Public Television For Sale

Media, The Market, And The Public Sphere

William Hoynes

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367300289
• eBook ISBN: 9781000308754
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Public television is uniquely positioned in our country to contribute to the invigoration of democratic public life because, ostensibly, it is neither driven by the market nor dominated by the state. In this comprehensive analysis of the forces that shape our public television system, sociologist William Hoynes finds that public television increasi

Chapter One
Public Television: The Historical and Political Context

Since its inception, American television has been organized by the principles of the free market. Although early regulatory statements suggested that television airwaves are a kind of public utility, and although federal government licenses are necessary to operate a broadcast outlet, television in the United States always has been fundamentally a private industry. In this regard, the United States stands in marked contrast to Europe, where television has been perceived as a scarce public resource, too important to be left simply to market forces. By the 1960s, concerns about the relationship between television, the market, and the quality of public life surfaced in the United States. Critics argued that commercial television's reliance on advertiser revenue and its need to attract a mass audience made it structurally incapable of serving the broader cultural, informational, and educational functions of a democratic mass communication system. In this view, the market orientation of American television was seen as its principal constraint. Rather than fundamentally restructuring the commercial television industry, reformers created a new institution, public television, to help fulfill the communication needs of a democratic citizenry.

In this book, I examine that system of public television, now represented by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), and local public television stations. When a national public television system was first proposed by the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television in its January 1967 report, it was designed as a uniquely American institution, one that would be supported, but not controlled, by the federal government. The Carnegie Commission argued that the new system had a crucial role to play in a democratic society and urged the federal government to act immediately to establish a national public television entity.

Shifting Political Pressures: From Johnson to Reagan

In November 1967 President Lyndon Johnson signed die Public Broadcasting Act, which created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and set the stage for the development of the current system of public broadcasting in the United States, The Public Broadcasting Act, which was first discussed in Congress only nine months before its passage, was one of the final pieces of Johnson's Great Society program—indeed, the only piece of communications legislation that was part of the Great Society. The rapidity with which it moved through the legislative process—now almost unheard of—reflected the firm consensus that the United States needed a healthy, federally funded, noncommercial television system. In the twenty-five years since the passage of the Public Broadcasting Act, the structure of public television has evolved, adapting both to the continuing growth of the public television system and, more dramatically, to changing political pressures.

The history of public broadcasting has been well told elsewhere,¹ and I do not intend to review all of the details. However, in order to understand the current state of public television and the dilemmas and contradictions it now faces, we need to begin with a brief historical overview. Because external political pressure has played such an important role in public television's history, we should be particularly concerned with the changing political climate and how public broadcasters have responded to it.

Since its earliest days, there has been a slow but steady privatization of public television. This trend is partially a result of the fact that fear of political control by the federal government has always outweighed fear of commercialization in public television circles. This attitude should not be surprising, because it reflects the broader political culture in the United States, in which intervention by "big government" in any arena of community life is immediately suspect.² Fears of state involvement, however, were not based simply on abstract popular notions. The formative experiences of many public broadcasters gave them good reason to watch out for government intervention, particularly from the White House.³

Rather than model American public television after state television in Europe, the designers of the system sought to avoid state control and suggested an administrative and financial structure to prevent it. The Public Broadcasting Act, however, only set up an administrative structure (CPB),⁴ leaving the financing to the federal government's regular appropriations process. As a result, the funding of public broadcasting—even when money is authorized on a three-year basis, two years in advance, as it has been since the late 1970s— has always been a politically charged issue, with partisan debates about "bias" and "objectivity" a regular feature of the funding process.

Early proponents suggested that the only way to prevent such a politicization of the funding process was to provide stable, long-term funding for publie television.⁵ Although President Johnson indicated in 1967 that a long-range funding plan would be worked out in the coming year, his ultimate withdrawal from the 1968 presidential race left public broadcasting without such a plan. The election of Richard Nixon brought new problems for the fledgling public television system. From Nixon's perspective, particularly as the Vietnam War continued to drag on, public television was a home for liberal journalists who produced biased news and public affairs programs with the help of federal funds.

