IdyllopusPress Presents

Ten years ago, Newt Gingrich set out to kill PBS. The said intention was to cut wasteful programming, but my belief was he was determined to kill children’s programming which harbored pesky thought gnomes of humanitarian and eco-friendly principles, pesky thought gnomes that hinted at possible egalitarian futures and social responsibility unhindered by the baggage of feudal religious agendas and capitalist drones demanding sacrifice of the all for the kings of suburban golf emerald-lands built upon mountains of force-fed consumer waste. Yeah, PBS had its stereotypes and problems with touting Eur0-American supremacy, but its attempt to reach a broad spectrum of children lent an air of co-operation, open-mindedness to alternatives.

Last night, Young Son spies me working on the graphic of Sesame Street Homeless. For better or worse, he’s addicted to PBS and Sesame Street. We live in a small urban apartment and he daily sees the endless emptying of the disenfranchised into the the homeless street. I’ve appreciated Sesame Street acknowledging the concrete and brick, however romantic, and Young Son remains taken with Elmo and Oscar the Grouch and Cookie Monster and the Count. But in particular Elmo and Oscar who lives in the garbage can.

“Look, it’s the garbage man,” he said once to me, elated, when five years of age, looking out his window at a homeless man going through the bins in the alley. “Hi, garbage man!” he happily called out his window, the urban version of Santa coming not down the chimney to give, but to go through the trash and take away what he or she can use.

You may think I’m joking, but it’s true. At least it is for my son. In fairy tales, one wakes up in the morning to find secret, elfen cobblers have finished your shoes for you. Here, one goes out and sees what abandoned and gifted household items, clothes and canned goods, left by the alley fence, have been spirited away. And sometimes we find a toy or book that we take in.

So, son knows what the homeless cart means and he comes up and he asks what’s up with Sesame Street. And I tell him the truth, that the government is thinking of taking away funding for his PBS programs. Son, appalled, comes up with an elaborate strategy of how they shall be saved. We should get money for the people that make the programs and carry it in a helicopter to them where they live and drop it off so they can continue to make shows. I said I didn’t think so and it would cost much more than we had. $100? he asked. So he settled on the huge sum of a $1000. I told him not to worry about it, that the funding slash wasn’t a done deal. Future for Young Son tends to be immediate and he asked if we had seen the last episode of Sesame Street and I said no, no, and he reassured himself that even if we had he could always watch his videos. Again, I told him not to worry.

Several weeks ago, Jonathan Chait wrote for the LA Times, in “Saving PBS from the GOP”:

The chief hack in question is Kenneth Tomlinson, the Republican-appointed head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which controls NPR and PBS. Tomlinson has carried out a low-grade ideological purge, reportedly discouraging journalists there from any projects considered too hostile to business or the GOP. He has proposed placing several fellow Republican loyalists in key positions at the corporation.

Tomlinson told the New York Times, “I frankly feel at PBS headquarters there is a tone-deafness to issues of tone and balance.” Everybody favors “balance,” of course. The trouble is figuring out what that means. Tomlinson seems to prefer a particularly skewed kind. He has appointed a pair of ombudsmen who can report on the networks’ political bias. One of them is William Schulz, a full-blooded movement conservative…

The irony is that, if Gingrich had succeeded, PBS wouldn’t be in these straits today. The only reason PBS has to have GOP partisans scrubbing it of any faint signs of residual liberalism is that it has to answer to the federal government. That made sense in the 1960s, when PBS was founded. There were only three broadcast networks, which forced them to cater to the broadest possible public taste. PBS needed taxpayer support in order to provide programming for a smaller, highbrow audience.

In a world of cable television, however, it’s far easier to satisfy a narrow audience and still make money. As Jack Shafer of the online magazine Slate has pointed out, the CPB controls a large share of the radio and television broadcast spectrum, which it could sell for a huge endowment and still broadcast on cable.

When Gingrich and other conservatives promoted this plan 10 years ago, liberals railed that it was an effort to kill public broadcasting. But the only real way to kill public broadcasting is to subject it to political manipulation. And the only way to guarantee that doesn’t happen is to free public broadcasting from the government.

I appreciate what Chati is saying, but it shouldn’t have to be this way, and he doesn’t take into account people in our situation who live in digs that don’t have cable access, and couldn’t afford cable if it was available to us. Which is why we don’t have a satellite dish of our very own perched atop the apartment building. In fact, only one person in our building has a satellite dish.

We have depended on PBS for, in particular, its programming for children, some of which I’m surprised has managed to survive to the present. “Postcards for Buster”, an excellent show, took a terrible hit , targeted by the Department of Education’s Margaret Spellings because of the “Sugarland” episode in which a child is shown with her mothers. Considering the Republican Xtian agenda, I’ve been nervous about the future of “George Shrinks”, which probably is allowed to surive because of the retro Deco to 50s setting and clothing that likely brings warm and fuzzy Ozzie and Harriet assumptions to Neocons who don’t bother to sit and watch the show. The mother is an artist, whose craft is eccentric, always applying for grants, and her husband is a musician. That they live in a spacious, incredible house with a huge yard is about as unrealistic as it gets, but my husband’s a musician and non-mainstream lifestyles are a rarity even on PBS. “Caillou”, to me, is an example of mainstream heavy-handedness in programming, but in “George Shrinks” the main character is encouraged by his parents to think on his own. Then there’s “Arthur” and, again, its spin-off “Postcards from Buster” that opens windows on other lifestyles in a unique way, and “Dragon Tales” with its trips to magic lizard land through wishing upon a dragon scale.

