TIME - Man of the Year/CompactPublishing-TimeMagazine-TimeManOfTheYear-Win31MSDOS.iso/moy/033092/0330991.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.5 KB | 117 lines

                                                                                TELEVISION, Page 58

Public TV Under Assault


Conservatives have stepped up their campaign against "left-wing"
fare, but their attacks are misplaced

By RICHARD ZOGLIN -- Reported by Elaine Shannon/Washington


    What is public television made of? Snips and snails and
Big Bird tales, many viewers might answer. For them, PBS is the
home of Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood and all that's
best and most wholesome in American TV.

    But for a vocal band of conservatives, including a growing
number of election-year critics on Capitol Hill, public TV is
something else again: a government-feathered nest of subversive,
indecent and politically biased programming. The increasingly
intense assaults are turning public-television funding into a
controversy that could become hotter than the one that recently
engulfed the National Endowment for the Arts.

    -- Republican presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan used
a PBS show as Exhibit A in his attacks on President Bush for
condoning "pornographic and blasphemous art" funded by the NEA.
A Buchanan TV ad featured scenes from Tongues Untied, a
documentary about the gay black life-style that ran on 114 PBS
stations last July.

    -- A Senate bill to provide a three-year authorization of
$1.1 billion for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which
funnels money to PBS and its member stations, was delayed early
this month after conservative Senators railed against the
alleged leftward tilt of the shows. Republican John McCain of
Arizona blasted Maria's Story, the profile of a peasant woman
who joined the left-wing insurgency in El Salvador, which aired
last summer. Minority leader Robert Dole criticized PBS election
commentators Bill Moyers and former Washington Post editor
William Grieder -- "two excellent journalists who also happen
to be two excellent liberal Democrats."

    -- These complaints have dovetailed with free-market
economics to inspire a spate of calls to end federal support for
public TV altogether. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative
think tank, released a report in January arguing that the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting should be privatized. The
growth of new cable channels offering similar fare, the report
argued, "makes today's public-broadcasting system unnecessary
and wasteful."

    The current ruckus may be more political grandstanding
than a real threat to public TV's future. Despite vociferous
attacks by Senate conservatives, led by Dole and Jesse Helms,
proponents plan to bring the CPB funding bill back to the floor
in the next week or so and are confident they can beat back any
crippling amendments.

    The attacks on the CPB, moreover, seem somewhat
misdirected. The agency accounts for just 17% of all public-TV
funding; the rest comes from individual subscribers,
corporations and other sources. The shows that have drawn the
most ire were produced without CPB help at all. Tongues Untied
was made by Berkeley lecturer Marlon Riggs for $175,000, $5,000
of which came (through two intermediary sources) from the
National Endowment for the Arts. Maria's Story, which cost
$225,000, was funded by Britain's Channel 4 and other sources.

    Both shows, to be sure, were part of a CPB-funded series,
P.O.V. But the CPB plays no role in approving individual proj
ects in the series, which was created expressly as a forum for
independent, out-of-the-mainstream filmmakers. "It's not that
we're out looking for controversy," says P.O.V. executive
producer Marc Weiss. "But if we're going to shrink from it, then
we might as well put P.O.V. out of business altogether."

    Conservatives are even more outraged at a series of
documentaries being funded by the Independent Television
Service. The organization, created by Congress in 1988 to help
bring more minority voices to PBS, has released an initial list
of projects that sounds like a TV Guide schedule from George
Bush's worst nightmare. Among the titles: Endangered Species:
The Toxic Poisoning of Communities of Color; An Act of War: The
Overthrow of the Hawaiian Nation; and Citizen Dhoruba, a
portrait of a former Black Panther convicted of attempting to
kill two New York City policemen.

    A survey by the Center for Media and Public Affairs
asserts that sources quoted in PBS news and documentary
programming over a one-year period in 1987-88 were much more
likely to support liberal causes, like environmental activism
and opposition to the arms race. Even if true (and PBS
supporters dispute the study), the public network has drawn fire
from liberals as well. The same study also found that women and
minorities are underrepresented as talking heads on PBS. The
network's longest running commentator is conservative William
Buckley. And the importance of corporate underwriting has led
to blander, not more provocative, fare: companies concerned
about their image tend to favor kindly nature series and benign
historical epics.

    In any event, PBS defenders point out, the audience seems
satisfied. A 1990 survey commissioned by PBS found that 79% of
viewers see no political bias in public- TV fare; the remainder
were divided as to whether it leans left or right. "If people
perceived a bias," contends PBS president Bruce Christensen,
"they wouldn't contribute as they do." And if politicians did
not perceive a bias -- whether it exists or not -- they would
have one less hot-button issue in an election year.