RIP CPB

It happened.  What Richard Nixon, Donald Wildmon, Newt Gingrich, and Mick Mulvaney all failed to do in the past, Donald J. Trump did in one fell swoop.  He forced the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to go out of business.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the somewhat makeshift entity that doles out federal funds, suddenly found itself with no funds to dole out after Trump and his henchmen succeeded in zeroing out funding for public broadcasting in retaliation for a perceived liberal bias in PBS's and NPR's news reporting.  That bias must have been a surprise to Margaret Hoover, the great-granddaughter of the thirty-first U.S. President, who currently hosts the right-leaning PBS talk show "The Firing Line," as well as to longtime viewers of PBS's "NewsHour" broadcast, which gets "funding" from such major corporations as BNSF Railway.  (After too much fluff pretending to be news, like stories on hip-hop culture and those stupid "Brief but Spectacular" essays which are neither, I stopped watching the NewsHour altogether, as you already know.) And National Public Radio tends to broadcast talk shows - many of them boring - that have nothing to do with politics of any sort.  But the "liberal bias" myth, unlike the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, endures. 

As far as I'm concerned, good riddance.  I'm glad that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is biting the dust, mainly because public broadcasting has become so unbelievably pretentious, from the miniseries set in the Regency and Victorian eras of nineteenth-century England on PBS to the Sunday-morning folk-music shows on NPR-affiliated stations that always feature Tom Chapin songs, cuts from David Crosby's solo albums, and Joni Mitchell wannabes singing about saving the whales or building more affordable housing - in other words, public broadcasting caters to the tastes of white bourgeois liberals, the same demographic that even bothers to vote on public broadcasting to begin with.  But given PBS's history with airing Lawrence Welk reruns,  John Tesh concerts, and those tiresome, tedious nostalgia concerts - public-broadcasting programming has more in common with Richard Nader than with Ralph Nader - it's a wonder how white bourgeois liberals could continue to believe that public broadcasting in These States was ever anything like the BBC.  The loss of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting pulls that mask off, but the mask was a bandit eye mask that allowed you to still determine the wearer's features.  People who thought public broadcasting was a truly independent alternative to mainstream commercial broadcasting should have seen right through that disguise all along.  Now they have no alternative but to face the truth.

We'll still have public broadcasting in some form, but now more than ever, local stations will have to rely on local funding.  Get ready for longer pledge-drive interruptions during "special" PBS programming like your local station airing the memorial concert for George Harrison for the 674,258th time.  But it's time to admit that public broadcasting in America - made possible by a grant from an oil company - is not, never was, and never will be anything like the BBC.  My observation is not a popular one, and I lost a friend who raises (raised?) money for a local public-television station by pointing this out to her, but let's face it . . .

How come National Public Radio never aired live performances of popular-music acts now considered "classic rock" and allowed them to be put out as records years after (the albums above don't really exist), as BBC Radio has done? 

Yes, it's too bad we don't have anything like the BBC in These States, but as a New York magazine writer once said twenty years ago, deal with it - there are more important battles against reactionaries to fight.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting disbands at the end of September. 

Public Narrowcasting

The Public Broadcasting Service, which airs commercials between programs, airs scripted comedies and dramas imported from Europe, produces no scripted comedies and dramas of its own, has failed whenever it has tried to do so, has aired reruns of Lawrence Welk's show, has also aired productions of Andrew Lloyd Webber's awful Cats musical (ironically on its "Great Performances" series), airs a nightly news broadcast that presents hip-hop stories as "arts and culture" stories, and has aired a political talk show hosted by William F. Buckley, Jr. and then Margaret Hoover (great-granddaughter of the thirty-first U.S. President) despite complaints of its "liberal bias," and National Public Radio, which concentrates most of its programing on topical talk fare, does not have a national network of music stations devoted to one genre or another, has affiliated local stations that broadcast non-commercial music such as college-indie rock and classical music but have weak signals due to their low wattage, has never had rock bands perform live on the air or in the studio and so has never had tapes of such shows become CDs thirty years after, and, like PBS, has pledge drives to supplement its funds and meet its budget needs, are getting their federal funding cut by Trump.

