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.