Does America really need a taxpayer-subsidized television network for well-to-do snobs? According to promotional advertising kits published by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), their primetime viewers are almost three times more likely to have investments exceeding $150,000 than the average wage slave. PBS viewers are also 1.6 times as likely to own a vacation home. In their own words, the attitude-laden PBS is admitting that the government compels all taxpayers to bankroll the predilections of America’s well-heeled upper crust.
PBS viewers, on the whole, are older and whiter than the national average; 57 percent earn more than $40,000 a year. More than half of its adult viewers have college educations. So why does a network that caters mostly to people who are better educated and richer than the average American need to rip off the average wage slave?
The Federal Communications Commission now requires all broadcasting stations to convert to a digital format. The folks who oversee public broadcasting have estimated that the PBS conversion will cost nearly $1.7 billion. So far Congress has provided $48.7 million, which is only one thirty-fifth of the total cost. Is the programming PBS provides really worth the wrenching bill of $1.7 thousand million dollars (1.7 billion)?
As a matter of history, PBS had only two reasons to justify its subsidized existence: children’s educational programming and cultural documentaries that appealed to audiences so small that the big networks ignored them. In the course of time all of this has changed. Today a wide array of specialty cable stations caters to niche audiences that are now being enlarged by cross-over viewers from the aging PBS. Parents who were raised on “Sesame Street” and “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” can now choose from a much bigger neighborhood of kid-friendly programming on Disney and Nickelodeon.
Cable stations cater to the unique proclivities of preschoolers by spending millions of dollars on programming that gives form to Harvard professor Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences. This programming stimulates many dimensions of pre-school development. The creaky puppet-show variations on PBS seem merely entertaining by comparison. Barney the purple dinosaur is intellectual junk food compared to Nickelodeon’s “Dora the Explorer.” Dora teaches special skills, interpersonal communication and bilingual language development as well as basic tutorials about letters and numbers. As ratings figures demonstrate, smart parents of preschoolers prefer the more cerebral programming on the cable channels. PBS is now frantically seeking viewers for its museum of children’s programming.
PBS is in constant financial straits because its executives bungled every opportunity to capitalize on its hottest commercial properties. The money made from “Sesame Street” merchandising spin-offs alone should have filled the PBS coffers to bursting, but all that stuff is owned by an outside producer called Sesame Workshop (formerly Children’s Television Workshop), which keeps most of the profits for itself. Manufacturers, such as Fisher Price, share little of their profits with PBS. After 34 years of working closely together, Sesame Workshop pockets most of the wealth generated by characters that PBS popularized. So dismayed is Sesame Workshop at the flagging prospects of PBS that it has begun distributing “Sesame Street” to PBS’ snappy rival Noggin.
Twisted History from the Burns Brothers
Public broadcasting’s documentary programs have been overshadowed by the rich fare available on the Discovery Channel, the History Channel and A&E, among others. The Discovery Channel is dedicated to non-fiction programming; their stuff compares well against what PBS claims to be non-fiction. In truth, much of the vaunted fare on PBS is cosmetically enhanced faux history, leftist historical revisionism and propagandistic cheerleading for left-wing utopianism.
Ken Burns has provided fifty-five hours of PBS programming; he’s their favorite documentarian because he never confronts liberals with uncomfortable historical facts. For example: In 1999 PBS aired a “documentary” by Ken Burns titled Not for Ourselves Alone: the Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. This film, by its seeming attention to detail, pretends to be a comprehensive exposition of the hearts and minds of these two feminist pioneers. But it isn’t. The most contentious issue of our time is the argument about abortion, so you’d think that any documentarian worth the name would have included any opinions that these two very opinionated women had on the topic of abortion. But Ken Burns chose to conceal the whole truth from PBS viewers and the liberals at the Public Broadcasting Service loved him for doing that.
Here’s the truth: Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton hated child aborting with a passion. In their feminist newsletter The Revolution they repeatedly called abortion “infanticide” and “child murder.” In a letter to Julia Ward Howe, dated October 16, 1873, Elizabeth Stanton declares: “When we consider that women are treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit.”
In The Revolution Susan Anthony does not mince words: “Guilty? Yes. No matter what the motive, love of ease or a desire to save from suffering the unborn innocent, the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed. It will burden her conscience in life, it will burden her soul in death; but oh, thrice guilty is he who drove her to the desperation which impelled her to the crime!”
