CIPB In the News Archive: July 3, 2000 a

"There is no 'public' broadcasting in the U.S.," said Loyola University Prof. Lee Artz, who berated the field for ignoring working-class audiences. To make matters worse, recent mega-mergers in the corporate media world make public broadcasting's responsibilities even more pressing, and its problems even more worrisome, critics say. "What our conference-goers, in the main, were saying is that today's broadcasters are very good and very realistic about hitting the market that's there for them," conference organizer and media scholar Michael McCauley told Current. "But we can do more."

Public TV, rather than radio, drew the most criticism. A sharp and funny anecdote came from Amy Goodman, host of Pacifica's Democracy Now, who said she got sick of commercials when she was watching TV with her niece. We don't have to watch all these ads, Goodman told her niece. Let's turn to PBS. The reply: "But this is PBS." The system's worst enemies aren't on the outside, Goodman said: "Public broadcasting is providing the greatest threat to public broadcasting."

Speakers said they understood the pressures on public broadcasters, but weren't willing to forgive sins committed in the name of branding and market placement. "The decisions public broadcasters have made have often been problematic," Hoynes told Current. "The strategy that's evolved in the last five years to market the PBS brand, engage in joint ventures, and really cash in on the audience will undermine public broadcasting in the long run. I think it's a wrong-headed approach, although I understand why they pursued this strategy."

Cutting the purse strings

If low funding is the problem, then more funding is the obvious solution. "If there's one theme that comes from the conference, it's that eventually the funding has to change," McCauley said. Some activists, including Starr and the CIPB, are already rallying for a trust fund to support public broadcasting, a model originally proposed by the Carnegie Commission in 1967 and defeated in Congress several times since. CIPB's proposal for a Public Broadcasting Trust that dispenses $1 billion a year "would take [public broadcasting] off the federal dole, remove corporate advertising, stop the desperate search for money, and free public broadcasting to pursue its mission with editorial integrity," explains the group's website. The trust overseen by a nine-member board would replace CPB and absorb the satellite distribution systems now run by PBS and NPR.

Half the trust's money would be earmarked for national program production, routed through divisions including a Television Program Department and a Radio Department. The other half would go to local stations for local program acquisition. The yearly $1 billion could come from an investment of the current budget surplus. CIPB also recommends drawing funds from spectrum fees, sales of digital TV sets, sales or transfers of commercial broadcast licenses, or the auction of the digital spectrum.

Such taxes would probably draw fire from commercial broadcasters, who have lobbied powerfully against such trust-fund structures in the past. Starr acknowledged his group has an uphill climb. "That's why we're proceeding slowly," he said. "Eventually, over time, we'll grow in strength and have a Congress that will be willing to invest in democracy." Starr also cites a poll paid for by the Open Society Institute, a funder of his organization, which says that 79 percent of adults favor taxing commercial broadcasters to support public broadcasting.

CIPB is also working on setting up local chapters that encourage communities to become active at local stations by attending board meetings and asking for a wider range of programs. The organization has a database to foster these groups, and is developing partnerships with educators, public interest groups and other organizations to encourage more activism focused on public broadcasting.

"As people come into a closer relationship with their stations, they also come to understand how the whole service would be vastly improved if it had independent funding," Starr said. CIPB offers a publication on the subject, How to Make Public Broadcasting Accountable to Your Community: A Manual for Activists. Academic proponents of a public broadcasting trust say broadcasters also need to show support. "They have to move away from this commercial model and really join with those who are arguing for independent, long-term funding," Hoynes said. "I think that should really be priority No. 1 internally."

"We're your friends"

Will public broadcasters join the push for reform? Many community broadcasters, video activists, and LPFM proponents are already on board, and added their voices to the progressive chorus at "Public Broadcasting and the Public Interest."

Other practitioners, however, left the conference feeling like punching bags, raising questions about future ties between reformists and pubcasters. Conference speakers called them to task for targeting affluent audiences or airing mainstream programming at the expense of minority views. Broadcasters responded that the bitter realities of funding force them to make choices. "I don't know that the conference really was able to come to grips with the differences between the practice of public broadcasting and the theory of public broadcasting," said Arlen Diamond, general manager of KSMU in Springfield, Mo., in an interview with Current. Like other managers, Diamond says he faces a dilemma: should his station try to serve a variety of interests, as critics advocate, and risk alienating core NPR listeners? "You can't have it both ways," he said.

Rhonda Morin, media coordinator at Maine Public Broadcasting, felt that academics were speaking too broadly of public broadcasting and not looking at individual television and radio stations. "I felt like they were making an assumption that PBS was public broadcasting," she told Current. "It's not the only entity." Starr, who screened a CIPB video called Put the Public Back in Public Broadcasting: If We Don't Do It, Who Will? that focused mainly on PBS, admitted that the video's original script touched on radio, but it proved to be harder to characterize on screen and was edited out.

Morin and other broadcasters also wished that more people from their profession had been at the conference. "We had some people who had their toe in the water, and a couple of people who had had bad experiences [in the field]…but they're hardly what make up the width and breadth of public broadcasting," said Alan Chartock, executive director of WAMC in Albany, N.Y. "That is where I think it went wrong…. By and large, the people who run public radio around the country are socially conscious and fairly progressive folks who I think would have every reason to resent the way they were being characterized."

Though few representatives from NPR and PBS attended the conference, critics say they do want pubcasters on their side. "I'm disappointed if public broadcasters at the conference perceived themselves as the enemy," Hoynes said. "The criticism is not as much of the individual as it is of the structure."
But activists say strengthening ties with broadcasters has been difficult. "What we've discovered, by and large, is that their wagons are already circled," Starr said, calling public broadcasters "people in a perpetual state of crisis." "Then, we come on the scene, and no matter what language we would have used, we would have been seen as independent and potentially hostile."

"We're really your friends," McCauley said, referring to pubcasters. "We want to see this enterprise live."