Oh, boo-hoo-hoo.

Once again:  If we had a real public broadcasting network like the BBC, the cuts to PBS and NPR - public broadcasting in the United States is so chaotically organized the television and radio services go by different names - would be news.  But when their programs are made possible by grants from major corporations, it's just a tempest in a very British teapot.

Nothing to see here, folks.  But I'll certainly comment on a story of major importance - like when Kamala Harris runs out of dental floss. 

CPB Versus BBC

As I noted in my previous post, the far right wants to dismantle public broadcasting as we know it.  Granted, public broadcasting as we know it is mediocre at best. Public television (PBS) may be ad hoc and random, but its programming is still in many cases superior to programs offered on network television or basic cable, while it is on par with programming on premium cable or streaming services many of us cannot afford. And anyone can watch public television.  Public radio? National Public Radio (NPR) clearly lacks nationwide music programming, focusing mostly on talk shows on topics ranging from politics to movies, but local public music stations affiliated with NPR do a decent job playing artists that tend to sell one record for every ten thousand records Taylor Swift sells. 

None of that means anything to conservatives like Mike Gonzalez, who in Project 2025's manifesto devotes a whole subchapter to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and complains about the 65 percent of viewers and listeners who identify as liberal and complains about the programming as being biased toward liberal values (forget Margaret Hoover resurrecting "Firing Line," the old PBS talk show begun by the late WIlliam F. Buckley, Jr.). Gonzalez sneers at the CPB receiving government subsidies to provide non-commercial educational funding when he finds even "Sesame Street" as a form of liberal indoctrination (because Sesame Street is in a racially mixed urban neighborhood where half of everyone speaks Spanish). 

The big complaint from liberals, of course, is that PBS and NPR receives corporate funding, which, conservatives want the CPB to rely on exclusively, and is thus discouraged from broadcasting anything that might offend their corporate "underwriters."  Ironically, Gonzalez points this out in his concluding paragraph. "NPR and PBS stations are in reality no longer noncommercial, as they run ads in everything but name for their sponsors," he writes. "They are also non-educational. The next President should instruct the FCC to exclude the stations affiliated with PBS and NPR from the [non-commercial educational] denomination and the privileges that come with it." 

Public broadcasting non-educational? Let me rebut that in the only way I know how. First, watch a history documentary on PBS. It doesn't matter which one, just watch it. Then try to find a comparable documentary on the History Channel, which for the most part stopped being about history years ago. Conservatives have long insisted that any public funding of broadcasting is a mistake, with Antonin Scalia, as a Nixon administration lawyer in 1971, warning of "a long-range problem of significant social consequences - that is, the development of a government-funded broadcast system similar to the BBC." 

The British Broadcasting Corporation is not, as far as I am aware of, in the business of spreading socialist propaganda, but it does provide original scripted comedies and dramas and a world-class news-gathering service, as well as five national music radio stations - including BBC Radio 1, which, like its predecessor, the BBC Light Programme, has a storied legacy of live performances from bands now considered "classic rock." The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has none of those things, thanks to a funding system that barely qualifies as a system - a mix of corporate funding, individual donations, and annual federal subsidies, meaning that PBS has to import original scripted programming from television networks from other countries (like the BBC) and settle for a second-rate TV newscast that gets half of its foreign news reports from Britain's Independent Television News.  That only goes to show you how a dedicated funding mechanism can make a difference for public broadcasting; the BBC is funded by an annual £159 ($216.60) license fee paid by all British households that make use of its services . . . which is practically everyone in the United Kingdom.  You get what you pay for.

If this all sounds familiar, it's because I've been saying it time and time again on this blog.