Not a word of this reaches the ears of PBS viewers because the politically fashionable Ken Burns wanted to create in the minds of PBS viewers the false impression that today’s feminists are the moral descendants of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, which they most certainly are not.
Ken Burns blew smoke in the face of the American public in an interview with PBS.
PBS: “There are several universal issues in this film. Can you elaborate on them?
Burns: “I think that’s what we, to our everlasting joy, realized very early on in this project. We were drawn to it because we felt a certain amount of outrage that this story has been so long withheld from popular view. That outrage was coupled with a sense of excitement at the discovery of the facts . . .”
PBS: “What was the most surprising discovery you made about your subject in creating this film?”
Burns: “There wasn’t one day, one moment, when it wasn’t a revelation, when it wasn’t a surprise. But I think behind those revelations, behind those surprises, I have to admit is a certain amount of outrage. I feel like I know a little bit about American history, and nowhere in my training, nowhere in my preparation, did I hear of the central importance of these two women – and especially Elizabeth Cady Stanton – to the whole of American history. And I’m outraged by that.”
He’s so outraged that he made the conscious premeditated decision to conceal from his viewers the outrage that these pioneering feminists felt about a practice that they called “child murder.” Kenny knows who PBS viewers are and he knows how dear abortion is to the people he hobnobs with at cocktail parties, so Kenny isn’t about to reveal all of the long-hidden truths that says he discovered. This is one surprise Kenny wants to keep hidden from future generations of school children who will see this film in classrooms. For Kenny it’s a smart business decision to never disturb the sensibilities of his liberal paymasters.
In another Ken Burns film, The Civil War, a traveler from the North is shocked to see elderly slaves, who had long since ceased to be contributing members of their plantation communities, who had been abandoned by their former slave masters after emancipation and the collapse of the plantation system. The traveler saw this abandonment as an act of cruelty and so did Ken Burns which is why Ken Burns included this fragment. What impressed me about this snippet was the fact that slave masters had continued to feed and clothe and shelter elderly slaves out of a sentimental commitment to their plantation communities at a time when elderly poor whites faced more precarious futures. Apparently someone sent Kenny a memo outlining this alternative perspective. When I home schooled my daughter on the Civil War, I couldn’t find this anecdote anywhere in my home version of The Civil War. In the Ken Burns cosmology, all slave owners must be demonized; they must be exactly like the Simon Legree stereotype in Uncle Tom’s Cabin or else the liberals will pout. For all the rich texture of his films, the filmmaker himself is rather simple and predictable left winger.
Ken Burns has a brother whose vision of the world is every bit as queer as Kenny’s. Ric Burns also fabricates collections of film clips that he calls documentaries. PBS was only too happy to air Ric’s flick “The Center of the World,” a unique retelling of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Towers by infidel-slaying Muslim bigots in which Ric Burns managed to avoid criticizing the Muslim bigots. All Ric wants to know is why they hate us and what made them so upset. Maybe next week Ric will be asking what the Jews did to get Adolf so ticked off. Ric is an adherent of utopian anti-globalism so he blames the successful for their successes and he sees every human failure as evidence of victimization by others.
The camera angles in Ric’s flick present the towers only as symbols of arrogance; the narrator keeps up the drumbeat of anti-globalism: “. . . the two tallest towers in New York were really bound to symbolize economic globalization . . . the cultural and commercial energies unleashed by the forces of globalization had breached political and ideological barriers around the world.”
In other words, Ric Burns thinks that America provoked Osama bin Laden, he believes we should take time to consider the merits of Osama’s complaints. But a moment’s reflection would lead any sane adult to conclude that we cannot dismantle the modern world and replace it with this bearded bigot’s vision of a global Islamic caliphate. We can’t return to the Seventh Century. The truth is that we were attacked by nineteen fanatical emissaries from Osama bin Laden’s very strange mental state – but you will not hear these jihadists blamed or even mentioned in this vapid Ric Burns poutfest. It was just the sort of silly rubbish that PBS calls “serious programming.”
