I find myself half in agreement with Jack Shafer’s call to get rid of Public Broadcasting, or more properly to stop government funding of public broadcasting.
The best remedy for this week’s public broadcasting crisis isn’t the dismantling of the "objectivity and balance" firewall but the abolishment of the CPB itself. Bureaucracies inevitably conform to the wishes of the ruling party, and as much as CPB would like to rise above politics, every federal appropriation comes laden with political baggage. No government—Republican, Democrat, or Socialist—will ever surrender control over media money it disburses.
As Shafer notes, the Corporation of Public Broadcasting contributes only 15% or so of station funding, so its demise would not necessarily mean the end of public television per se, especially if other revenue sources could be found. And on the pro side of the de-funding argument, PBS has been moving more and more toward shadowing the kinds of programming that networks and narrowcast cable channels already do. Its cooking shows aren’t that different from the Food Network’s, especially given PBS’s new reality-superchef show. And its children’s programming has become a marketing juggernaut of its own. In spirit if not letter, public television is already half-dead.
Still, let’s not pretend that nothing will be lost if we give up on television free from the direct constraints of the market. The NewsHour gets its complaints for being soporific, even wretched, but I happen to think that there is a service in airing the voices and analysis of policy experts, politicians, diplomats and foreign journalists, even if the program’s market share is in the low single digits. Our network and cable news simply do not serve as broadcasts of record in the same way.
The political costs of public television may eventually not be worth it, particularly as Republicans are not simply questioning its funding and (perhaps unfairly) its liberal slant, but the very notion of a public good to begin with.
Yet one thing the conservatives overlook is the possibility that the market may in fact work for cultural goods as well as they claim. Right now, two structural factors keep there from being an avowedly liberal press comparable to the conservative Fox news and tabloids (and to the liberal-left press of Western European countries): oligopoly and the siphoning off of niche bourgeois audiences into public television and radio. Factor number one is on the wane, as the network news outlets lose their oligopolist grip to the cable news. The unleashing of PBS from government funding may be one precipitating factor of a rearrangement of the media marketplace along more politically partisan and polarized lines.
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