----------------------------Original message----------------------------
I am forwarding this piece by Wally Bowen and hope that others on this list
find it informative in regards to the current debate concerning public
television. AS
>Date: Fri, 27 Jan 1995 16:44:23 -0500 (EST)
>(Following is a draft op-ed on the public broadcasting debate by Wally Bowen
>of Citizens for Media Literacy in Asheville, N.C. Comments would be
>appreciated at <[log in to unmask]>. Internet distribution is encouraged. All
>rights reserved. For other publication, please contact the author. Copyright
>Wally Bowen 1995)
>
> Barney and Big Bird going head to head Jan. 19 with radical
>right-wingers Reed Irvine and U.S. Sen. Larry Pressler was like watching the
>lambs of public broadcasting being led to the slaughter.
> Barney and Big Bird's defenselessness was underscored by the total
>silence of public broadcasting officials in rebutting the right-wing charge of
>liberal bias in PBS programming.
> Right-wing opponents of PBS enjoyed the best of both worlds. By going
>unchallenged, their charges of liberal bias gained credence. By arguing the
>superiority of the commercial marketplace, they offered "safe haven" for
>successful PBS creations like Big Bird and Barney.
> So it was no surprise to see Pressler's quick follow-up to the Jan.
>19 hearing when he floated stories about media giants Bell Atlantic and Jones
>Intercable's interest in buying up parts of public broadcasting. We'll hear
>more from the media barons who would own PBS when Pressler's Senate Commerce
>Committee holds hearings in coming weeks.
> This push to privatize public broadcasting demands close scrutiny.
>It's clear that PBS made poor business decisions by not getting a bigger cut
>of
>the Barney and Big Bird's profits. But allowing taxpayers to be ripped off a
>second time with a fire-sale give-away of valuable public assets would only
>add
>insult to injury.
> Who wins and who loses by privatizing PBS? A little history sheds
>light on this question.
> During World War One, the U.S. government poured money and talent into
>perfecting a new media technology called radio. Many returning veterans with
>"wireless" training helped spawn hundreds of radio stations across America
>during the post-war years. By 1925, there were 128 college and university
>radio stations and a similar number of stations run by a variety of
>non-profits, from farmer and labor organizations to religious and civic groups.
> But a problem soon arose when the frequencies of the fast-growing
>commercial networks, NBC and CBS, began bumping into non-profit frequencies.
>Led by NBC, commercial broadcasters lobbied the Hoover administration for
>government regulation of the airwaves.
> This led to the creation of the Federal Radio Commission, which NBC
>and its allies packed with sympathetic attorneys and engineers. In 1928, the
>FRC issued a ruling which designated non-profits as "propaganda" stations,
>while commercial broadcasters were given the more benign label of "general
>service" stations.
> Not surprisingly, the FRC ruling favored "general service" stations
>whenever frequency disputes arose. Drawn into lengthy and expensive
>litigation, many non-profit stations were forced to shut down. Most of those
>that survived ran head on into the Great Depression and died.
> The final nail in the coffin occurred in 1934, when the networks and
>their lobbying arm, the National Association of Broadcasters, defeated a move
>in Congress to set aside 20 percent of the public airwaves for non-profit
>stations.
> One of the key arguments against the 20 percent set-aside came from
>business elites who feared that non-profit radio would be used to organize
>farmers and the working classes. They had reason to be concerned.
> One of the most prominent non-profit stations in the late 1920s was
>Chicago's WCFL, the "Voice of Farmer-Labor." Its news coverage from the
>perspective of working people led one Midwest business association to issue
>this dire warning:
>
> "Think of the speeches that may go forth. Wild and radical speeches
>listened to by hundreds of thousands. These wild men in their wild talks
>regardless of consequences, may reach the ear, possibly inadvertently, of your
>influential and trusted employee, who may be detracted from paths favorable to
>his employer's success."
>
> With this first attempt at "public" broadcasting successfully
>defeated, the commercial networks went on to create the privatized
>broadcasting
>system we know today. By the 1960s, however, the TV game-show scandals and a
>growing public perception of TV as "a vast wasteland" set the stage for
>change.
>
> Following a major 1966 study commissioned by the Carnegie Endowment,
>Congress passed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. But one key component of
>the Carnegie study was missing: Congress should insulate public broadcasting
>from political manipulation by providing an independent revenue stream in the
>form of a tax on the sale of radio, TVs, and broadcast licenses.
> President Lyndon Johnson supported the independent revenue stream
>idea, but the issue was tabled in order to get legislation passed quickly.
>Johnson believed Congress could amend the legislation the following year, but
>this was never done.
> By the early 1970s, President Richard Nixon and his fellow
>conservatives were disgruntled over PBS documentaries such as "The Banks and
>the Poor," a critical look at how banks' lending policies helped keep the
>urban
>poor impoverished. Hoping to avoid charges of censorship, Nixon accused
>public
>broadcasting of becoming too "centralized."
> So on June 30, 1972, Nixon vetoed Congress' funding of public
>broadcasting, which was then forced to turn to major corporations -- mainly
>the
>oil companies -- for support.
> What America witnessed Jan. 19, 1995, therefore, was the latest twist
>in the noose in a 75-year attack on public broadcasting. Those who would kill
>public broadcasting today are direct descendants of the business elites who
>saw
>public media as a threat to their dominance of America's information order.
>(Is it just coincidence that no regular PBS program with a labor perspective
>ever emerged during the era of CPB's growing reliance on corporate funding?)
> Now with a new information order being mapped out by today's media
>barons (men like cable TV's John Malone, the networks' Rupert Murdoch and the
>phone companies' Raymond Smith), the Republican Congress presents another
>historic opportunity to snuff out public-sector media.
> Unfortunately, those in a position to defend public broadcasting today
>are prohibited by conventional wisdom from placing the battle in an historical
>context of power relations between rich and poor, owners and workers.
> Today's "conservative correctness" defines the fault lines in American
>society along the axes of right and left, conservative and liberal, terms
>whose
>history seem to begin and end in the 1960s. By contrast, in the 1920s, Edward
>Nockels, station manager of WCFL, could make an analysis that would be unheard
>of in today's "conservatively correct" climate: "Will the public interest be
>served by granting all the channels of communication to those who do the
>employing and denying even one cleared channel of communication to the vast
>group of employees?"
> And Nockels rightly predicted that "whoever controls radio
>broadcasting in the future will eventually control the nation."
> Protectors of free speech have long recognized that the commercial
>marketplace by its very nature serves to silence unpopular voices and
>dissenting points of view. The cheer-leading media coverage of the Persian
>Gulf War is one of the more obvious and recent examples of this reality.
> Unfortunately, today's leaders of public broadcasting got their jobs
>because of their willingness to ignore the free speech roots in the battle for
>public media.
> Advocates for the preservation of public broadcasting would be
>well-advised to find a credible voice to tell the story of public
>broadcasting's 75-year struggle for survival. Big Bird and Barney can't do it
>alone.
>(Wally Bowen is founder and executive director of the Asheville, N.C.-based
>Citizens for Media Literacy, a member of the public-interest
>Telecommunications
>Policy Roundtable.)
>
>
Allan Siegel
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