Public Broadcasting Has Overstayed Its Welcome
"If Public Broadcasting Doesn't Do It," good!
"If PBS Doesn't Do It, Who Will?" a 1990s promotional campaign by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) asked rhetorically. As it turns out, in a world where anyone with a camera–and everyone has a camera–can broadcast content to a global audience at virtually no cost, the answer is “lots of folks.”
So what is it then about public broadcasting today that justifies continued government funding?
There was a time when public media outlets like PBS and National Public Radio (NPR) indeed filled a niche that commercial outlets tended to shun - public affairs, educational series, British TV shows, opera, classical music and other programming with a more intellectual bent. A show featuring a quirky, soft spoken artist dabbing paint on a canvas while speaking of “happy little trees” would have been laughed out of network productions offices, yet Bob Ross found a home–and a grateful audience–on PBS for years.
When cable TV began to take off in the1980s, the guardrails slackened. But it was of course the advent of the internet and smartphones that knocked them down altogether. (It is likely no coincidence that PBS dropped its If PBS Doesn't Do It, Who Will? campaign in the year 2000.) Anyone who spends any time channel surfing today will be overwhelmed, and perhaps even a bit disoriented, by the number of choices. (Whether or not many of those choices are worthwhile is another matter.)
This proliferation of choice is not limited to television and video. While the popularity of radio has indeed declined (although not as much as one might think), podcasting has taken off in ways that may have surprised media watchers a few decades ago. And because of the internet, the number of topics and genres of podcasts dwarfs that which radio was able to offer even in its heyday. By most accounts, the number of podcasts available currently exceeds 4 million. The number of commercial radio stations, while still considerably higher than in the 1970s, is somewhere south of 16,000.
It’s true that the sheer volume of alternatives does not by itself obviate the need for the kinds of educational or “highbrow” content championed by public broadcasting. But why do so many inside that world cling to the idea that government aid is vital to this mission? Is there another unstated reason for this resistance to break from the past?
While public broadcasters are loath to give up their government dollars, they are also given to downplaying their significance. NPR declares on its website, “On average, less than 1% of NPR's annual operating budget comes in the form of grants from CPB and federal agencies and departments.” PBS similarly acknowledges government funding is just a “small part of the funding mix.” On top of this, PBS offers this defense:
The CPB [Corporation for Public Broadcasting, funded by Congress] estimates the annual cost to each American every year is $1.35. [Y]ou can decide for yourself whether that $1.35 a year is worth it.
While $1.35 per American does not sound like a lot of money, $450 million (the 2018 CPB federal subsidy) certainly does. And sometimes principle trumps cost. Did Congress really need to appropriate $500,000 in 2007 for North Carolina’s Sparta Teapot Museum of Craft and Design? Even if it amounts to just one and a half cents per American?
But if it's not about the content and not about the dollars, what remains? New NPR President and CEO Katherine Maher tried to answer that question last week in the wake of the controversy over (now former) NPR editor Uri Berliner’s The Free Press article alleging clear left-leaning bias at the network. Maher wrote to her colleagues about her take on NPR's “aspirational mission”:
I joined this organization because public media is essential for an informed public. At its best, our work can help shape and illuminate the very sense of what it means to have a shared public identity as fellow Americans in this sprawling and enduringly complex nation.
But nothing in Maher’s 1500 words explains how a “public media” “illuminates” our shared identity any more effectively than private media. But if instead of “illuminates'' we focus on the word “shape”, then maybe we see what the game is really all about. Maher places great emphasis on understanding who NPR’s audience is and what they are looking for, and reflecting that in the organization’s makeup and content. But while Maher’s letter to the staff contains references to its “public trust” and “public interest mandate,” there is not even an attempt to justify public funding
Instead, the idea seems to be that public subsidization, even if a drop in the bucket, amounts to a kind of ratification and endorsement of the kind of content NPR produces–and the worldview that attends it.
Rather than being just one of many fish in a big pond, public broadcasters prefer to be a very special fish in a very special pond, funded the same way that Social Security and VA hospitals are.
With the future of public funding of media once again up for debate in Congress, supporters are pulling out the big guns yet again to protect this special status, with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand warning that “the future of… beloved shows like Sesame Street… could be in jeopardy.” In a world with thousands of media options rather than just four networks, however, such threats ring hollow. And with the PBS Foundation listing its very first funding priority as “climate,” a significant segment of the population may struggle to give public broadcasting $575 million as part of a “shared public identity” that they do not share.