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. 

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.

Good Night, Jim

Jim Lehrer, who died last week at 85, as perhaps the closest thing we've had to Walter Cronkite since Cronkite himself retired in 1981.  As the co-anchor of PBS's "The MacNeil-Lehrer Report" and the later "The MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour," now the PBS NewsHour, he offered clear, sober, dry television reporting reflecting his experience as a newspaper reporter that made PBS's newscast required viewing even as the three major network newscasts became parodies of themselves.  The PBS NewsHour's style of reporting remains essential in today's 24-hour cable news environment. You watch MSNBC or CNN for the latest news but you watch the PBS NewsHour to understand it.  (You watch the Fox News Channel for comedy.)

Jim Lehrer set the standard for PBS by covering the stories that matter most.  Throughout 1995, it was the only place to go for a newscast that didn't talk about the O.J. Simpson trial.   The NewsHour's stories are often seen as being dry and boring, but, as Lehrer himself said, when climate change or war affects you directly, none of that is boring.  Under Lehrer and his successors, the NewsHour spends more than a few moments on one story so you know the basics of the issue, not so that you're just informed. Information is not knowledge; knowing how to process information is, and the NewsHour is there to make sure you get it.  Lehrer's influence lives on.

Lehrer was not just a journalist, though; he was an accomplished novelist whose stories about the Kansas of his boyhood and latter-day Washington could be amusing and sometimes riveting, and he had a reporter's eye that enabled him to tell vivid stories.  Once a writer, always a writer.  His ability to communicate in journalism and in fiction with equal aplomb made him a national institution, and his death is a great loss . RIP. 

(The timing of his death was serendipitous; it occurred a week before the first day of issue of a U.S. postage stamp honoring his former colleague Gwen Ifill, which is this Thursday.)

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

The Pac Is Back?

Tupac Shakur's killing in 1996 may have rendered him unable to record anymore, but he continues to be a thorn in people's side. After seeing a PBS "Frontline" documentary critical of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, members of the group Lulzsec hacked PBS's page for its NewsHour program and posted a fake story claiming that Shakur was alive and secretly living in New Zealand. The group claimed that the posted the fake news item about the rapper, who was inspired by both black radical politics and street violence, was their way of saying they were "less than impressed" with "Frontline"'s reporting and wanted to get revenge on PBS for what they perceived as a smear of Assange.

Shakur would have loved this.

The story was taken down almost as soon as it was discovered. I don't think anyone seriously believed that Shakur was still alive. Anyone who knows anything about the rapper knew that his life was a proverbial walk down a razor. His feuds with other rappers were legendary, and his murder still hasn't been solved.

American public broadcasting can't get a break. First its radio service gets stung by right-wing activists, then its television service Web site gets punked by left-wing hackers. If public broadcasting in the U.S. is offending both extremes, it must be doing a good job.

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.

A Teachable Moment

I was really ticked off with the PBS NewsHour's regular Friday night political analysis from Mark Shields and David Brooks last night. After spending so much oxygen on Democratic party ennui and other Washington insider stuff, they addressed the Shirley Sherrod controversy - for ten seconds!

This was the biggest story of the week, and quite possibly a turning point for a presidential administration that may have finally learned it has to fight back harder against their conservative enemies in the media. It exposed right-wing newscasting as a fraud. Yet Shields, Brooks and Jim Lehrer reduced it to sound-bite analysis. In those ten seconds, Shields and Brooks agreed that President Obama showed poor loyalty in allowing Sherrod's dismissal, as if he were the only one fooled by the nonstory of her nonracism. Though Fox News was the biggest villain in this defamation of a capable and devoted public servant, the words "fox" and "news" never passed Shields's or Brooks's lips.

The PBS NewsHour brags that it doesn't entertain, it informs. What I found entertaining was how little attention PBS even chose to bother paying to a story that calls an entire cable news channel's being into question. Because PBS isn't driven by ratings as much as Fox News's Roger Ailes is ("Ratings! Ratings!" was an answer he gave to explain his programming on Fox News), I expected more from public television.

But then, maybe I shouldn't have. After all, PBS is beholden to corporate interests who "fund" them and who would just as soon see a thoughtful discussion on race and journalistic integrity not happen.

Coincidentally, journalism icon Daniel Schorr died yesterday at 93.

Margaret Warning

Jim Lehrer's news show on PBS, "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer," is often derided for being stale and boring. Well, it got interesting tonight!

The dowdy Margaret Warner sat with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, in town for talks with president Obama about the perpetual crisis in Pakistan, and she peppered him with hard questions about the Taliban in the country's Swat Valley, if eliminating Talib fighters meant "killing" them (he said it did), and the security of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal.

At the end, when Warner thanked President Zardari for the interview, he acknowledged her graciously and added, "You are one tough lady!"

Margaret Warner is like a goddess to me. :-) :-D

Jim Lehrer himself was honored at an awards dinner for his career this week. Seems they honored the wrong newscaster.