By 1970, the Nixon administration was unhappy with the broadcasting of such documentaries as Banks and the Poor,⁶ which critically examined banking practices that exacerbated poverty in urban areas and "closed with a list of 133 senators and congressmen with banking holdings or serving as directors of banks—while the Battle Hymn of the Republic played in the background" (Stone, 1985: 29). As such, the White House made plans to rein in public television. Federal funding was the weak link in the plan to insulate public television from political pressures, so the administration focused its strategy on the appropriation of money for CPB. On June 30, 1972, President Nixon vetoed CPB's authorization bill, arguing that public television had become too centralized and was becoming a "fourth network." In criticizing CPB and the supposed centralization of the system, the administration had hoped to capitalize on the confusion about the evolving relationship between CPB, PBS, and the local stations. In retrospect, it seems clear that Nixon's call for a return to "the bedrock of localism," as the administration put it, was a cover for the more political problems the administration had with the system—particularly with several members of the CPB board, who were perceived as too liberal and unwilling to work with the administration, and with CPB's relationship to National Educational Television (NET), one of the principal programmers for the young public television system and producer of Banks and the Poor. However, as Witherspoon and Kovitz (1987) suggested, the Nixon administration was concerned about the consequences of directly attacking public affairs programs. Its goal of changing the makeup of the CPB board and steering public television away from the production of nationally distributed public affairs programs could be accomplished by focusing on the role of CPB instead of on the particular programs. Such a strategy was intended to shield the White House from the argument that it was interfering politically with public television or that it intended any form of "censorship." To a great extent, the strategy worked: Over the next months, the chairman, president, and director of television for CPB resigned. At the end of August, after these resignations had been accepted, Nixon signed a bill authorizing public broadcasting funding for 1973.

The political struggle between Nixon and CPB had three important, and lasting, consequences. First, it showed that public broadcasting was vulnerable to political pressure, particularly from the White House. Its vulnerability came from a predictable source: the fact that the federal government had to regularly approve its funding. Second, it meant that public television had to establish mechanisms to protect itself, as much as possible, from the political pressures it was likely to face in the future. This necessity led to the development of a new, decentralized method for distributing production funds, the Station Program Cooperative (SPC), which would be a central component of the public television programming process from 1974 to 1990.⁷ The creation of the SPC was one sign of a broader trend to diffuse the potential targets of political pressure by shifting programming decisions away from CPB. Third, the public television system realized that it needed to look for additional sources of revenue, particularly from the private sector, in order to reduce its dependence on the highly politicized federal appropriations process. Specifically, the Nixon veto led public television producers to turn their attention to corporate underwriting, initially from major oil companies, as a new source of program financing.

These three consequences—vulnerability to presidential political pressure, a reorganization of the relationship between local stations and the national public television system, and the reliance on corporate underwriting dollars— can be seen as a set of recurring issues in the history of public television. The 1972 Nixon veto set the tone, and provided a framework, for the ongoing political contest about the need for, and structure of, the public television system.

In contrast to the Nixon years,⁸ Carter's presidency was relatively quiet for public television, which continued to grow. Congressional Democrats had traditionally been supporters of public television (and, for the most part, continue to be), and the lack of tension between public television and the Democratic administration served as a temporary respite from political pressure. When Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, however, public television faced renewed political and economic pressures from the White House. On one level, the hostility to public television was philosophical: The Reagan White House supported wide-ranging deregulation, and it frowned upon a host of federally funded programs. As a result, federally funded public television was, to say the least, not a favored institution in the Reagan administration. On another level the hostility was more partisan, as the old claim of a liberal bias in public television, last heard from the Nixon administration, was once again in the news. Such philosophical differences and partisan political charges did have material consequences. The Reagan administration pushed forward funding reductions for public television through the 1981 Public Broadcasting Amendments Act, and federal funding of public television was under siege again.

