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Leave the Belts
Public broadcasting is circling the drain. Their ratings are a shadow of what they once were. Anyone who looks at today’s political realities knows that it’s only a matter of time before NPR and PBS get some very bad news. In pro wrestling, when your contract is up, whether you’ve got a job elsewhere or not, it’s understood by all that you’ll “leave the belt”– lose the championship (and its ornate belt) before going out the door.
When funding is cut for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a near-certainty, NPR and PBS should be allowed out the door to re-organize themselves as non-public private foundations and keep themselves on the air with their own money, if they can. But they irrevocably lose “the belts”– the names, trademarks, and above all, any lingering claim to be operating in the name of the US public.
It didn’t start this way, and it didn’t have to be this way. When I was a kid, there was no political tone to broadcasting the local chamber orchestra on Sunday afternoon, or morning lectures by irascible old Prof. Bowman. The Ford Foundation made an offer the stations didn’t refuse: videotape machines, costing $70,000 each, equivalent to $757,000 today. Now the stations could exchange tapes. That was the primitive origin of a public television network, what a later generation would call “sneaker net”.
Surprisingly, much of the Congressional support for paying for a “real” network via AT&T long lines and then satellites came from conservative rural states, who saw possible virtues in putting a teacher wherever there was a television set. LBJ’s Democrats repackaged the loosely knit NET as centralized PBS, gave it a self-perpetuating staff, did a similar deal with educational radio, created NPR, and established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as their permanent funding agency.
But this happened at about the same time as a cultural “hinge event,” the election of Richard Nixon. Nixon hated PBS, and the feeling was mutual. To the horror of PBS’s founding generation, CPB sought and got corporate funding that moderated the programs of public broadcasting. The largest single new 70s funder was Mobil Oil, sponsor of Masterpiece Theater, setting the tone for PBS for decades to come. Their programming, much of it classical and British, wasn’t conservative but mostly apolitical. That compromise was acceptable to the institutional GOP, and that balance held for a long time. PBS became known for cooking shows and wildlife documentaries.
By the time of the Carter administration, public TV’s fondest gift list was a book called Keeping P.A.C.E. with the New Television. At a time when cable systems were still rare and had very restricted capacity, this book proposed that the country should have national, taxpayer-supported channels for news, history, and culture, all run by PBS. That would be the future of TV—no privately run, competing viewpoints from, say, the History or Learning channels; no A&E, Discovery, Bravo, or Nickelodeon. It would all be handed to public broadcasting on a platter, by Congress and the FCC. Didn’t happen.
The Nineties began with PBS’s most influential television hit, Ken Burns’s The Civil War. That was the high point of American public television in ratings and cultural relevance. In 1990—thirty-five years ago and counting–this was as good as it got.
In the hands of PBS, every subsequent progressive domestic political movement tends to have its own distinctive, authentic characteristics molten down so it can be recast as Selma or Freedom Summer 1964. Feminism, ethnicity and gay rights were issues that local station fundraisers either found helpful (mostly in coastal states, the industrial Midwest, and college towns everywhere), or unhelpful (most of the rest of the country).
They chose a side. It had short-term marketing benefits but long-term political drawbacks. In the years after 9/11, CPB force-fed a little bit of genuine diversity to PBS, commissioning projects from conservatives. It was called America at a Crossroads. The shows were fresh, different, and popular. Naturally, the institutional blob smothered Crossroads as quickly and discreetly as it could. Today, PBS’s ratings have plunged far below even the anemic numbers of twenty years ago.
While TV’s PBS flatlined, radio’s NPR thrived for a long time. It became one of the popular brand names of progressives, in effect their Harley-Davidson, Smith and Wesson, or the Black Rifle Coffee of the tote bag-and-pledge-drive ladies. It began to look like PBS would have been better off rebranding itself as “NPR Video”. But then NPR lost its showroom shine. Changes in radio listening habits, the rise of wokeness, and the rise of revulsion to wokeness, have all resulted in historic audience losses. When insider Uri Berliner published a damning essay last year about how political bias brought NPR low, they fired him.
Nearly seven years ago, when Australia was debating changes to its own public TV, Sydney’s Daily Telegraph quoted Ricochet:
Public broadcasting was born in a 1950s world of limited information, limited bandwidth, and narrow choices. It dreamed of a world where you could be in Tupelo, Utica or Provo and still be able to see “Macbeth” on TV. In that world it had a real purpose.
Today, you could be in Tupelo’s outer fringes and see virtually any version of Shakespeare ever filmed, on your phone, at any time of the day or night. PBS struggles with that new world. Wouldn’t it be wiser for them to declare victory over cultural deprivation, mission accomplished! – and then fold their tents for good?
Time to fold those tents, fellas. On the way out, make sure to leave the belts.
Published in General
It’s the same logic behind “NPR and PBS only get a tiny fraction of their money from the government” being argued simultaneously with “any cuts in government support will destroy public broadcasting”.
See also Planned Parenthood and funding for abortion “services” …
Given the state of technology today, everyone who has a phone or computer has access to a gazillion classic titles, be they music, operas, plays, etc. The need for PBS and NPR is over . . .
I guess I’ll have to turn to other sources to hear the finest in accordion music.
Provided you want to pay for them. Everything else is a form of theft.
There’s a couple of reasons. At first, people who owned TV’s were a more sophisticated audience. As TV sets got cheaper and the audience became more widespread, the percentage of people with rarefied tastes was reduced. The demand for more popular fare increased.
While the networks were not directly regulated by the FCC, the stations that played the network’s content were. They were still required to provide a percentage of “public service” content. As that disappeared – and we conservatives are generally for less regulation, so we can take the credit/blame for that – the political demand for an alternative, like PBS, increased.