Recruiting for Islam on PBS
PBS took its infatuation with outsider perspectives one step beyond with its airing of “Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet,” which comes across as an English-language promotional film for Muslim missionaries. The film treats Muslim beliefs – such as Muhammad’s journey to heaven and his personal audience with God – as historical facts. This PBS “documentary” asserts that Muslim war making was only defensive and reluctant, which is preposterous. Virtually every part of the Islamic world except Indonesia was subjugated by the sword. This film frets about the discomfort American Muslims have experienced since 9/11, but makes no mention of the ruinous sneak attack no America. The narrator exaggerates the number of American Muslims and he overestimates the appeal of Islam to Americans.
Almost every assertion made about Muhammad in this film is now undergoing scholarly reassessment, but you won’t hear about any of that scholarship on PBS. This is in glaring contrast to the PBS documentary “From Jesus to Christ” that spent almost every minute showcasing the contrarian opinions of modern Jesus scholars. Should the taxpayers be forced to bankroll a two-hour promotional film for the Islamic faith? The heart of this film consists of nine of the Muslim devout trying to outdo one another in their extravagant praise of The Prophet. There are no criticisms. Muhammad is praised as a benefactor of women; there is unanimous silence about Islam’s penchant for genital mutilation, honor killings, forced marriages, gender apartheid, polygamy and female illiteracy. PBS likes to call this kind of uncritical cheerleading “cutting-edge programming.”
How the Nice Negroes Didn’t Really Liberate the Jews
The most thoughtlessly contrived piece of rubbish to appear on television in decades was a heavily promoted PBS “documentary” called “Liberators: Fighting on Two Fronts in World War II,” which claimed to be the long-suppressed but totally true story of how two African-American army units liberated the death camps at Dachau and Buchenwald. These claims are totally false. Contrary to what the dolts at PBS would have you believe, the 761st Tank Battalion did not “capture” Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge. Neither did they “liberate” Dachau and Buchenwald, nor did they “spearhead” Patton’s Third Army across Germany. These are all lies. These claims are not even close to the truth.
The 761st Tank Battalion had their first day of combat five months before the end of World War II. They fought in the Saar Triangle and their mission led them to the town of Tillet, Belgium, about ten miles west of Bastogne. This was the closest they ever came to Bastogne. In any case, Bastogne was never in enemy hands so it couldn’t have been captured by anyone other than the Germans. The 761st Tank Battalion did assist in the relief of Bastogne together with eight armored divisions, ten armored infantry regiments, three airborne divisions, twenty infantry divisions and others. They never “captured” Bastogne no matter what PBS wants you to believe. On December 26th, 1944 the encircled 101st Airborne Division was relieved by elements of Combat Command R of the 4th Armored Division. That’s the truth.
Furthermore, the 761st Tank Battalion never “spearheaded” Patton’s 3rd Army across Germany; they were transferred from the 3rd Army to the 9th Army on February 3rd, 1945 and on March 3 they were transferred again to the 7th Army. So from Feb. 3, 1945 to the end of the war on May 9, 1945 the 761st was not part of Patton’s Third Army. They weren’t spearheading anything.
As for Buchenwald: On April 11, 1945 the inmates liberated themselves as the Waffen SS scrambled to flee the camp. By three in the afternoon the inmates had captured 100 SS guards. An eyewitness, Pierre Verheve, was a member of the Buchenwald underground. He spent three years and three months in 17 Nazi prisons, finally arriving at Buchenwald in January 1945. He left on May 7, 1945. He says that no tank ever crashed the front gate or entered Buchenwald. In fact, the front gate is still standing. The only Negro he ever saw was the ambulance driver who transported him to the Weimar Airport on May 7th. The 761st Tank Battalion never got closer to Buchenwald than Coburg, Germany – 50 miles to the south.
Dachau was liberated by two units of the 7th Army on April 29th, 1945. They were both infantry regiments. There is no mention of tanks in the existing military histories. The 761st Tank Battalion was never nearer to Dachau than Regensburg, seventy miles away.
All of this information was available to the PBS “documentarians” but why would a pack of liberals ever let the facts get in the way of a feel-good story. Their intent was to enhance a feeling of solidarity between blacks and Jews. There was a lavish black/Jewish celebration for “Liberators” at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. There was a screening. The sponsors called the film an important tool for repairing black-Jewish relations. The Reverend Jesse Jackson, surrounded by white-haired Holocaust survivors, embraced a bearded Hasidic rabbi. The press played along; they weren’t there to question whether the liberation story was true.
