Public Television

Who is the "public" in public television? When your local station wants your money, they say "You are." But where are "you" when decisions are made about the content and direction of "your" programming?

Public television still delivers most of the worthwhile children's programming in the United States. And it can still occasionally cough up a revelation like "Eyes on the Prize" (see page 41 of this issue). But for the most part, public television today serves a very narrow cultural and political agenda, the boundaries of which are set by Reagan-appointed board members and (guess who?) our friends in the Fortune 500.

In the first year of the Reagan administration, public television stations aired a documentary on the Nicaraguan revolution titled "From the Ashes" that was partially funded by a Carter-era grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The next day Reaganaut NEH Director William Bennett (now secretary of education) announced his horror at public money going for pro-Sandinista propaganda. He said things like that wouldn't happen any more. And they haven't. The boards that make funding decisions at NEH and at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) have been stacked with Reagan appointees bent on a cultural jihad against "unbalanced" programming, meaning anything that casts doubt on their vision of America and the world.

Most recently, Bennett's successor at NEH, Lynn Cheney, was in the news with a similar attack on the documentary series "The Africans," which had received some NEH money. The series, which aired over the last months of 1986, was conceived as a view of Africa by an African. As such, it presented some unpleasant facts about matters like colonialism and the slave trade. Cheney found the results insufficiently grateful to the West and insufficiently insulting to Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi. She successfully demanded that NEH's name be removed from the credits, but she couldn't stop the series from being broadcast.

Another documentary on matters African, "The Making of Sun City," wasn't so lucky. The program is an hour-long spin-off from last year's brilliant anti-apartheid benefit rock album Sun City, named for the apartheid regime's show place resort in one of the "homelands." It shows the creative process behind the musical protest and explains the broader human and political reasons why hundreds of leading entertainers the world over "ain't gonna play Sun City." The documentary speaks of a pressing public issue in a language that a large segment of non-yuppie America can understand. But you'll never see "The Making of Sun City" on "your" public television station. It was rejected by PBS as a violation of the system's "journalistic integrity."

Ironically, the increasing government pressure to keep dissident views off the public airwaves comes at a time when government financial support for public television has been Gramm-Rudman-ed to the bone. Government money for public television, while holding the perennial threat of political meddling, was also supposed to bring the benefits of independence from the lowest common denominator of the commercial marketplace.

IN THE REAGAN ERA, we enjoy the worst of both worlds: State commissars regulate political orthodoxy, while, through their tax-deductible donations, giant corporations gain the same kind of influence in the public domain that they have to pay for in commercial broadcasting.

For instance, according to a recent piece in the Columbia Journalism Review, the petro-aesthetes at Exxon select the programming for the arts series "Great Performances," while their counterparts at Mobil do the same for "Masterpiece Theater." On the public affairs side, one of the top funders for Louis Rukeyser's "Wall Street Week" happens to be the Prudential-Bache Securities brokerage house. And "High Tech Times," a series devoted to consumer electronic gadgetry, is sponsored by the Electronic Industry Association.

The other alternative source of funding for public television is the viewer, hence the semiannual marathons. But if you're interested in democratic broadcasting, then heavy dependence on viewer donations is no bargain either. It inevitably makes programmers accountable only to that segment of the fabled public that can afford to pay and that apparently never tires of programs about 19th-century Britain.

There are better ways to run the public broadcasting railroad. And, ironically enough, one good example comes from Britain. In 1982 the British Parliament created Channel 4, a national TV network mandated to provide media access for blacks, Asians, women, the handicapped, the unions, and other groups left out by the BBC and commercial broadcasting.

Channel 4 set about commissioning freewheeling work from independent filmmakers on politics, the arts (from popular to avant-garde), and the whole underside of life in Thatcher's Britain. The result is what the Washington Post recently called "perhaps the most exciting and varied TV channel anywhere." In the process Channel 4 has found a sizable audience and is turning a profit. The same kind of thing could easily be done in the United States if the public demanded it.

Danny Duncan Collum is a Sojourners contributing editor.