Forward this e-mail to all your friends and colleagues today and help protect public broadcasting from partisan tampering.
With your help, we can turn the tide against government efforts to muzzle the quality journalism, independent viewpoints, and dissenting voices that sustain our democracy.
Act now!
Timothy Karr
www.freepress.net
P.S. To learn more about building a public broadcasting system that deserves public support, read "A New Standard," the recent report from Free Press, Common Cause, Consumer Federation of America, Consumers Union, and Media Access Project at: http://www.freepress.net/docs/pbs_report.pdf.
Everything Karr says in this letter leads him to the conclusion that people like public broadcasting and want it to continue. What he seems to miss is that this is not the only conclusion his arguments lead to. It's not that they like public funding of TV and Radio, it's that they like the content of these broadcasts. This suggests that if public broadcasting is as popular as he claims, then there ought to be enough of a commercial market or enough private support for it to continue on without government involvement.
When public broadcasting started out it began with small, listener-supported stations like KPFA in Berkeley and KUHT in Houston. These stations were supported by membership subscription and donations, and that model worked well enough to launch a nationwide system which followed that same model. The idea of the Education Television Facilities act in 1962 was to provide some government backing to help these individual stations work together to form a nationwide educational television system. This was necessary at that time because there was nothing on the air but the three main broadcast networks, and there was no national source for educational programming. The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 turned the existing network into the Corporation for Public Broadcasting with NPR for the radio and PBS for television. It also increased direct government involvement, with the CPB becoming a combination of private corporation and government agency.
The key reason why the CPB was founded was the lack of educatinal programming on existing commercial networks which meant that no educational programming was available to the 80% or so of the general public who at least had TVs. Today that same 80% of the population gets their television content from either cable or satellite broadcasts, which gives them access to hundreds of channels, and even on a basic service plan this includes numerous educational channels, some of which rebroadcast PBS material, but most of which have their own original programming based on the model of PBS and often produced for profit by the same production companies. The existence of educational channels like The Travel Channel, Discovery Channel, National Geographic, Biography, Science, Discovery Home, Discovery Health, Discovery Time, The Learning Channel, Animal Planet, Discovery Kids, The History Channel 1 & 2 and Arts and Entertainment, not to mention another dozen channels of kids-only programming including PBSKids - all of these as commercial ventures on cable/satellite TV - clearly shows that there's a huge market for high-quality educational programming. All these channels exist on revenues from subscriptions or advertising and they thrive because there's real money to be made from educational programming. The model is successful enough that you even have channels in head to head commercial competition with each other like Discovery Time and The History Channel. Even the political content on PBS is done better and more comprehensively on the cable news networks. Some of the best PBS shows, like The McLaughlin Group have even moved over to cable and gone commercial. And if it's the left-wing slant of PBS that people like, they've got MSNBC which distills it to pure essence of leftiness.
Article comments
1 - Tim Karr
Nice work, Dave. But you need to get your ducks all properly in a row before you level a critique at an organization and a public broadcasting system that you clearly know little about.
First, Free Press (at www.freepress.net) is not associated with www.freepress.org. Different group altogether, Dave. It says so on their website and could have easily been made clear to your unfortunate readers had you done a minute of journalistic legwork.
Second, I'd be happy to speak to your complaint that Free Press is intent on "suppressing speech," but it doesn't seem worth the effort. You base that critique on a cursory scan of a website belonging to another organization. Had you been more rigorous, you might have come to a different conclusion about Free Press (www.freepress.net) before blasting away. The record shows that we have has been a forceful advocate of diverse, democratic and independent media.
But, alas, you weren’t very thorough, were you, Dave? So, let’s move on.
Third, had you spent even a moment to check the number of public opinion polls conducted on public broadcasting you would have found that, yes, people do like public broadcasting (according to a Tarrance Group 2003 poll more than 90% agreed that PBS offers “high quality programming” and an additional 80% agreed that PBS programming was “fair and balanced”). You would have also discovered that 78% of Americans believe that it is important for the federal government “to support PBS financially.”
Perhaps after having read this information you would have thought twice before concluding: “overwhelmingly [the American public’s] choice has been to pay for it through their cable subscriptions rather than their local public television station or through government funding for PBS.”
Whose choice, Dave? Are you sure that you’re not putting your own words into the mouths of the public? It’s hard to tell from this fact-challenged indictment. One thing’s certain though: If you hope to make a case for the removal of government funding from public television, you should start from a foundation of fact and not fiction. Otherwise, people might dismiss your ramblings as meaningless twaddle.
2 - Temple Stark
What !!!!???!!!
3 - Temple Stark
While you're at the site here and continuing to shed cred ...
4 - Dave Nalle
Thanks for visiting us here on BC. You seem to have missed the main point of my article, which is that PBS is a good thing and should be kept free of government interference - which can best be done by privatizing it. But I'll address your other quibbles.
>>Nice work, Dave. But you need to get your ducks all properly in a row before you level a critique at an organization and a public broadcasting system that you clearly know little about. <<
I've been watching it since it started and making donations to local stations for 20 years or so. Plus I've read up on the history of public broadcasting. I've got a pretty good idea how it works.
