Information, Please

In its current state, PBS represents a mission gone awry. Is it too late to change its meandering course?

[Source: ebonyjet.com]
By Jacquie Jones

“From Clifford the Big Red Dog to Lawrence Welk, ThinkTV provides a wide variety of programming that informs, inspires and delights audiences of all ages.”

- Quoted on the homepage of ThinkTV.org, the Dayton, Ohio public television station this month

That’s it. It’s official. Public television has become the Hillary Clinton of the contemporary media landscape.

Its virtues are incontestable, its intelligence, its integrity, its track record. So, why isn’t America buying it anymore? Viewership is down. Membership is literally dying off, and a growing number of Americans, and especially African Americans, don’t even know what PBS is. To many people in my generation, those born too late to experience the excitement of the civil rights movement but shaped, nonetheless, powerfully by its promise, the answer seems obvious: Lawrence Welk in 2008.

Simply put, PBS fails to connect us to each other or to the information that we need to understand this uniquely American moment. It doesn’t reflect our diversity. It doesn’t inspire us.

Shows like “America’s Ballroom Challenge,” “Inside Europe,” and “The Osmonds 50th Anniversary Reunion” – just to sample a few recent shows – overwhelm primetime schedules, while the serious stuff we want, Independent Lens and POV, for example, get harder and harder to find. Those national programmers scheduling “Masterpiece” and the many hours of britcom reruns each week seem to be unaware that the BBC now operates its own channel here in the United States or that there are voluminous outlets for lovers of nature, science and antiques.

What is in short supply, however, is information.

Sally Jo Fifer, the President and CEO of the Independent Television Service, whose incredibly groundbreaking work represents the best hope for a new public broadcasting platform, said something to me that is as totally simple as it is totally true: “An uninformed populace is at the crux of every problem we have as a society.” We happen to have been talking about immigration but we could easily have been talking about bad public schools or poverty.

And it is sheer folly to suggest that that crucial ingredient – information -- should be doled out at the discretion of people who want to sell us washing machines and oil. We need to maintain a public square in this country, one that is free of the constraints of commerce. And we can do it.

Certainly, there is no question that the electric 2008 Presidential race is exciting a generational shift in both our understanding of and our hunger for true democracy. It is also shattering the old party lines about race and class, allegiance and interest. In short, in an odd way, it is demonstrating that there is, in fact, a new kind of “American” being born.

But that birth is happening in an environment of total media saturation and in a nation of 300 million people. It simply isn’t possible to just get everybody down to the town hall to hash things out. Yet, in no other “industrialized” nation in the world, would your national broadcaster NOT be the first place you tune into to get news about national elections or other kinds of crises that are impacting your people. Let me see the hands of those who turned to PBS on Super Tuesday.

When the New York Times, once considered “the nation’s” newspaper, endorsed a particular candidate in this election, it made plain the distinction between its rights as a private interest and the demands of an impartial forum for public discourse and debate. And that is not a criticism, just a statement of fact.

Well, public television, in my opinion, should be that forum. And it could be. One thing’s for sure, there would be no competition, because the one thing that Discovery, History or the BBC can’t be is the America channel. The channel that gives us the information we need to make good decisions about who governs us and how they do it. I’m not talking about hearings on the house floor but about the meticulously researched and rigorously lived documentaries on series like Frontline and Wide Angle. I am talking about insightful and rich programming about our history and culture as well as the peoples and governments of the world, whom we have to coexist with in this era of globalization. I’m talking about intelligently moderated forums where we hear the voices of citizens and leaders. These things exist in some measure now, but, as many critics of PBS rightly point out, they don’t define it.

Making public television a true reflection of our society would demand a rigorous focusing and an unflinching round of cuts and changes. I, for one, have never understood why British period dramas are broadcast and subsidized by American tax dollars, our tax dollars. It’s just hard for me to see that as media in our public interest. And now is the time to stand up and demand that that’s what our public broadcaster give us, media in our interest, that not only better represents the changing racial demographics we know too well – although that would be nice, too – but also our regional, political and lifestyle diversity that have made our cultural exports the gazillion dollar industries that they are.

But, like the Presidential race, it ain’t over ‘til it’s over. And I, for one, believe that we can still capture this dynamic moment and recreate public television in our own image by both supporting continued funding for public broadcasting and demanding greater accountability from PBS. We’ve seen from the last several years of tug-of-war over the Congressional appropriation, that one without the other won’t work.

As President Lyndon Johnson said when he authorized the Corporation for Public Broadcasting: “If public television is to fulfill our hopes, then the Corporation must be representative, it must be responsible – and it must be long on enlightened leadership.”

And, if we are unable to live up to that mandate, maybe the time has come to let Lawrence Welk retire with dignity.

Jacquie Jones is a filmmaker and executive director of the National Black Programming Consortium.