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Does Public Media Matter? The Importance of Public Television in the Media-opoly Age 
There may be hundreds of channels, but that’s not real diversity, especially when most cable channels are owned by the same corporate entities that control the broadcast channels. Today, when only five corporations account for more than half of all media revenues, public media has become imperative.
The 1967 Public Broadcasting Act that led to the creation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and PBS also imposed a limit on federal funding—it was not to exceed 40 percent of total revenue. This was meant to prevent the government from exerting too much control over content. However, the reality is that federal support of public broadcasting has never topped 20 percent, and now hovers at 16 percent. Thus PBS finds itself trying to “educate, enlighten, engage and inform” while also soliciting membership support and corporate underwriting. Its foreign counterparts, such as the British Broadcast Corporation and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, do not find themselves in that position. Telling the Untold Stories Public television is the last bastion of long-form investigative journalism, says Robert Richter, an independent producer who has made more than four dozen documentaries for PBS, CBS, ABC, NBC, Discovery and elsewhere. Some stories are just too complex to be covered in the 10-minute clips favored by 60 Minutes and the like, Richter says, so they simply go untold. Richter’s hour-long documentary For Export Only: Pesticides, which was broadcast on PBS in the early 1980s and which earned a duPont-Columbia Award, led to the establishment of a U.N.-sanctioned international monitoring system for pesticides. That wouldn’t have happened with a short, fit-between-the-commercial-breaks treatment. If Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly’s documentary about Joseph McCarthy had been a 10-minute segment on a newsmagazine instead of a carefully crafted one hour exposé, the witch-hunter of Communists might still be serving in the Senate, Richter once wrote in a commentary for Harvard’s Nieman Reports. Public television “is such a special vehicle for voices to be heard … [for] visions and viewpoints that are a part of America … ignored by commercial media,” says Richter. PBS is the only broadcast outlet that would have aired Frank Christopher’s part-doc/part-drama examination of race and social memory, says Christopher, whose NAT TURNER: A TROUBLESOME PROPERTY aired on ITVS’s Independent Lens. “Thanks to ITVS and Independent Lens, programs like NAT TURNER get broadcast. They question the very nature of history documentaries through the telling of a story that explores issues of slavery, sex and violence, and they offer the public a chance to make a contribution to our national dialogue on the legacy of slavery,” says Christopher. Public broadcasting “allows the nation to hear the voice of independent filmmakers—people outside corporate culture—who are thinking about problems, and even solutions to problems, that most of us are not even aware of. Providing access to voices that are truly independent is a response to the increasingly monolithic corporate broadcast industry that prohibits unpopular and unconventional voices from being heard.” Liz Oakley and Joanna Katz’s SENTENCING THE VICTIM (featured on Independent Lens in March) documented Katz’s nightmarish ordeal of having to make repeated appearances before parole boards and relive her gang-rape so that the men responsible would stay behind bars. This film resulted in an amendment being proposed in the South Carolina senate to repeal some of the practices the film questioned. “Sometimes miracles do happen,” says Oakley.
Reaching Excluded Audiences Cable connections exist only where it’s profitable for cable companies to run them, usually in population-dense areas. Nearly one-third of the nation’s households don’t get cable. Satellites may beam down a dozen movie channels and scores of pro sports games but often neglect to carry the local stations that tell people what’s going on in their communities. In contrast, public television reaches 99 percent of the nation’s households. Thanks to a system of transmitters, it carries signals into the nether corners of the nation and to households that can’t afford cable or satellite hookups. “I remember when I first came back to Washington and we were struggling with broadcasting, particularly in rural areas. Public broadcasting became the answer to bringing those areas of Alaska into the 20th century,” said Republican senator Ted Stevens of Alaska. He is chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, which allocates funds to federal agencies, including the CPB. “In [Alaska’s] rural areas, public broadcasting is often the sole source of news and information, including weather reports, which are relied upon by our whaling communities and others in their daily activities.” Unlike its commercial broadcast counterparts, public television is not a network but a membership service of 350 local television stations. Their program directors have considerable discretion in their selection of shows, which results in a public television station that fits the needs and tastes of its local audience. Series produced by public television’s state networks, ranging from magazine shows like Kentucky Life to Iowa Public Television’s longrunning weekly agribusiness report Market to Market, address regional issues and preserve local culture. Conservative politicians often criticize public broadcasting as being too liberal. However, a 2002–2003 survey of opinion leaders by the market research firm Erdos and Morgan ranked The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Frontline, NOW with Bill Moyers and Washington Week as the four most credible public affairs shows on television. All four are public television programs. A study released in October by the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy found that Americans who got most of their news from NPR or PBS were significantly less likely to harbor misconceptions about the war in Iraq than those who tuned in to commercial and cable networks. The advent of digital channels is allowing still more diversity of programming. Many public television stations and state networks are using these