The growing controversy over the Bush administration's attempts to replace what it sees as a "liberal bias" in PBS programming with what would appear to be "conservative bias" has forced me to think the unthinkable -- or at least the heretical, certainly in my cultural/ideological circle:
Do we really want or need PBS anymore?
I am not defending the Bush administration's assault on PBS, which is as appalling as it is predicable, nor do I mean to denigrate the fine, often brilliant work PBS has done through the years -- "Masterpiece Theater," "Firing Line," "Bill Moyers' Journal," Ken Burns' epic documentaries on the Civil War, baseball and jazz, among many others.
Broadcast executive -- The Media Matters column in Sunday's Calendar section said Kenneth Tomlinson, chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, wanted to replace the current president and chief executive of PBS, Pat Mitchell. It should have said Tomlinson wanted to find a successor for Kathleen A. Cox as president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
CPB executive -- The Media Matters column last Sunday said that Kenneth Tomlinson, chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, wants to replace the current president and chief executive of PBS, Pat Mitchell. It should have said Tomlinson wants to find a successor for Kathleen A. Cox as president of CPB.
But when the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the parent of PBS, was created by the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, we lived in a television world largely limited to three commercial networks, a world quite accurately characterized as a "vast wasteland" by Newton Minow, then chairman of the FCC.
We now live in a cable world, a "500-channel universe," and while I would not argue that many of these cable offerings match PBS at its best, they (and Fox) do provide many alternatives to the three original networks we had in 1967. HBO alone has provided some of the best programming available anywhere in recent years, beginning with the best show on television, "The Sopranos."
Of course, cable has two major, perhaps related, drawbacks as an alternative to PBS. Individual families have to pay for it -- $30 or $40 a month or more -- which may help explain why about a third of the homes in America don't subscribe.
But politics, not the availability of more alternatives, is the primary reason to question the continued viability of PBS. PBS has become a political football, and in our increasingly polarized and poisonous political climate, that is not likely to change.
Remember, the Bush administration is not the first to challenge the independence of PBS. Back in the early 1970s, the Nixon administration was so enraged by PBS coverage of Watergate and the Vietnam War that it stacked the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting with Nixon sympathizers.
"There were tremendous fights, with the Nixon administration trying to prevent public television from doing any public affairs programming at all," Lawrence Grossman, the former president of PBS, subsequently told the New York Times.
