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TV History Thursday Night, Part 4: You’re (Not) Watching PBS
That’s an article from 13 years ago, at a critical moment in the history of broadcasting. Yes, the American Cinema Foundation was hosting a big Hollywood event, a national online conversation about the future of PBS, sponsored by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Yes, the American Cinema Foundation was well known as a group of Hollywood conservatives. The irony of that title is that what keynote speaker Rob Long demanded wasn’t a seat at the PBS table at all. He wanted it ended, but in the nicest, wittiest, most reasonable way. For weeks, the “blob” of employees and administrators of PBS stations sputtered in rage. But what they didn’t do—the only thing that might have saved most of their jobs over the following decade—was to listen to us. We were polite. We were entirely polite. We said, “You’re doomed”.
Public broadcasting wasn’t always a political issue. Well, it was once only a mildly political issue. When the first college instructional stations signed on in the mid-Fifties, there was still widespread, bipartisan belief that TV could bring the very best teachers into every classroom within reach of an antenna. The US armed forces, faced with the Cold War job of instructing hundreds of thousands of recruits about the new mysteries of electronics and atomic energy, worked hand in hand with universities and the corporate world to explore the possibilities of mass teaching through television. This was true on the other side of the Iron Curtain as well.
Your local college TV station was probably started by a professor of electrical engineering who learned his stuff in the Army. It might have been built from donations of Raytheon, General Electric, and Texas Instruments parts. Those were the earliest, most naive days of educational TV. If you watched old Doc Jensen talk about Egyptian mummies and pyramids every morning at 7:45 and passed a test, you could get college credit.
As the Fifties rolled over into the Sixties, the shiny new Ford Foundation made grants for video recorders at $50,000 apiece so school and community stations could exchange and copy each others’ tapes. That, at first, was all the “network” was: a central shipping office in the Midwest that handled tapes and 16mm films. Plain, boring old educational TV became National Educational Television, with a step up in its ambitions. More and more, these stations used the NET contraction, to subtly suggest that it was a network, just like the bigger, better known channels, and also to begin distancing themselves from their modest, limited roots in instructional media. They had more than mere education in mind.
From the outset, NET liked to pose as the intelligent alternative to commercial TV, the sole inheritor of the television crown of brains, and 60-plus years later, its successor PBS still does. Giving it more of the trappings of ABC, CBS or NBC was supposed to raise its profile and its audiences.
By the mid-Sixties, public broadcasters had spent years of wining and dining to convince congressional staffers to tell their bosses that NET deserved money to convert to color television and have the same kind of coast-to-coast live capability that the three major commercial networks had. That was called “Interconnection”, and at the time it was treated as an obvious if not self-evident token of fairness; not between left and right, but between metropolitan and rural. Conservatives back then were broadly in favor of extending the reach of educational stations in their own communities.
Lyndon Johnson’s administration worked with other Democrats to form new agencies to support independent public radio and television stations. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting was established as the parent organization, the “bank”. It funds research and engineering projects, but is best known for its funding of TV’s Public Broadcasting System and radio’s National Public Radio. Separate from this support of network programming for TV and radio, the CPB also gives grants directly to the stations themselves to fund transmitters as well as the recent (2009) changeover to digital television.
Political activists of the left were never satisfied by NET’s relatively bland, consensus-driven history and educational programs. They didn’t care about white professors lecturing about the solar system. They wanted Angela Davis and Bill Ayres. “NET Journal” was a left voice for civil rights, so not every station carried it—another strike against NET. It allowed choice! Well, to hell with that. The hilariously one-sided “Great American Dream Machine” was criticized in Congress and attracted as much heat as support. The new, more centrally organized PBS looked like a more pliable, politically weaponizable vehicle, and so it proved to be. But it didn’t happen nearly as quickly as its most impatient hijackers wished.
In the mid-Seventies, moderates and cultural conservatives struck back with a most effective weapon: money. Herb Schmertz of Mobil Oil became the indispensable Santa Claus of public television, often flying to London and personally selecting the programs that would air in America the following year. To the teeth-gnashing annoyance of the more woke crowd of PBS’s early wave of left politics, the new face of PBS was generally a polite, beautifully costumed British series set in the 19th century. No one was talking anymore about public broadcasting providing a live feed from ghetto councils. Thanks to Schmertz’s demands, for the first time PBS sponsors would be recognized and thanked by name, (“This episode of Ricochet Silent Radio is made possible by a generous gift of the Rhody family”) although in a far more restrained way than on commercial TV.
PBS had the fields of documentaries, American history, and public issue panel discussions almost to itself for its first 20 years, with occasional hits like “Eyes on the Prize”, and was still relevant enough to make Ken Burns’ The Civil War a national television event in 1990. But that was, in many ways, their last hurrah, twenty-eight years ago. The kinds of cultural programming that people associate with the BBC was increasingly being done by cable, not PBS. This trend would accelerate.