If Project 2025 goes forward as planned under a Republican President as far as public broadcasting is concerned, we can expect to see funding for public broadcasting zeroed out and completely dependent on wealthy donors, which will no doubt limit even further the CPB's ability to provide the sort of programming it does now. PBS will be like the basic-cable channels that used to air educational programs but stopped doing so when it turned out to be unprofitable. (TLC, which used to stand for The Learning Channel, now shows reality programming and its name is just a bunch of meaningless initials.)  PBS and NPR stations in small media markets will go off the air for lack of funding with no alternative public-affairs programming, just as sure as, as noted in my previous post, the Republicans will restrict commercial media providing alternatives to news and opinion with a conservative bent.  Several NPR-affiliated music stations may go off the air, denying people in small media markets an alternative to a commercial music station playing Justin Bieber. 

But it's not like we won't have government-sanctioned media in place of public broadcasting.  We will.  In fact, a leading Republican already has one set up.

His name is Rupert Murdoch.

Merciless

The idea of a public television network canceling a scripted series when public television isn't supposed to rely on ratings and fickle advertisers may seem foreign to, well, foreigners, but in fact PBS in the United States cancelled its first scripted drama in years after only two seasons.

When the Civil War hospital drama "Mercy Street" premiered on PBS in January 2016,  it looked like a sure-fire winner.  It brought the vivid reality of the war to life, its depiction of life in a hotel in Alexandria, Virginia converted into a Union Army hospital spared no detail, the storylines dealt with slavery honestly, and the writing and acting were stellar.  As good as Mary Elizabeth Winstead was as a nurse, Josh Radnor (both actors are shown above in their roles) was the really big surprise.  Radnor played Ted Mosby on the CBS sitcom "How I Met Your Mother" for nine years, and it sounded implausible to cast such a contemporary actor in an historical drama, but he pulled off his role as a Union Army doctor brilliantly and understatedly.  Add a solid supporting cast including old pros such as Donna Murphy, Gary Cole and the black actor L. Scott Caldwell (Caldwell is a woman, for those who've never heard the name), and, well, how could a show like "Mercy Street" go wrong?

It didn't, but it was cancelled anyway, and that's what's so dismaying.  PBS explained that the cancellation was due in part to the "complicated nature of aligning production timelines" with scheduling,  but it also admitted to another, possibly (gee, ya think?) more serious issue: funding.

PBS gets some funding from the public in the form of donations, gets some funding from wealthy donors, and gets some more funding from the government.  "Mercy Street" got axed soon after Donald Trump and his evil budget henchman Mick Mulvaney decided to ask Congress to zero out federal funding for public broadcasting - TV and radio - because they, as Mulvaney put it, just can't ask a poor woman in Detroit to give her hard-earned money to public broadcasting.

Public broadcasting in the United States has long been a joke. Its programming is mostly made up of documentaries (which saves money in salaries for actors, writers and directors), and its original arts and entertainment programming is comprised mostly of concerts (including pop concerts from performers who haven't had hits in years).  PBS's scripted programming is imported from Britain, and some of that is still airing years after the programs ceased production.  I can count numerous BBC sitcoms and dramas, not all of which have made it to America, but I can count all of PBS's own scripted entertainment shows that ever were on one hand with fingers to spare.  The unpredictable funding for public broadcasting in the U.S. is the main reason for this, even as there is a dedicated tax for public broadcasting in other countries or, in the case of Britain, an annual license fee of £145.50 (US$185.51) for every British household with a TV.  I don't support such an idea for this country - just dedicate some of the tax money I already pay to public broadcasting.  Many of us - including poor women in Detroit - would likely prefer that more of our tax money go to a dedicated fund for public television and radio instead of, say, the military.  But that would eliminate the need for wealthy donors to foot the bill for public broadcasting, and then how would these rich folks ensure that certain programming doesn't get aired?  For all I know, a wealthy donor objected to "Mercy Street" because he thought it had an anti-Southern bias. 