“It’s a lie,” declared E.G. McConnell, a veteran of the 761st Tank Battalion, “We were nowhere near these camps when they were liberated.” He says he stopped cooperating with the filmmakers when he came to believe they were faking the facts.
As for the 183rd Combat Engineer Battalion which the filmmakers claim liberated Buchenwald: the unit’s commander at that time, Lawrence Fuller, says the 183rd only visited Buchenwald later on the order of General Patton who wanted American troops to witness German atrocities.
When the film’s producer Nina Rosenblum was confronted with the facts she immediately lapsed into ad hominem attacks; she denounced her film’s critics as racists and Holocaust revisionists: “These people are of the same mentality that says the Holocaust didn’t happen!” she sputtered.
The Homosexual Home Invasion You Pay For
When homosexuals complained to PBS that there was not enough primetime gay-themed programming to satisfy them, PBS spokeswoman Lee Sloan responded: “PBS is one of the most prominent places for gay-themed programming. We air gay-themed programming throughout the year.”
According to The Washington Blade, a gay-oriented newspaper with a national circulation, Ron Bachman, director of programming for PBS’ powerhouse Boston-based WGBH had given assurances that “WGBH does not expect to alter its longstanding commitment to gay and lesbian programming. Bachman said that only a lack of available programming would cut their presentation of gay shows.” The Washington Blade Online informs us that Kevin Harris, vice president and television station manager at PBS’ WETA, “said that the best shows air during primetime but that the timing of the shows was not related to the sexual orientation of the people portrayed in the show.” In Mr. Harris’ own words: “Anyone who is interested in great public TV about gay and lesbian issues . . . should be very involved in making sure federal funding is maintained.” [Emphasis added]
That’s right taxpayers, PBS station executives agitate in gay publications urging the well-organized and politically-savvy gay community to press politicians harder to fund more gay programming with your tax dollars. Even if you shun all cable connections, PBS will see to it that gay programming is pumped into your home if your local PBS station chooses to air it. Right now about 130 PBS stations regularly air the gay and lesbian news magazine “In the Life.” Its producers hope it will eventually be broadcast from all 348 PBS stations. They have reason to be hopeful: the number of stations that air “In the Life” jumped from six to sixty in a single year.
And then we have “Under the Pink Carpet” which targets a younger audience with features about underground gay entertainment, slice-of-life glimpses into the gay bar scene and “Man on the Street” segments where gays are invited to “air their community’s dirty laundry,” as one gay publication put it. The host and producer of “Under the Pink Carpet,” Tony Sawicki, was encouraged by the cable successes of “Boy Meets Boy” and “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.” He says he wants to get away from the kind of gay programming that focuses only on the “acceptable aspects of gay life.”
The PBS series P.O.V. (Point of View) keeps the gay themes coming with low-budget features such as Family Fundamentals about gay children trapped in homes with devout Christian parents. Then there is Flag Wars about an urban gentrification project that put gay newcomers in conflict with African American residents.
Another PBS series offered us Daddy and Papa about two wonderful homosexual males who adopt. Homosexual parents are always wonderful in the gay press, in the New York Times and in PBS programming. This film was written, produced, directed and features Johnny Symons who showcases his homosexual relationship with the guy with whom he wants to share parenting. The film also showcases other wonderful gay parents and gay-parent wannabees. It’s not a documentary really; it’s an instrument of persuasion; its intention is to convince viewers that homosexuals can role model adult relationships for children who were (almost certainly) born to fulfill heterosexual destinies, and do it just as well as any heterosexual couple. As one fawning reviewer said in the New Yorker magazine, “. . . these men, who had to go out of their way to create their families, are able to talk about wanting children in a way that’s moving and sweet.” To the reviewer, their personal cravings are all that matter; their inability to do more than dimly mimic the subtle dynamics of heterosexual co-existence for their heterosexual children doesn’t dampen the critic’s enthusiasm a bit; the children are just props in Johnny Symons’ self-congratulating home movie. It was classic PBS fare.
The month of June, in case you forgot to mark it on your calendar, is Gay History Month, which PBS celebrates with daily propaganda pieces promoting the gay political agenda. June was the month of The Stonewall Uprising, a tawdry anti-police crimefest by drag queens, male prostitutes and rowdy gay thugs outside a Mafia-owned gay bar in New York City. Years later, this riot is commemorated with parades featuring a motorcycle drive-by of the bare-breasted Dykes on Bikes and buff gay guys dressed as nuns simulating sex acts atop fuzzy pink floats. PBS joins in the fun with offerings that showcase the creations of some pretty slick gay propagandists.
