Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, December 15, 1994 TAG: 9412150024
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TOM SHALES
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
Public TV is too liberal, the conservatives always say, although one can find plenty of liberals who think it's too conservative.
Now, in the wake of the recent congressional elections and a Republican sweep, new attacks on public TV have begun. Newt Gingrich, speaker-designate of the House, launched into a rant recently on the right-wing NET cable network. Gingrich said he hoped Congress would ``zero out the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,'' the quasi-governmental agency that channels funds to public television, because it has been ``eating taxpayers' money'' for years.
On one side we have Newt Gingrich and fellow conservatives in the House and Senate. On the other: Big Bird, Kermit the Frog, Barney the Dinosaur, Charlie Rose and MacNeil and Lehrer. The public TV that millions of Americans enjoy is once more being threatened with extinction, or at least radical cutbacks.
``Privatize'' is the buzzword of the moment, and when applied to public TV it basically means one thing: commercialize.
The argument is often advanced that cable channels have emerged to assume some of the roles of public TV. BBC imports, for instance, now turn up not just on PBS but on the Arts & Entertainment Network and other channels. The riotous British sitcom ``Absolutely Fabulous'' ended up on Comedy Central because public TV executives were too conservative to buy it, ironically or not.
But when the programs show up on cable channels, they don't show up without interruptions. Commercial breaks on cable channels sometimes run to five minutes each. Shouldn't there be an alternative television that isn't ruled by commercial considerations? Virtually every civilized nation in the world has some form of public television, yet in the United States it is repeatedly assailed by its enemies as a frivolous luxury.
One way to improve American public TV would be to insulate it more effectively against the meddling of politicians, whether Republican or Democrat. And there may indeed be millions to be saved in downsizing the bureaucracy that operates the system. It is bulky and unwieldy, and it often acts more out of the fear of controversy than in the public interest.
But the Gingriches of the world don't seem to be interested in improving the system so much as destroying it.
Suppose we buy the argument that public TV does lean to the left in its news and public affairs programs; even if it did, televised discourse is still overwhelmingly dominated by conservatives, from Rush Limbaugh and his syndicated talk show to the NET network on which Gingrich appeared to GOP TV, an ad hoc network that puts out pro-Republican programming.
It's fashionable now to say the government should get out of this, the government should get out of that. Some even say that the government should get out of government. The National Endowment for the Arts, like public TV, is on the Gingrich hit list. But PBS and the NEA play roles in improving the quality of life in America, in perpetuating our cultural richness. The next step would be to say we should abolish the National Gallery of Art, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (already earmarked for some funding cuts), national parks and all cultural institutions that don't pay their own way. Public television needs lots of improvements, but adding commercials hardly sounds like one of them.
Gingrich said on NET that Americans ``have been paying taxes involuntarily to subsidize something which told them how to think. ...'' But public TV doesn't tell people how to think. It just tells them that they should. It's one of the things that commercial TV doesn't often do.
Congress can be more fun than a barrel of monkeys, but sometimes it exhibits less intelligence.
- Washington Post Writers Group
by CNB