Public broadcasting in the U.S. isn't uniform like in other countries, either; it's a patchwork of local television and radio stations ostensibly under the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and some stations - this is particularly true of radio stations with music formats - have only a nominal connection to the national services at best.  Good grief, the national television and radio outlets each have different names - the Public Broadcasting Service is the television outlet and National Public Radio (NPR) is the radio outlet.  That's how diffuse it is. In Britain there is one British Broadcasting Corporation, with several TV stations, ten national radio stations, six regional radio stations and forty local radio stations - predictable, reliable, and solid.  American public broadcasting is none of those things, as evidenced by its need to accept corporate sponsorship from companies like Farmers Insurance - and even play Farmers Insurance ads starring J.K. Simmons - for some extra dough.

It would be nice to see J.K. Simmons play a different role on public television - in a domestic scripted series - and it would have been nice for "Mercy Street" to survive and prove that such programming can prosper, but again, such programming on PBS is one more nice thing we can't have in this country.  If we want non-commercial, original scripted programming produced here in the U.S. of A., we go to Netflix, or premium cable, which not everyone can afford.  But then, even the BBC isn't as pure as it used to be.   Their program planners are looking at ratings now.

And if it is true that people in the Old Confederacy have a distrust for government or any public institution, I guess the cancellation of "Mercy Street" means that the South really did win the Civil War. :-O

National Public Embarrassment

Conservative sting activist James O'Keefe helped further impoverish America with his hidden-camera attack on ACORN, which folded as a result. Recently, he turned his sting operations on National Public Radio, threatening to make America's airwaves even more of a vast wasteland.

O'Keefe had his henchmen pose as Muslim activists and approach NPR fundraising executive Ron Schiller with a generous donation offer for the semi-national radio non-network. They got him to declare on a hidden camera that Tea Party Republicans are rabid gun-toting racists and xenophobes. Schiller could have stopped there, but he added that NPR would be better off without federal funding. To be fair, Schiller told the O'Keefe operatives that he was expressing his own personal views, not those of NPR. His personal views, though, were good enough for House Republican leader Eric Cantor and South Carolina GOP senator Jim DeMint, who renewed their commitment to zero out funding for public broadcasting, and Schiller's comments were also good enough to force his resignation from NPR. Confronted by the failure of her own leadership, NPR chief executive Vivian Schiller - no relation - resigned as well.

Despite NPR's condemnation of Ron Schiller's comments, and despite O'Keefe's failure to entrap other NPR officials (or any PBS officials), no one on the right is giving NPR any benefit of doubt. Conservatives have always regarded National Public Radio as a domain of liberal elitism and highbrow snootiness, and Ron Schiller's comments only confirm their prejudices. (I don't see how the Magliozzi brothers's national show "Car Talk," devoted to the very middlebrow - and very American - obsession with automobiles and how they work, fits into the right's theory. Maybe it's because the Magliozzis are from Boston.) This comes on the heels of Juan Williams's dismissal from NPR for his comments about a fear of Muslims on airplanes, which lowered morale at the radio establishment. Now there's no one in charge of NPR fundraising or of NPR itself. Brian Stetler of the New York Times reported that this would mean a loss of ten percent of funding for the average station. For from being a minuscule amount NPR stations can live without, it makes the difference for many NPR stations in hiring reporters for their local news departments, buying transmitters, and getting quality programming. Remember - NPR is not a uniform collection of national stations with different formats like BBC Radio is. Many stations are pretty much on their own, even when it comes to nationally syndicated programming.