The reduction of federal support and the simultaneous deregulation of commercial television were not the only signs of a renewed emphasis on the market orientation of the television industry. In 1984 the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) broadened its guidelines for the identification of corporate underwriter support on public television programs, allowing commercial-like announcements at the beginning and end of programs. Rather than simply allowing "advertising" on public television, the new regulations, labeled "enhanced underwriting," permitted "logos or slogans that identify—but do not promote or compare—locations, value-neutral descriptions of a product line or service, trade names, and product or service listings" (Witherspoon and Kovitz, 1987: 56). Not only was the commercial television industry becoming less regulated and therefore less accountable to any measure of the public interest beyond audience ratings, public television itself was—as a result of federal funding cuts and new underwriting codes—becoming more commercial.

The Privatization of Public Television

In the spring of 1992, public television became the subject of national discussion once again. It made newspaper headlines, aroused a great deal of attention on Capitol Hill, and even was the subject of campaign advertisements by one Republican presidential candidate. The attention was not, however, due to the release of another highly acclaimed documentary, such as Vietnam: A Television History or The Civil War, both of which had catapulted PBS into the national spotlight in previous years. On the contrary, the attention in the first half of 1992 was neither triggered by a particular PBS program nor encouraged by public television executives. It represented, to be sure, the most powerful threat to the survival of a public television system since the 1972 Nixon veto: the growing movement toward the privatization of public institutions.

The process of privatization, as such, does not occur spontaneously, any more than the initial creation of the public sector did. Nor is it simply the product of a particular Zeitgeist, such as the market fetishism emerging in the post-cold war era in the United States. Privatization must be understood as part of the larger ongoing contest over how societies are to be organized, the social relations of both production and consumption. Occurring at a time in which the collapse of the Soviet Union is taken as the ultimate victory of capitalism—and in which the economic and moral superiority of the free market is celebrated uncritically—the call for privatization must be seen as the work of those social strata, led by corporate America, that have historically had little need for a public sector and will, not surprisingly, benefit most directly from privatization. Although the erosion of the public sector seems to take on a life of its own in a recessionary economic climate—particularly when such an economic climate is combined with a growing perception that some people are "dependent" upon the public sector and others are not⁹—we must avoid the tendency to forget the actual human agency, in the form of organized political activity, that is the driving force behind movements toward privatization.

This is the context in which public television made headlines in early 1992. At a time when the survival of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) appeared in jeopardy and the commitment to public education seemed to be wavering, public television, much to the dismay of its principals, momentarily took center stage in the debate over the future of the public sector. The proximate source of the widespread attention was the organized attack on public television by a coalition of conservative organizations, led by the Heritage Foundation, at a time when Congress was to consider the reauthorization of funding for public broadcasting. The substance of the attack was not new, although its increased vigor gave the impression of being something different. The outcome, at least in the short run, was also reminiscent of previous debates, as a Democrat-controlled Congress passed the reauthorization bill but attached tighter strings. Perhaps the only truly new aspect of this contest was the post-cold war political climate that celebrated the market in a quasireligious manner, a climate in which the privatization of public television seemed to have become a viable option.

The 1992 debate about public television, much like those that occurred under Nixon and Reagan, illuminates a great deal about the historical tensions, both economic and political, inherent in the public television system in the United States. Since this book is about the current state of public television— indeed, the very meaning of the term "public" television—the story of the 1992 conservative attack and its consequences is a particularly useful place to begin.

1992: Renewed Attack on Public Television

The conservative attack on PBS came from two apparently contra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Public Television: The Historical and Political Context
• 2 The Political Economy of Mass Media
• 3 Early Visions of Public Television
• 4 The Content of Public Television: A Case Study of the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour
• 5 Funding and the Politics of Programming
• 6 Audiences, Markets, and the Public
• 7 Goal Ambiguity and Organizational Survival
• 8 Democracy and the Future of Public Television
• Methodological Appendix
• References
• About the Book and Author
• Index