THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, April 20, 1996 TAG: 9604200003
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A13 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
SOURCE: GLENN ALLEN SCOTT
LENGTH: Medium: 70 lines
A little more than a year ago, Republican U.S. Sen. Larry Pressler of South Dakota, as the new chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, set out with gusto to ``zero out'' federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Privatize public broadcasting, he cried. Let it fend for itself - surely it can do that.
Now the senator is in the congressional vanguard suggesting ways to preserve public broadcasting, which derives 14 percent of its revenue from the federal treasury, as a not-for-profit option to commercial television. We have a gracious plenty of the latter and are destined to get more, for better or for worse. Meanwhile, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting seems assured of getting through 1999 with roughly as much federal money annually as it has become accustomed to in the '90s.
So what happened between last year and this year?
Had not a conservative tidal wave swept the country? Didn't the Corporation for Public Broadcasting look to be a pushover? Hadn't Americans who went to the polls in the 1995 congressional elections said no to enough Democrats and yes to enough Republicans to install GOP majorities in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate? Wasn't that majority, especially in the House, hell-bent on slenderizing and weakening big government? Wasn't severing the funding pipeline to public broadcasting on the revolutionaries' list, ostensibly to balance the federal budget?
That was mainly a smoke screen. Public broadcasting is a liberal demon, a handmaiden of the devil, in the eyes of the far right. Religious broadcasters who make out like bandits, thanks in no small measure to their not-for-profit edge in the marketplace, pointed at the not-for-profit CPB's involvement with producers of programs, such as ``Sesame Street,'' that are merchandising mammoths. Public broadcasting needn't pick taxpayers' pockets to survive, Senator Pressler said; it had only to cut better deals with producers.
Never mind that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and its hundreds of public-television and public-radio affiliates were already striving mightily to exploit every source of revenue they could without becoming indistinguisable from commerce-driven television and radio. Never mind that federal subsidy amounted to an expenditure of only a little over a buck per person per year. Never mind that the presidential commission that had proposed creation of CPB a quarter of a century before had recommended establishment of a revenue source that would have freed public broadcasting's dependence on Washington for a portion of its rations.
If that recommendation had been implemented - if Congress had directed, say, $100 million a year into a trust fund that could also accept private-sector contributions - the federal-funding-of-CPB controversy would never have arisen.
But Senator Pressler had the controversy on the front burner last year - until he heard from South Dakotans angry about his intention to push public broadcasting off the dock. Turned out that plain people in the Plains state, not just the scorned ``elitists,'' liked public-broadcasting's products and would count themselves impoverished without them. ``Privatize Larry Pressler'' bumper stickers blossomed in the prairies. Many other members of Congress got similar messages from constituents who, because they watch public television and listen to public radio in significant numbers and are literate, quickly learned what was happening and responded to the alarm.
Even some revolutionaries, it appears, see the light when they feel the heat.
MEMO: Mr. Scott is associate editor of the editorial page of The
Virginian-Pilot.
by CNB