We homeschool and use sometimes the nature and history programming as resource and starting points for further exploration and conversation on even the Euro-American centric bias that does work its way into PBS. Such as white explorers still presented as the first to tread intrepid in the mysterious jungles, and in the next sentence being given as led in their journey by natives of the area.

If these shows were on cable, they would be out of our reach. There are alternatives such as places where you can rent educational videos on a monthly subscription basis, but our budget is stretched as it is with the essentials for education and memberships in local museums, none of which have free days that would grant children from lower-income households access to these too-privileged resources that offer an opportunity for involvement that books and videos don’t afford.

“Sojourner” is a “Christian ministry whose mission is to proclaim and practice the biblical call to integrate spiritual renewal and social justice.” Their sympathies are Democrat and Progressive, and still a neglect of lower income households is displayed in Danny Collum’s 1995 article on PBS, “Eyes and Ears”:

Is public TV really what Newt calls it-”a sandbox for the rich”? Is it rendered irrelevant by the age of cable? To answer that question for myself, I analyzed the evening schedule for a typical week on Washington, D.C.’s WETA-TV, one of the “feeder” stations of the PBS chain.

Of the 21 prime-time hours (post-MacNeil-Lehrer and pre- Charlie Rose), seven related to some sort of science and nature programming. Three hours were devoted to British entertainment programs, three to “classical” music of European origin, and three more to historical documentaries. Another three hours went to the 1950s Hollywood movie Giant. That leaves two hours for public affairs: One went to the Friday night snooze-fest of Washington Week in Review and Wall Street Week, leaving 30 minutes for local politics and 30 minutes for the local arts.

All of this programming certainly has a right, and a reason, to exist. But Newt and Pressler are right that much equivalent programming does now exist on A&E, Discovery Channel, Learning Channel, CNN, C-SPAN, etc., without public subsidy, but with commercial interruptions.

Of course, only a little more than half of America’s households have access to those cable channels. But the cable households are found in the higher-income part of the population, and so they represent a huge majority of the actual voters. And, let’s be frank, they also include most of the audience for all that elite “public” culture. Newt and Pressler are right that the people who really want Masterpiece Theatre and Mystery! already have cable and could easily pony up $15 a month for an all-Brits-all-the-time premium channel.

In other words, lower income individuals are uneducated, politically-disenfranchised, and uninterested in nature and issues and history and don’t watch PBS and since the middle-class and rich have their cable, why not get rid of PBS. Is this true? I don’t give a damn even what parts might be true. (Not to mention, I have a problem with the prejudice that a Bachelors, Masters or PHD = Education = Learning and Wisdom, which a quick scan of the privileged and highly-educated Right should give a clue on.) Availability is key.

Collum then admits,

As commercial TV culture evolved and matured in the 1960s, it became apparent that leaving young children to the mercies of the market would spell social disaster. Like it or not, a lot of children were going to be in front of the tube during most of the daylight hours. They were a ready market and the commercial broadcasting system proved itself incapable of self-restraint in the means it used to capture and deliver that market for advertisers.

Backed by Great Society and foundation cash, the Children’s Television Workshop stepped into the breech with Sesame Street, aimed specifically at urban pre-schoolers. Other programs followed and today public television offers an entire day of constructive (or at least non-destructive) children’s programming, free of commercial interruptions. Nothing is sold except literacy, common decency, and, yes, maybe some slightly mushy cultural relativism.

In brief, public television for children succeeded as mass culture in the public interest. It beat the market at its own game. As we all know, there are no more prized commercial spokesmodels now than Big Bird and Barney. And those mythical beasts, even as commercial figurines, are at least to some extent accountable to educators and parents, and not just to the market.

Children’s programming on public television can be seen as a case study for a good, democratic cultural policy. The children’s shows serve a social need and supply a public good that commercial market culture is incapable of recognizing. They do it well and they have created a mass culture constituency that is not completely beholden to market forces. This represents a rare zone of culture democracy and sanity, and it is one that Americans should learn from and build upon.

As noted, I’ve had problems with PBS and its narrow view on cultural relevancy displayed in a good part of the programming, but PBS has also made available a number of great shows that do demonstrate “good, democratic cultural policy”. Sesame Street. Bill Moyers. And finally, “Postcards from Buster”, managed to break stereotypes beautifully, and not surprising that Spellings went after it with such vigor.