Where I live, in northern New Jersey, I occasionally listen to WNYC in New York for nationally syndicated and local public affairs shows, as well as interview shows about art and culture such as "Fresh Air" and "All Things Considered." (Okay, maybe public radio is a little snooty.) For music, I listen to two local NPR-affiliated stations - WBGO-FM in Newark, a jazz station, and WFUV-FM in New York, a folk/indie-rock station. These stations all have the sort of programming commercial radio can't be bothered with. Go to commercial AM talk radio in the New York area and you find right-wing commentary that at worst is redolent of the Third Reich's Volksempfänger broadcasts - and at least is just plain redolent. Commercial FM radio around here offers a lot of stations playing power ballads and pulsating dance tunes - not fascistic but still like a sledgehammer to my brain. If not for WCBS-FM (oldies) and WRXP-FM (rock, not all overplayed classic tunes), there'd be no alternatives to public radio for me . . . and any commercial radio I do like is susceptible to ratings. If WRXP-FM can't compete against other stations in the Arbitrons, it could be forced to change its format. Other rock stations have done so.

If federal funding for NPR is eliminated, New York-area public radio might manage to survive; the region is affluent enough to support it. In many other parts of the country, it's very doubtful that NPR stations could function at the level that they do now, if at all. In which case, if you don't live in a metropolitan area like Greater New York, your only recourse for good music and intelligent talk may be satellite radio, or BBC Radio on the Internet. Internet broadcasts from New York-area public radio? Oh, no, that might be what they have to eliminate to survive.

Good news: The White House has come out in favor of continued funding for public broadcasting. Bad news: The White House supported the public health insurance option, and look how that turned out.

Made Possible By . . .

Republicans are trying once again to zero out federal funding for public broadcasting, seeing as they don't like public institutions - especially as they don't make a profit. Several activists are going through the age-old ritual of tearing their hair out over the proposed cut and demanding that funding for the Public Broadcasting Service on TV and National Public Radio be restored to keep both PBS and NPR from being commercialized.

News flash: Public broadcasting has been commercialized since the early seventies. If federal funding were to disappear for public broadcasting, no one would really notice, except maybe insomniacs who might find a test pattern on their local PBS station at two in the morning while looking for anything on TV. Much of the programming you see on public television in America is "funded" or "underwritten" by some of the biggest companies in America. Right now, Chevron is an "underwriter" for the PBS NewsHour. Liberty Mutual, an insurance company, "funds" the historical documentary series "The American Experience." The science series "Nova," which has received "grants" from Microsoft, now gets funding from - wait! David H. Koch? The industrialist who funds right-wing causes with his brother??

And need I mention "ExxonMobil Masterpiece Theater?"

Notice also that their acknowledgements of corporate funding -commercials, really - have gotten longer and less discreet over the years, sometimes being the exact same commercial spots that appear on regular television? Only one show honestly tells you it's "brought to you by," not "made possible by a grant from," a sponsor - "Sesame Street," brought to you by the letter L and the number 3.

Someone I knew insisted that none of these sponsors - that's what they really are - interrupt PBS's programming with commercials for their products, and others would point out that acknowledgement of corporate funding at the beginning and the end of a program doesn't try to sell you anything. These arguments miss the point. The influx of corporate money into public television has meant that certain programming and commentary can't be offered, and that many interesting things can't be shown on PBS any more than on commercial television. No one wants to offend the donors. Next time you watch PBS programming, pay close attention to it. You'll find "The American Experience" offering documentaries that don't offer many new facts that you didn't learn in high school (unless you were napping in high school history class). And watching "Nova" isn't really going to make you scientifically savvy. I once saw a "Nova" documentary exploring the possibilities of . . . time travel. I was amazed that they were able to fill the remaining 59 minutes.

And is there really any cultural value in "Antiques Roadshow?" Then again, a show about money for junk fits well into the American grain.