Let the commercial networks act like commercial networks and have a taxpayer funded public service alternative. That worked for them until the technology made it easier for there to provide more channels, which made PBS obsolete.
As for Paley, from what I read of him, he was a mixed bag. He was someone you didn’t want to cross, especially if you were an up and coming producer that wanted to put something different on the air. That would be fine if he didn’t quite have as much power that he did.
A lot of that is just plain wrong. A broadcaster pledges to operate in the “public interest, convenience and necessity” of the communities to which they are licensed. Whether or not they are meeting those needs is not up to the federal government to decide. Stations are still required to maintain a public file on what they’re doing to meet the needs (as identified by station management) of the community and that file is open for anyone to inspect. Unless your local station is in flagrant violation of FCC technical standards, challenges to renewing a station’s license is supposed to be initiated locally. If some church group in Indiana is mad at Disney they have no standing to challenge Disney’s broadcasting practices in New York. Same with cranky politicians in Washington, DC. Maybe the local Disney station in New York goes after Donald Trump. Maybe WABC’s audience likes it.
And while in the past, these regulations usually resulted in a Sunday morning ghetto of bad local public affairs shows, digital sub channels have created all sorts of possibilities. A network affiliated station can now put a high school football game on their .2 or .3 signal and thrill the local community and “meet their needs,” if they see that as one of their needs.
I saw a fundraising banner ad on the NPR web site: “The voices seeking to silence us are growing louder”. Get it? “Louder”. Those ignorant, violent people who don’t want to fund us. And they’re noisy!
No, they aren’t “growing louder”, they’re growing much more numerous.
Let me expound on what I said above. There is no percentage of public affairs programming required for any station, and certainly no federal mandates. There is also no single federal definition of “broadcasting in the public interest.” Anything you’ve heard from Donald Trump and his acolytes – including the current chairman of the FCC – are just politicians blowing smoke up your skirt.
From the FCC itself: (emphasis mine)
It’s something of a mystery why Los Angeles, second most populous city in the US, center of the world film industry, wasn’t a force in producing public TV. You could understand being outclassed by NY; but Boston?
When KCET’s chief, Al Jerome, announced that they were leaving PBS, other station managers referred to it as “Al went nuclear”.
Usually how loud I am about it is directly proportional to how many drinks I’ve had, so it might not be steadily increasing over time.
This comment is so rich with content it should be a post on its own as well.
There are probably not many bars in America where loud mobs of tipsy, jeering men demand that the terrified bartender switch the big screen TVs from Stephen A. Smith’s lecture on the racial history of the NFL, over to the 10-part Bill Moyers retrospective on women in unionism sponsored by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. And by the Pew Charitable Trust.
OK, Ricochet, that’s your cue…a channel of the finest in accordion music, replacing NPR, because one of your wittiest constituents made a jocular threat to (gasp) consult other websites. ;-)
I suggest we start here:
https://ricochet.com/1205094/rockish-bands-i-love-with-full-time-accordionists/
Search for Zydeco.
Required cartoon posting
I love Ricochet.
And we shouldn’t forget this:
Gary,
I decided to click ‘Like’ on this Comment just to show everyone that I can take criticism.
Cheers,
Mark
I’m quoting from two posts. In the second post @ejhill quotes the FCC. A federal agency.
No state or local government can revoke an FCC license. And no local or state government in the United States can tell a commercial broadcaster to get off the air.
And to make his point, EJ turns to, not some state law, but the FCC.
So this blather about local control is just that. Blather. It’s the Feds, all the way down.
It seems that virtually everyone where I work is making an early start on the Easter holiday. So with the place to myself, I decided to treat myself to less typical music.
The first hour was sea shanties. The second hour was bagpipes. After an off-site meeting, I’ll play some accordion music. Perhaps alternate between polka and Mexican.
It’s not blather. Just as you can’t arrest someone, and the cops cannot convict someone, the revocation of a license has its steps and individual components.
The revocation process begins locally not with the FCC. Which is why when Bill Kristol gets his hackles up about Fox News and asks the FCC to deny the renewal of Fox’s Philadelphia license they tell him to pound sand, primarily because he doesn’t live in the market and the people of Philadelphia feel otherwise.
Go read the Communications Act and get back to me.
Just to be clear, I was making no criticism at all–I was entirely sincere. You made a great comment.
Quote is of Gary McVey quoting Mark Camp. Picked the wrong comment to quote from
The greatest example of pseudo-intellectual auditory torture from “modern music” is Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, also translated as Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima[4][5] (Polish: Tren – ofiarom Hiroszimy) by Krzysztof Penderecki.
Truly horrifying auditory torture. Every pseudo-intellectual should hear it at least once.
Though it worked pretty well as background in The Shining.
We’re talking about several overlapping things at once. If the subject is political bias in public broadcasting, the suggestion is to pull funding, not pull the FCC licenses.
PBS and NPR are not obliged by law to be unbiased. They merely claim to be.
Unless a station starts running pornography or using its transmitter to interfere with other stations, IIRC, it’s legally hard to cancel a license.
Thanks, Gary.
(Actually I took it as a compliment, and tried to say thanks with a joke, employing my infamously incomprehensible sense of humor. Kate says she knew my attempt would crash and burn. “NOBODY knows how to take you, Mark. You should have just politely said thank you to Gary.” ;-)
It wasn’t that incomprehensible.
I decided to click Like on this one, as well. It makes me feel a little better about my faux pas.
But I plan to go back in approximately 90 minutes and remove the Like because it might make Gary feel a little bit worse for not catching it.
The plan is then to go back at 10 PM to see if Gary has clicked Like on it, too, which would prove that he also didn’t find it that incomprehensible, and was 90% sure I was being funny, but to be safe, he clarified.
I hope this is all clear. Or if not, then funny.