Disservice to the Public...Broadcasting System

One of the longest running jokes about PBS goes like this: "If you think the Balkans are bad, imagine if they armed the public television stations!"

For years, the fractious, feudal public broadcast "system" of powerful, quasi-independent stations/fiefdoms has frustrated PBS programmers and producers alike. Programmers at leading stations like WGBH and WNET seem to compete as much as they collaborate, dueling for scarce dollars to fund their productions, while executives in lesser markets loudly exercise their local autonomy, preventing programs from being broadcast at the same time on every station, for example, thus foiling efforts to create a truly national network. Periodically, of course, they alternate taking pot shots at PBS officials by arraying themselves in circles before firing.

Of late, however, the balkanized PBS stations seem armed, dangerous and oddly united. True, it's taken what some termed a "creeping conservative coup" to bring them together -- but then the Bush Administration has elevated sneaky partisan zealotry to a fine political art. Now public television's middle-class Middle Americans are fighting back.

Corporation for Public Broadcasting chairman Kenneth Tomlinson has been one flashpoint for the recent unrest. Tomlinson, a former head of Voice of America and retired Reader's Digest editor who is also the Bush-appointed chair of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees VOA, Radio Free Europe and other government media outlets, has caused what the public telecommunications journal Current termed "dark accusations and suspicions" in public television's usually staid suites. How? By commissioning secret content reviews of programs like NOW with Bill Moyers, recruiting White House staffers to write guidelines for newly installed CPB ombudsmen, pushing for the appointment of a former Republican National Committee co-chair as CPB president, and in general leading a drive for "political balance" on the public television airwaves so controversial that has already poisoned CPB's reputation and threatens to do the same to that of public television itself.

But Tomlinson is not the only problem public television executives currently face at CPB. Two recent multi-million dollar programming initiatives are now being denounced by the board of directors of the Public Television Programmers Association (PTPA) as "a disservice to viewers and stations alike."

The first, entitled "America at a Crossroads," is CPB's largest programming initiative in recent years, undertaken as a direct response to the attacks of 9/11. CPB framed the twenty million dollar effort as a means of producing programming that explores

"...the nature and direction of international terrorism, the war against it, the use of American power against states that harbor or sponsor terrorists, America's image abroad, radical Islamist movements, pre-emptive military action, unilateralism, regime change, conflicts between homeland security and civil liberties, and other still-emerging questions resulting from the 9/11 attacks."

24 program proposals have received research and development funds from the initiative. (Full disclosure: like hundreds of other filmmakers, I submitted proposals that were not selected for funding.) In reading through the descriptions of those CPB did select, the PTPA board was "struck by a profound sense of déjà vu," according to a commentary written on its behalf by board president Garry Denny, associate director of programming at Wisconsin Public Television. "The programs funded to date have themes, topics, and narrative voices that are similar if not completely repetitive" of programming that has already aired on pubic broadcasting. Michael Pack, the conservative documentary film maker who as CPB vice president for television programming is the lead executive for the initiative, says the Crossroads initiative sought to "bring in new voices who will advance and enrich the discussion, not rehash the same old conversation." But Denny and other public television programmers argue that "rehashing may indeed be exactly what we get."