That “good, democratic cultural policy” is now on emergency life-threatening status with the Neocon boot stomping onto PBS’ grounds, kicking out what it doesn’t like as “biased” (when, as I’ve said, there’s been no shortage of relatively conservative Euro-American viewpoint) , and who knows maybe it was part of the plan to liquidate resistance to PBS going the way of the dinosaur if moderates and the left felt it had been ursurped and independence scrapped anyway, so never mind it all. Because now comes the news that the House Appopriations Subcommittee has voted to cut PBS’s budget for next year by $100 million and an additional $23 million chopped out that was used to pay for shows such as Sesame Street. And it voted within two years to elimate federal funding for the CPG, the government agency that dispenses public funds for PBS stations.

From The Baltimore Sun,

Lawmakers seek to starve Big Bird
By Clarence Page
Originally published June 14, 2005

WASHINGTON – They’re coming after Big Bird again.

And Arthur, Reading Rainbow, Dragon Tales, Between the Lions, Postcards from Buster and Clifford the Big Red Dog.

If you thought you saw a quiet end to the battle to “defund” public television and radio 10 years ago, guess again. The culture warlords are back, draped this time in a rather tattered and faded cloak of fiscal responsibility.

A House subcommittee endorsed a proposal Thursday to make the biggest cuts in public broadcasting since Congress created the nonprofit Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 1967.

Before I fulminate, I must insert some appropriate disclosures: Besides my day job, I am a regular essayist for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS, a commentator for the National Public Radio program News and Notes with Ed Gordon and a longtime panelist on The McLaughlin Group, which some PBS and NBC stations carry.

But as the local stations say during their pledge drives, what’s important is not the value that public broadcasting has for me, but the value that it has for you.

On a voice vote, the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services and Education decided to eliminate the federal dollars that underwrite popular children’s educational programs such as the ones mentioned above. The panel also voted to completely eliminate CPB’s funding in two years, beginning with a 25 percent cut, from $400 million to $300 million, in the budget for next year.

The subcommittee’s chairman, Republican Rep. Ralph Regula of Ohio, said the cuts have nothing to do with widely publicized conservative dissatisfaction with perceived liberal bias in public radio or TV programs. Rather, he said, cuts are needed to balance the federal budget.

Nevertheless, I’ll believe Congress really cares about balancing the budget when I see it roll back – at least a teeny bit – President Bush’s wartime tax cuts…

What’s particularly shortsighted about the proposed public broadcasting cuts is how deeply they slash beyond cuts requested by the White House. For example, the House panel completely erased $23.4 million that the Bush administration wants continued for a children’s education project called “Ready to Learn,” which includes Sesame Street, Dragon Tales, Clifford and Arthur, among others. Sadly, it is low-income children and their families who stand to lose the most if these proposed cuts go through.

Sure, most Americans have more broadcasting choices than what was once available. We have 300 or more channels of cable TV that we didn’t have when CPB was founded. That’s great – for those of us who can afford it.

But take a look at what passes for “public affairs” programming on commercial cable TV, and what do you see? Too often it is hour after hour of arguments over “the runaway bride,” that scoundrel Scott Peterson and the talented-yet-strange Michael Jackson.

After all that, what a relief it is to turn to Charlie Rose, Washington Week in Review or Paul Gigot’s panel of Wall Street Journal editorialists, confident in the knowledge that I will not hear a word about Paris Hilton’s love life, except in jest.

If that still means something to you, let your congressional representative know it. Operators are standing by.

Clarence Page is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune Publishing newspaper. His column appears Tuesdays and Fridays in The Sun.

Surprise, surprise, in the Spring of 2004 Ralph Regula supported the interests of the John Birch Society 40 percent of the time; in 2004, on the votes the Famliy Research Council considered important, he voted their preferred position 92 percent of the time and 84 percent of the time on the preferred position of the Christian Coalition. His Civil Rights voting record is about as dismal as it gets.

There you have it. It’s the Famliy Research Council and the Christian Coalition who are calling the shots on PBS. Get rid of the programing for kids, they’re saying. They haven’t been able to get the control over it they want perhaps, and perhaps they know that they won’t be able to get the kind of control they desire. Ever. Mainstream media and its influence over low-income kids is less a concern. Why? I think it’s because of the worries of the Family Research Council and Christian Coalition over “democratic policy”, over humanitarian concerns not hinged to religious agenda. There are progressive social principles that PBS may not be extolling directly, but are there implicitly, indebted to the cultivation of its children’s programming on the backbone of urban-focused Sesame Street. Mainstream media teaches absorption into a passive consumer ethic with which, despite all their yelling about unsavory programming, the Family Research Council and Christian Coalition have no problem.

People for the American Way writes:

This is simply the latest attempt by politicians to eliminate public broadcasting as an independent voice; one not controlled by far-right pundits or corporate owners. The American people have defeated such attacks before, but the right wing’s grip on power in Washington, D.C. is stronger now – it will take a powerful outcry from the American public to save the independent voice of public broadcasting

Here’s a People for the American Way link to send a letter to your representative stating you oppose the slashes in funding and denounce the efforts to destroy PBS from the inside.

Here’s Moveon’s Petition link to save PBS.