new supplemental channels to provide targeted programming, such as children’s and adult education, public affairs, and local and regional events. Some have taken a page from C-SPAN and turned an unflinching camera lens on state legislative sessions and school board meetings. It’s public broadcasting’s role to serve audiences underrepresented by the commercial media, says Alyce Myatt, now multimedia editor of OneWorld TV and a former vice president of programming for PBS. “If there is a view shared by a significant portion of our population and that viewpoint is not available elsewhere, one of the roles of (PBS) is to try to ensure those viewpoints are shared.” Reaching Beyond the Broadcast Public broadcasting is the only service whose educational mission extends beyond what’s put on the television, computer or radio. Often called outreach, also community engagement, these efforts are usually the result of partnerships between stations and community and national organizations. They can be formal and ongoing, such as the Ready To Learn workshops that stations offer parents and childcare providers. Those workshops are tied to PBS children’s programming, and help prepare children for school. Outreach efforts can be big-budget campaigns surrounding national broadcasts such as the recent Independent Lens special The New Americans, Kartemquin Films’ richly layered seven-hour documentary of the varied experiences of five immigrant families, a film that took four years to make. “Outreach components have always played a key role in our films,” says Kartemquin’s Steve James, whose company also produced Hoop Dreams for public television. “The range of activities and usages have been highly varied—everything from school-based curriculums, assemblies and mentoring programs to community events, community organization engagements, free admissions at theaters, free tapes, public policy materials, station grants and more. Outreach helps ensure our films will have a greater, ongoing purpose in communities, post-broadcast. They also give potential funders the comfort of knowing that the results of their grants are tangible and measurable. Lastly, they help us think through the issues that our films raise, which can help us make the films themselves more relevant and provocative.” Tracy Tragos’s film BE GOOD, SMILE PRETTY received ITVS Community Connections Project support. ITVS paired with national veterans’ groups, such as the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the Vietnam Veterans’ Association of America, to schedule screenings, initiate discussions about post-traumatic stress disorder and devise ways to teach about the Vietnam War in classrooms, among other activities, says national outreach coordinator Angee Simmons of KCPT, in Kansas City, Missouri. Outreach “helped create a considerable amount of buzz in the victim advocacy, legal and correctional fields prior to (SENTENCING THE VICTIM’S) broadcast,” says Oakley. “I love being able to tell people that they can go to the website and download a curriculum developed by national organizations courtesy of PBS and ITVS.” Educating—Informally and Not Nickelodeon, the History Channel and A&E claim their programs are educational, but only public television can tout formal education initiatives such as GED Connection. Here viewers can study for their high school equivalency diplomas simply by watching over-the-air broadcasts (available to 87 percent of the nation’s households) and can earn college credit by taking college telecourses. More than five million students have earned their GEDs from watching the shows and studying workbooks created by Kentucky Educational Television (KET), and more than six million people have earned college credit through public television’s online courses. A new PBS-KET initiative called Project Connect aims to serve one of the nation’s most underserved populations—people learning English as a second language. These immigrants are overwhelming adult literacy centers nationwide with their desire to learn English. Scheduled to go online this fall, Project Connect will teach not only English but also civics, which encompasses “what it means to live and work in the United States, how our education system works, how you can participate in civic activities,” explains Sandy Welch, a former PBS executive who now does independent consulting on education projects. “Over the years I’ve had a tremendous appreciation for what independent producers have contributed to public broadcasting and education,” says Welch. “When I was at PBS, many of those ITVS programs were widely used, particularly in high schools’ social studies classes.… There have been literally thousands of independent programs that have contributed not only to informal education through broadcast but through formal education in classroom use as well.” One of the important functions of public media, as demonstrated by foreign broadcasting systems, is that when successful, it can make commercial broadcasting better. “Democracy is predicated on and requires freethinking of individuals. Media such as TV may shape people’s minds, and in many cases homogenize and dull them, more than any other force, including religion, parents etc.,” says Francis Nkara, whose film DOWNPOUR RESURFACING touched audiences with its tale of poet-therapist Robert Hall’s coming to grips with child abuse. “People wrote to me and said that it moved them in ways decades of therapy had not. They said it changed their lives,” says Nkara. “That happens in the unadulterated communication that can still take place on public television, not in the current titillation paradigm to suck in channel surfers.” Geneva Collins is a freelance writer based in the Washington, D.C., area.
Learn More
For more about the ITVS films mentioned in this article, search for the title or producer name at itvs.org/search/ Find out more about public media and media ownership. Columbia Journalism Review What major media companies own. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting The national media watch group. The Center for Public Integrity Investigative news in the public interest. Common Assets Defense Fund Reclaiming the airwaves for public use. MediaChannel.org The global network for democratic media. Center for Digital Democracy Preserving the openness of digital media. |
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