On Mending Over Ending
Pleased to reappear in the Washington Examiner Magazine…
As someone deeply concerned about institutional corruption, much has been refreshing about Elon Musk’s merry band of DOGE barbarians laying waste to dubious federal programs and expenditures. Sure, the cuts are mainly symbolic window dressing that don’t particularly affect the government’s dire fiscal trajectory, but it’s the principle of the thing: over the years, endless billions of taxpayers’ hard-earned money have been squandered on slush funds subsidizing culture wars and comfortable sinecures for plugged-in professional progressives. That status quo cannot continue.
And now, in the heat of the fray, many “starve the beast” reformers have set their sights on defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, established in 1967. In recent years, it has provided over $500 million annually to help sustain PBS and NPR stations across the country. I understand how they feel. But seeing that I was practically raised by PBS, in my view destroying it would not just be a mistake but a missed opportunity.
I can’t imagine who or where I’d be without having watched so much PBS growing up. Public broadcasting was more or less my babysitter, and not just the kiddie stuff: I started off on Sesame Street and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, of course, but before long, graduated to watching the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour nearly every night with whichever parent was cooking. And on many an evening throughout the golden ’90s, the best thing on prime-time broadcast television at any given hour was often Great Performances, American Masters, Mobil Masterpiece Theatre, Nature, or that week’s episode of Louis Rukeyser or Bill Moyers. More than any book I ever read or class I ever took, PBS shaped my whole identity.
Kicking off my career working for Bill Moyers felt like winning the lottery. It was my dream job for my favorite show. Many on the Right have never quite forgiven Bill for his involvement with the infamous “Daisy ad” from the 1964 presidential campaign equating a vote for Barry Goldwater to supporting nuclear Armageddon. But however unsportsmanlike that might have been, it was one early misstep in a long and largely venerable career with decades of thoughtful reporting and interviews. For my part, I’ve never met a finer human being, right up to Bill generously enlisting me to become his research assistant after I proved his only underling bold or tactless enough to keep forwarding him populist jeremiads about illegal immigration.
I’m still proud of a lot of the work we accomplished in those years, but even at the time I had an uncomfortable sense that some of it was becoming too ideological to be entirely appropriate for government-sponsored programming. We did have any number of smart conservatives on the show, but typically as the exception that proved the rule, and we got progressively less balanced as Barack Obama took power. While our particular broadcast was fully funded independently, it still occupied a prime timeslot on public airways utilizing publicly funded personnel and infrastructure. The right-leaning critics carping at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting weren’t wrong to feel slighted when it came to news coverage.
From inside the PBS journalism firmament, I’d felt increasing misgivings about the role we were playing in the broader discourse. The PBS NewsHour was no doubt more substantive than its competitors, for instance, but just because the content was presented slowly and in complete sentences didn’t mean it was that much more substantive. And it got even less so over time. In today’s broadcast news landscape, Lester Holt and David Muir and whoever’s on CBS are basically Teletubbies — it’s hard to come away from their wafer-thin infotainment packages feeling that you’ve actually learned anything. Meanwhile, the NewsHour still retains just enough apparent gravitas to make viewers feel genuinely informed as if the higher-brow infotainment they’ve just consumed is incomparably more nuanced and rigorous. Often it is — there are some very good people working there — but often it’s not.
A few cases in point of what’s gone wrong with PBS’s national news programming: the NewsHour’s formerly illuminating Friday evening left-right roundup now pits the fiercely outspoken progressive Jonathan Capehart of the Washington Post against the ambivalent and apologetic David Brooks of the New York Times, who probably hasn’t voted Republican since 2004. The once must-watch Washington Week, as of the days of the great Ken Bode, now languishes in redundant establishmentarian irrelevance under Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic. And it pains me to say that while the flagship PBS news program Frontline is still brilliant about half the time, it’s chosen to devote much of the rest of its credibility and high production values to thinly veiled partisan advocacy. The revival of William F. Buckley’s old Crossfire series, now hosted by Margaret Hoover, has been solid but has a certain whiff of the obligatory to help balance out the rest of the roster.
Regardless of how inappropriate much of that national political programming may be, it’s a small fraction of what local PBS stations still provide regional audiences around the country, particularly outside of major metropolitan areas. My hometown station, the Nine Network of St. Louis, Missouri, is one of the lodestars of the entire national system, helping knit together whatever civic interchange our highly polarized region can claim, not just in the city and suburbs and exurbs but rural counties with little access to other cultural resources. It’s awfully easy for relatively affluent professionals who grew up close to museums and symphonies to say, “Just look it up on the internet,” but if it’s not already seeded into many other folks’ realities, they might never be exposed to it at all. And that’s what consistent broadcast reruns of programs such as Antiques Roadshow help make possible, translating people’s regional memories into being that much more relevant to themselves, their families, and their cultural inheritance as Americans.
So my proposal is this: excise national news shows from what PBS subsidizes and redirect all that funding to licensing classic back content plus supporting individual stations’ local programming. The staffs of the NewsHour and Frontline are quite talented, and the pockets of activist progressive foundations are quite deep, so their essential output could easily be repurposed for syndication or cable without the general public having to pay for it.
Some 60-odd years ago, then-FCC Chairman Newton Minow didn’t know quite how good we had it when he iconically condemned the “vast wasteland” of television. Today, even the basics seem on the very verge of collapse. But, less than a year from now, America is poised for its hugest party in 50 years to celebrate the country’s 250th birthday. It’s a chance to reset some pieces on the historical board. With unparalleled archival footage ranging from Ken Burns to Carl Sagan and beyond, what better way than PBS to mark the occasion?
Read in the Washington Examiner Magazine.
Next: A Hat in the Ring
Sorry, I don’t believe the entity is salvageable.
Even small or remote areas now have Starlink access - and if the previous administration had done anything positive it could have implemented that as a benefit 4 years ago.
Public libraries, YouTube, Khan Academy, etc is a way better solution than sponsoring ossified navel exams by costal elite folks with fake British accents.
Let them start a podcast or Substack or YT channel and serve their niche audience. But not with my taxes.
I think the issue is TRUST. While one wishes that a nation could have impartial public broadcasting outlets, ours have shown themselves to be mouthpieces for the DNC, like much of the REST of the legacy media. Why would anyone ever again believe that NPR is impartial? I know _I_ won’t. Besides - like every other government agency, it’s going to have a Leftist slant, because those are the people who believe in using government to achieve their social engineering goals.