Rowland. Larson doubts that stations have the resources, the imagination and the resolve to make the leap to the interactive DTV medium.
What's needed, the report suggests, is a dedicated digital "space"--"free of PBS constraints, underwriter preferences and congressional pressures"--for independent and risk-taking experimental productions that are now "crowded out" by polished mainstream programming.
Likewise, the report says, the country needs a highly interactive citizens' channel, which pubcasters would be required to help create, like the one proposed by Rights & Wrongs producer Danny Schechter in a 1995 Current commentary.
The report envisions "a new philanthropy of the digital era," though it would be philanthropy under duress: Under a legislative horse trade like those considered by the Gore Commission, commercial broadcasters would be induced to give in-kind production and dedicated channel capacity to nonprofits in exchange for the DTV channels given to the broadcasters.
Pubcasters, too, could be involved. The report cites a November 1997 lecture by former PBS President Larry Grossman that proposes public TV alliances with libraries, museums, universities and other community groups to create an electronic civic sphere.
But public TV has shown more interest in alliances with commercial partners rather than other nonprofits, the report says. "Thus the drive for a broader noncommercial alliance may have to originate elsewhere in the nonprofit sector."
The report "shares the growing concern that public broadcasting has lost sight of its original mission." Public TV "overlooks almost entirely" the ideals of program diversity, public access, civic discourse and experimentation that the field was established to pursue. To make its offerings more diverse, public TV should use programming from sources other than the four major producing stations and Children's Television Workshop, and work more closely with cable access channels, the report advised.
It quotes Eli Evans, a foundation executive who was a member of the Twentieth Century Fund panel that studied public TV in 1992: "It is difficult to convey to the American people all the programs they do not see: they can only imagine the roads not taken out of fear of controversy, the ideas that never get a chance because of a risk-averse bureaucracy, the ease with which the ordinary crowds out the original."
The report observes that "one cannot imagine the American media landscape without public radio at the bottom of the dial and public television at the top of the multichannel heap," and it lauds the field's work in captioning, outreach, online work, and distance learning. But it gives public TV little credit for its most renowned programs, which are dismissed as "polished" and "predictable."
The report quotes James Day, founder of San Francisco's KQED and onetime president of National Educational Television: "Our national need cannot be met by fine-tuning the system now in place, a system whose fragmented and multipurposed structure makes it hopelessly resistant to reform. Public television must be reinvented."
And that need is urgent, the report contends: "The proposed 'reinvention' of public broadcasting, in short, represents the last opportunity to fulfill the original promise" of the field.
Center for Media Education, which commissioned the report, was founded in 1991 by Chester and his wife, Kathryn C. Montgomery, and has become a major voice in telecom policy on the public-interest team. CME established the Telecommunications Policy Roundtable that rallied nonprofit support for pubcasting during CPB's 1995-96 crisis. The group has called press attention to commercialization of children's TV and children's web sites. Before starting CME, Chester worked as an independent TV producer and helped advocate the creation of the Independent Television Service. Montgomery is a former UCLA academic and author of Target: Prime Time--Advocacy Groups and the Struggle over Entertainment Television.
Outside link: Full text of report on web site of Center for Media Education.
Web page created July 19, 1998
Current
The newspaper about public television and radio
in the United States
A service of Current Publishing Committee, Takoma Park, Md.
E-mail: webcurrent.org
301-270-7240
Copyright 1998
To Current's home page
Earlier article: Danny Schechter's 1995 commentary
on the future of PBS programming, mentioned in the CME study.