PBS tried to fight back by trying to get sympathetic TV critics to call their new competition “copycat programmers”, as if PBS invented documentaries. They rolled out ad campaigns like “If Not PBS, Who?” The answer was, the Discovery, Learning, History, and Science Channels; A&E; Bravo; Logo; Black Entertainment Television and literally hundreds of others. If you didn’t get your news from PBS, you could get it from Fox, CNN, or MSNBC; if you didn’t get historical drama from PBS, you got it from HBO, Showtime, and Sundance.
Their craftier, more successful radio cousins at NPR made it into a strong brand name, the Disney or IBM of mainstream liberalism. The right got the AM talkers; the left got the FM talkers. Morning and afternoon drive-time news radio and commentary for liberals became a branch of public broadcasting so popular it can license its name to companies making non-related products aimed at the same buying crowd. This level of marketing is something usually reserved to names like Harley-Davidson, Jack Daniels, or Ruger. Conservatives who generally abide by the free market should own up and admit that the libs created something profitable. Strictly from a commercial branding point of view, at this point PBS should consider repackaging itself as NPR Video, a streaming service affiliated with a much more successful public media enterprise.
Even a pittance of public money, especially federal money, is important to their self-image and ego. “America’s forum for new voices, new visions” is an empty claim, but at least Uncle Sam’s dough, even if it only covers 5% of the budget, gives PBS a threadbare excuse to represent the nation. This is one reason why it was always an elusive target for GOP budget cutters; it wasn’t possible to do more than symbolic harm to the system. The national network and the local stations have no co-ownership; neither can force the other to do anything. At most, Congress could go after the direct support that stations get, not PBS itself, but there’s not much appetite to shut down the TV at Cottonwood Junior Community College.
So conservatives never overthrew public broadcasting. NPR thrives. But PBS withered away. Oh, it still exists, and when a piece of luck like “Downton Abbey” comes its way, it can puff itself back up…to one twentieth the audience, and influence, it had a quarter century ago. PBS is now little more than America’s Official TV Network of White Guilt. To be fair, it also features Benny Goodman at pledge drive, Jewish guys in major league baseball history, and British drama, for which I thank them.
Go ahead, oppose them. Just don’t feed their delusions of grandeur. 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?
Published in General
Bravo, Gary! From watching local children’s theater in Carlisle, PA (via Harrisburg) to Bob Crumpler (Cleveland Public Schools’ “Mr. Wizard”) ETV added to my early elementary and junior high education…I’m grateful! But now, I hardly recognize the landscape…Really saddening.
I’d love to see what @roblong had to say. Are there any links available?
I’m trying, but CPB and Current Magazine took them down. Funny, huh? I’ll try to post the videos.
I blame PBS for starting the whole celebrity chef thing. They had those series back in the 90’s Great Chefs of … Whatever. Also hasn’t PBS created whole industries in arts and crafts too? Well maybe they are creative geniuses now that I think about it.
That is the harm that needed to be done.
Ah, don’t forget Julia Child, the grand dame of the whole thing, who convinced you that you really could cook like that at home.
That would be fantastic… although I’m not surprised it disappeared. I’m sure the “centrists” at CPB like constructive criticism almost as much as their fellow centrists in the governments of Cuba & Venezuela
Let’s be honest…they hated it, hated it, hated it. But here’s a shot of Rob:
051015 Finding the future of public television. Panel debate presented by American Cinema Foundation.
PHOTO: NIKLAS LARSSON
And here’s one of Peter:
He
051015 Finding the future of public television. Panel debate presented by American Cinema Foundation.
PHOTO: NIKLAS LARSSON
He wasn’t happy about what he was hearing.
Cathy Seipp too? That must have been great. RIP.
I’m not sure if I’ve told you my wife’s tales of her adventures at WBEZ (NPR Chicago affiliate).
Followed by The Galloping Gourmet.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is probably the greatest destructive force in America. Not because of anything it did but for what it stopped.
Before PBS came along America’s broadcasters took their roles seriously. For goodness sakes, NBC had their own symphony orchestra, commissioned the first opera for television, showed Broadway productions and hired Richard Rogers to score Victory at Sea.
ABC was the home to The Undersea World of Jacque Cousteau and National Geographic Presents.
What PBS and the CPB did was free the networks to eschew this type of programming and begin the race to the bottom. Eventually, cable would probably do this but they put it on the fast track.
The other problem I have always had with them is when they competed against private companies. When I first entered the business the PBS station in Cleveland had a mobile unit they rented out for non-station productions. If you Google “renting production facilities from pbs stations” you’ll find that many still do. That’s not what tax dollars and pledge drives are for.
Ah, but that was local, ABC I think, syndicated daytime TV…I never saw anyone enjoy food so much. He started as a chef in the Royal Navy in New Zealand…
My wife says that public radio is incredibly inefficient. They use many people to do what one person does on commercial radio (she also worked at WFMT).
That, and the merchandising. And the way they started out taking grants, but then took grants while making the grant givers prominent ‘Brought to you by Mobil’ which became ‘a Generous Grant from the Mobile Oil Company’ which morphed into ‘Brought to you by Mobil Oil: Clean Energy for a Better Tomorrow’.
It’s a commercial already, guys.
And people like Bill Moyers have gotten rich off selling items related to the programs in which they appear.
