The state of broadcasting on this side of the Atlantic still dismays Europeans
To the editors:
Alex Ross, in his music history, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, quotes composer Aaron Copland, who said that the job of being an American artist often consists simply in making art possible.
That now seems to be the fate as well of public radio journalists and producers: To many listeners — and to more than half of the U.S. House of Representatives — their hard work is as ornamental and expendable as art in these economically constricted times. Knowledgeable broadcasters in Europe (who, by the way, are also having to tighten their belts), view our situation with dismay — which is nothing new:
While researching his forthcoming history of the BBC, Simon Elmes, creative director of its documentaries department, learned that, early in the 20th century, British broadcasters came to the United States in order to find out how to make the new medium of radio viable. What they discovered was commercial cacophony: stations using the same wavelength and trying to out-shout each other, ruthless competition, chaos. Horrified, they returned to Britannia, vowing not to do it that way!
The result: a Royal Charter, sundry broadcasting boards and committees, rigorous fairness and impartiality standards — and (soon) 90 years of the BBC.
In Germany, Peter Leonhard Braun (whom some call “the Pope” of radio feature-making, and the originator of the Prix Europa and the 40-year-old International Feature Conferences), excoriates the current state of affairs in America: "...In your blessed and blasted radio-continent, how much I deplore your condemned system of financing your media — changing that extraordinary potential of possibilities into something resembling a roaring desert. And in that vast landscape of meagre soil you find the nomadic [producers] wandering and looking for the last water wells."
Braun emphasizes the crucial role of radio "houses" (i.e. networks, stations, conferences, ateliers) where producers and reporters can rub elbows, compete and refine their work. Such entities (such as the BBC and networks in other countries) are frequently funded by license fees. Braun and Elmes urge the United States to adopt a similar system: i.e., charge customers an extra $200 annually upon the purchase of a television or a major digital device, which fee would go directly to support public media via a politically free and independent board.
Onerous? Unworkable? I wonder, for it has never been tried here. Until it is, or another revenue source is found, American public broadcasting journalists and producers will just have to get used to being as expendable as Aaron Copland and all other artists.
Alex van Oss
Radio producer
Washington, D.C.