PBS and its grand ambitions

[Desperadoe]

I have been watching PBS, experimentally. I do also watch it recreationally, and I have watched it educationally, but lately I've been watching it like a scientist — a scientist with himself for a subject — immersing myself in the airwaves of public broadcasting to take its measure at what, to read the papers or watch the news, is a time of crisis. Funding is being stripped and returned. Pundits are pontificating. Politicians are having their haymaking say. The chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funnels money to public television and helps its trains run on time and in the right direction, has been accused of partisanship and has made accusations of bias.

Much of this is hot air, and much of it is sincere knee-jerk reaction, and some of it is actual fear. The CPB needs money, as do the member stations who own and operate PBS — a decentralized system as opposed to the increasingly consolidated conglomerates that run commercial television. And if this isn't the best time to see what's up with KCET — public television, like its privately held cousins, takes it easy in the summer, bringing out reruns, Fourth of July fireworks (as if to demonstrate in this parlous time its good citizenship) and another heaping helping of Huell Howser every time you turn around — even so, I could get a good sense of its flavor and of what sets it apart and how necessary it remains despite oft-heard claims that in the 500-channel televerse all its good work might be done elsewhere.

And in the middle of my experiment, the London transit bombings happened, and I got to see how the network handled that — thoughtfully, informatively and without undue alarm. (They save all the raised voices for "The McLaughlin Group," evidently.) It can seem a little staid, in fact; sometimes this is a matter of substance, but sometimes it is just a matter of professorial style. Its programs are not all to my taste, nor would I even say it's all good. (It is the home of the terrifying Barney the Purple Dinosaur and his overacting little human friends — who can seem like reason enough to revoke its charter.) And because they have to raise money from its viewers to function — individual contributors account for the largest share of their funding — PBS can be at times disappointingly crowd-pleasing.

But public broadcasting is ambitious in ways other networks rarely are: PBS is fundamentally the people's network and dedicated to the welfare of its viewers, not of its stockholders (of which there are none). Which is why, paradoxically, it is held to standards of accountability that the big commercial broadcasters — permanently squatting upon airwaves actually belonging to the public, barely paying for the privilege and giving back little in return — are not.<snip>

http://www.latimes.com/news/custom/showcase/la-ca-pbs17jul17,0,3994454.story?track=tothtml

[Ian David]

1. What PBS needs to do is create programing for the people that support it

Conservatives do not support PBS.

In fact, the right-wing yanked $100 million of PBS' funding.

The answer? Yank $100 Million worth of right-wing programing off the air.

[MichiganVote]

2. Those that insist that PBS is liberal need their heads examined

Bill Moyers was about the only risk neocon's had of being assimiliated. I think that this latest attack is about cordoing off the profitable airwaves. Easy to spread a bunch of hype that PBS is the bad child of TV viewing and then their airwaves later come up for sale. Poor Big Bird, done in by the conglomerates to stage more Hip Hop rich kid stories.