That 5% is both their sword and their shield. Without it, they are stripped down to being nothing more than another tribe of liberal media schnooks.
The PBS British series stuff started in the 1967 with The Forsyte Saga, which I remember watching every Sunday night. The precursor to today’s Dowton Abbey was Upstairs, Downstairs in 1971. If you weren’t into variety shows like Ed Sullivan or Carol Burnett, you watched PBS on Sunday.
The 1960’s British shows were the justification for funding PBS with government money. And once Sesame Street started in 1969, it was impossible to “Kill Big Bird.”
It’s been pointed out elsewhere in the past that while the nation’s largest public television station — Ch. 13 in New York — retains it’s pre-PBS roots with its WNET call letters, it holds even deeper ones to WNET’s predecessor, WNTA. That was a commercial TV station licensed out of Newark, N.J. which was owned by National Telefilm Associates, and was bought out by supporters of having a VHF public broadcasting station in the NYC metro area. NTA was a failed network in the 1950s, half-owned, ironically, by 20th Century Fox, and is why New York from 1961 to Fox v2.0’s arrival in 1987 had three independent VHF stations but Los Angeles had four (the conversion of Ch. 13 to non-commercial broadcasting was also why New Jersey was yelping for the next 20-plus years about not having a regular commercial TV station).
Anyway, WNET retains the right to air regular commercials through their FCC license if they chose to do so, and could go in that direction if they really, really wanted to augment their income (which brings up the question of whether or not ads between shows really would be any worse than Pledge Week). And the FCC in the future could free up all the other PBS stations with non-commercial licenses to have the right to air ads. Then the question would be what kind of ad rates or sponsors could they get, but at least it would mean PBS would have to stand or fall on their own, instead of being a partial taxpayer charity case that in 2018 competes in its various niches against other cable, satellite and even streaming video channels.
Great pice of history, thanks. I’m all for all of it, but not a dime of taxpayer money, nor tax favors. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but there is no reason for government support now. All of the good shows would find a syndicated place on commercial radio and TV.
When I think of PBS I just think of the kids shows. Some of which are pretty good. They at least try to be educational anyway, and not all of them are full of left-wing indoctrination. There are classics like Mr. Rogers Neighborhood and the modern version Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood that are fantastic. And of course there’s Sesame Street, which kids outgrow pretty quickly (thank goodness) and to be honest is rather uneven in quality. Most of the show is just OK, other parts like Elmo’s World are so awful it’s cringe-inducing. But then there are gems like the Cookie Monster spoofs of other shows. (Of course I might just like those because I can associate with Cookie Monster. I like cookies.) The current favorites are Wild Kratts and Lets Go Luna.
But here’s the thing – my kids haven’t watched any of these shows on PBS. They watch them on Amazon Prime or stream them through the PBS Kids channel on Roku. And most of the time they’d rather watch some of the Amazon original shows like Creative Galaxy which are just as educational but have much higher production values, or the Disney Junior shows which are more entertaining than educational. If PBS stopped making kids shows, someone else would fill that market niche pretty quickly.
Big Bird is in bed with HBO and PBS is now Sesame Street’s secondary outlet. (Today’s program was brought to you by the letters “A,” “T,” and “T.”)
I like this WaPo essay’s evidence for why it makes sense to give any taxpayer funding to PBS: “So the big worry is that an end to government funding would leave pockets of the country without public radio and TV, replaced by commercial stations that are less affordable, more saturated with advertising, and less educational.”
Happily for the pro-PBS people: “There’s evidence that the educational fare on public television is indeed beneficial. One 2000 study divided 62 young children in Oklahoma into three groups: One group watched PBS’s “Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood,” one group watched “Power Rangers” (not an educational show), and a control group didn’t watch TV at all. The children that watched “Power Rangers” subsequently had more trouble focusing on tasks and engaged in more horseplay.”
Notice that the reporter didn’t say how kids who didn’t watch TV at all fared? BTW, I want to defund NPR and PBS because they aren’t even pretending to be even-handed or neutral, and I don’t see any reason why I should help fund progressive onanism.
Or “People who watch government funded television are easier to control.”
It occurs to me that if we do manage to wound PBS, there will be people (there probably already are) who will push vigorously for government-subsidized cable for the poor since they won’t have access to good-for-you tv.
The Roberts family are HUGE advocates for government subsidies for internet access for the poor. And then they run ads about how wonderful they (i.e. Comcast) are for providing high-speed internet access to help the poor.
Great way to ‘help’ lower your price point and capture a larger portion of the market.
Soros is going to own all of that stuff someday. I think he funds some extra specialized arm of NPR, already.
The Minnesota Public Radio studios are insane. It’s like being on the Starship Enterprise. Crazy salaries.
Right. TV took its public service mission much more seriously in the Fifties, and well up into the Sixties it ran documentaries in prime time, like CBS’ “Harvest of Shame” and “Sixteen in Webster Groves”, as well as novelties like “The National Health Test” and NBC’s “Testing”, each with check-off test blanks in TV Guide and major newspapers. The existence of PBS made it easier for stations to slack off–“Hey, let Big Bird do it”.