Ah yes, cultural programming. PBS does some good work in that realm with ballet recitals and symphony concerts, and it even offers the less commercial side of country and rock music with its "Austin City Limits" series. But you don't see all that many new and challenging performing arts programming that offers radical dance or theater. PBS is comfortable to air the usual classic operas and dances from Lincoln Center. Dramatic programming is even more staid, with many of its scripted shows being British imports - dramatizations of the Victorian novels that bore American high school students to tears, detective shows, and of course, situation comedies that went off the air in the mother country long ago. Hey, I like " Keeping Up Appearances" - the last episode of which originally aired in Britain in 1995 - as much as the next guy, but if they're going to show old Britcoms on PBS all the time, can we get some variety beyond Patricia Routledge? Maybe some old Frankie Howerd comedy thrown in?

New Britcoms? Ah, you have to go to BBC America on cable for that.

Last time I checked, this is America, and PBS ought to show something current and American as well as something old and British. Original drama series on PBS are rare. The TV series version of the movie The Paper Chase, which originally aired on CBS before getting cancelled and finding a more welcome spot on the public airwaves, was an exception, as was "American Family," a drama series about an extended Hispanic family that starred Raquel Welch. But you see, PBS has to rely primarily on private funding, and there usually isn't enough money to support such programming, which is part of the reason it focuses mainly on public affairs, educational and other cultural programming.

But then, PBS programming is largely aired in a patchwork fashion, as it has no uniform network or channels carrying the same programming at once. Individual PBS "member" stations in a single metropolitan area end up being redundant, without much local programming; many people in New Jersey think of the public New Jersey Network as a channel on which to see "Mystery!" on a different night. And, unlike the BBC, whose programming has normally appeared on PBS in America, PBS doesn't have a central program production arm; all of its programming is created or supplied by - or produced under contract with - other parties, such as the individual member stations. Even its news programming isn't an in-house production; Jim Lehrer's production company is responsible for the "PBS Newshour." And many of Lehrer's guests tend to represent the established political and business order, with few experts out of the mainstream offering alternative viewpoints - part of the reason some say PBS should stand for "Pro-Business Soapbox."

National Public Radio is much better, despite its similar funding mechanism, having an in-house production unit and more solid programming. And many of its member stations offer on the local level music programming in the form of jazz and rock performers deemed not mainstream enough for commercial radio. But even NPR has its shortcomings; like PBS, it has no uniform network carrying the same programming at once, and scheduling of national programming varies from station to station. (And, as with some PBS stations, some NPR stations might not carry specific programming because it's too "controversial.") Notice also the lack of a group of radio networks each devoted to a certain format. BBC radio has six music stations alone - Radio 1 for current pop, Radio 2 for classic pop, Radio 3 for classical and jazz, and so on. NPR's lack of national music shows or networks explains why seventies American rock bands don't have Live at NPR or The NPR Sessions albums to offer.

Whenever public broadcasting feels the pinch, they go to their loyal viewers every few months with pledge drives, usually with the kind of safe entertainment programming - programming Joe Queenan once described as "middlebrow hokum" - to encourage more viewership and more donations. After "a cabal of bespectacled dweebs try to convince you that the only thing that stands between Newt Gingrich and the eclipse of Western civilization as we know it is your viewer dollars," as Queenan wrote in 1997, PBS airs such provocative fare as performances of the Andrew Lloyd Webber songbook. More recently, they've been airing doo-wop revivals during pledge week.

I would be quite happy, actually, to see government funding for public broadcasting in its current form end, if only because we'd only have to deal with corporations. Because when Congress gives public broadcasting operational funds, and when the director of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting serves at the pleasure of the President, you're asking for trouble. Anyone remember George Walker Bush's CPB chairman Kenneth Tomlinson, and his efforts to push PBS away from what he perceived as a liberal bias in public affairs programs by bullying Bill Moyers, only to be forced out after getting personally involved with funding a show from the Wall Street Journal editorial board? A dedicated tax for public broadcasting, with no government interference on programming decisions, which is how the BBC operates, would be superior. Given the American people's aversions to taxes, though, I'm not likely to see it happen in my lifetime. But it may happen one day.

Until then, enjoy the Lawrence Welk reruns.