>>First, Free Press (at www.freepress.net) is not associated with www.freepress.org. Different group altogether, Dave. It says so on their website and could have easily been made clear to your unfortunate readers had you done a minute of journalistic legwork. <<
Then explain to me why I came to freepress.net through a shared entry site which gave me a choice of freepress.net or freepress.org? In fact as far as I can tell freepress.net can only be reached by going through the joint entry page at freepress.org. Trying to go direct to freepress.net gives a server error, though that may be some sort of temporary problem. You can say you're independent, and that's fine, but although freepress.net has a more respectiable look, the political perspective appears to be identical to freepress.org.
>>Second, I'd be happy to speak to your complaint that Free Press is intent on "suppressing speech," but it doesn't seem worth the effort. You base that critique on a cursory scan of a website belonging to another organization. <<
I thought you were with freepress.net? I hardly looked at the freepress.org site.
>>Had you been more rigorous, you might have come to a different conclusion about Free Press (www.freepress.net) before blasting away. The record shows that we have has been a forceful advocate of diverse, democratic and independent media.<<
I based my opinion on reading a number of pages on freepress.net, which does seem to be for free speech, so long as it's speech you agree with. Dissenting speech need not apply, apparently.
I could have just drawn this conclusion from your original letter. It makes very clear that you think that the introduction of more conservative opinion on PBS is a bad idea. I actually agree with you on this, but it's quite evident that you don't have the same concern about the liberal bias which was characteristic of PBS for years and years. We differ in that I think ANY political bias is undesirable in educational and public interest TV.
>>But, alas, you weren’t very thorough, were you, Dave? So, let’s move on. <<
So far I'm not convinced that I'm wrong about any of this, but you're entitled to your opinion.
>>Third, had you spent even a moment to check the number of public opinion polls conducted on public broadcasting <<
My article wasn't about opinion polls. It was about solving the problem of political interference with PBS.
>>you would have found that, yes, people do like public broadcasting (according to a Tarrance Group 2003 poll more than 90% agreed that PBS offers “high quality programming” and an additional 80% agreed that PBS programming was “fair and balanced”). <<
And any poll of the public is going to result in two opinions on PBS, a partisan opinion from those who love PBS who return a positive response on fairness and balance and a non-response from those who don't watch PBS. Such a pollis virtually meaningless.
>>You would have also discovered that 78% of Americans believe that it is important for the federal government “to support PBS financially.”<<
So a majority of Americans have been convinced they'll lose the programming PBS offers if it loses government funding, which is absolutely not true. And again, this poll suffers from the fact that those familiar with PBS assume that government support has to be integral to the operation of the network, without considering the alternatives.
>>Perhaps after having read this information you would have thought twice before concluding: “overwhelmingly [the American public’s] choice has been to pay for it through their cable subscriptions rather than their local public television station or through government funding for PBS.”<<
So you're saying that 80% of the American public does NOT choose to have cable or satellite rather than sticking with broadcast television? Let's see your citation for that fact. The cable companies will be depressed to hear they've lost almost half their subscribers overnight.
>>Whose choice, Dave? Are you sure that you’re not putting your own words into the mouths of the public? It’s hard to tell from this fact-challenged indictment.<<
Fact challenged? The facts are very simple here. Most people get this sort of programming through cable or satellite, not broadcast.
>> One thing’s certain though: If you hope to make a case for the removal of government funding from public television, you should start from a foundation of fact and not fiction. Otherwise, people might dismiss your ramblings as meaningless twaddle.<<
Cool, someone else who uses the word 'twaddle'. That said, the facts in my article are not in dispute here. They remain true and you haven't successfully disputed any of them. The polls you cite don't negate my argument, you're completely wrong about how many people watch cable and satellite, and while freepress.net and freepress.org may indeed be independent of each other, it's neither particularly relevant nor is it entirely convincing.
It's nice that you stopped by to respond, but it would be much more interesting if you actually considered the main thrust of the article in some way.
We both like public broadcasting and we both agree that it's very popular and serves a useful function. It also has the potential to be enormously profitable. That being the case - and ignoring what polls say - what reason is there for PBS not to become an independent, self-funded, non-profit network? Wouldn't that solve the problem your original question complains about by removing government interference? I just don't understand why people are so resistent to this obvious solution to the problem.
Dave
5 - Dave Nalle
Quick followup - there does seem to be a technical problem at freepress.net. The server is now returning this error: Fatal error: out of dynamic memory in yy_create_buffer() in /Library/WebServer/Documents/index.php on line 3
Dave
6 - Dave Nalle
Oh, and let me add as a final comment here, that I believe that Timothy Karr and Freepress.net have raised a real concern here, they're just looking for the wrong answer. I'm as pro-PBS as they are, I just think we need to think outside the government box in this case and find a permanent and real solution.
Dave
7 - Dave Nalle
The freepress.net site is now up again. I encourage anyone who believes Tim Karr to go and check out how balanced their viewpoint is. Perhaps peruse their listing of the media Hall of Shame - which strangely only includes people on the political right. No Dan Rather, no Michael Isikoff. Pretty odd that the two most suspect media figures of our time are missing from the list.
Dave