A Little History
Back in 1987, two queer theorists, Marshall Kirk and Erastes Pill, collaborated to produce a manifesto titled The Overhauling of Straight America which articulated a six-point agenda for expanding the gay comfort zone into every corner of American life. Any thoughtful reflection on the behavior of PBS programmers erases all doubt that PBS is diligently promoting the gay agenda exactly as suggested by Kirk and Pill.
For example: PBS does its best to “Talk about gays and gayness as loudly and as often as possible” on the supposition that frequent exposure to gay mannerisms and behaviors will make gays seem normal.
Point Two: PBS does its best to “Portray gays as victims, not as aggressive challengers.” The queer theorists tell us that “In any campaign to win over the public, gays must be cast as victims so that straights will be included by reflex to assume the role of protector.” PBS does this with countless propaganda pieces created by homosexuals that portray gays as warm and wonderful people who are abused by a heartless Christian culture populated by mentally-ill “homophobes.” These pieces are artfully crafted to tweak the “reflex to assume the role of protector” by straights who are unaccustomed to critical thinking.
Point Three: PBS answers the call to “give protectors just cause” by employing “anti-discrimination” as a common theme in its presentations because, as the queer theorists acknowledge, little headway can be made by demanding “direct support for homosexual practices.” If normal heterosexual Americans would be disgusted to learn that seven of every ten gay males regularly indulge in anonymous group sex at commercial sex emporiums, then recast the story of attempts to close gay bathhouses as an “attack” on a time-honored gay tradition and the less said about the behaviorally-driven AIDS epidemic the better.
PBS is at its peak when it comes to point four of the gay agenda: “Make gays look good. To offset the increasingly bad press . . . the campaign should paint gays as superior pillars of society . . .” Gays are always “superior” on PBS. PBS made a secular saint of the slain Matthew Shepherd whom they endlessly portrayed as a sweet victim of a savage straight homophobe. The truth is that Matthew Shepherd descended into depression and heavy drug abuse after he was brutally gang raped by homosexuals during a vacation overseas. His killer was a fellow dope user with whom Shepherd was already acquainted. Matthew Shepherd was killed to keep him from disclosing that he and his killer had previously been sexually intimate. It was only after the already-beaten Shepherd uttered the words “I’m going to tell!” that his departing tormentor returned and delivered the fatal blow with the butt of a revolver. Shepherd was going to rat out his married killer as a closet homosexual. But you won’t hear what really happened on PBS.
You also won’t hear the horrific story of the two homosexual lovers who kidnapped, drugged and then raped to death thirteen-year-old Jesse Dirkhising. That was a story that the gay-friendly programmers at PBS deemed “not news.” (A detailed description of this crime can be found in my essay Homophobia in my book.) PBS is far too busy spinning real-life complexity into gay-propaganda that will excite a “reflex” in their viewers, a reflex that will preclude any critical thinking.
Point five of the Marshall Kirk/ Erastes Pill gay agenda is a PBS specialty: “Make the victimizers look bad.” In other words, smear normal people. Gays on PBS spend a lot of time denouncing “right-wing conservatives” and “the Christian right,” the sort of people the rest of us just call parents and neighbors. Here are Kirk and Pill in their own words: “At a later stage of the media campaign for gay rights – long after other gay ads have become commonplace – it will be time to get tough with remaining opponents. To be blunt, they must be vilified . . . we intend to make the anti-gays look so nasty that average Americans will want to dissociate themselves from such types.” They encourage gay activists to go on a talent hunt for the most unappealing opponents they can find and to make these carefully chosen people the personification of everyone who would dare to resist the gay agenda. Kirk and Pill expand: “The public should be shown images of ranting homophobes whose secondary traits and beliefs disgust middle America.” They go on to suggest identifying all of their opposition with the Ku Klux Klan and with “southern ministers drooling with hysterical hatred” and with “menacing punks, thugs, and convicts speaking coolly about the ‘fags’ they have killed or would like to kill.” All of which is intended to terminate any thoughtful and probing debate about the social consequences of an expanding homosexual comfort zone. If gays can simply define all doubters as horrible people by the use of a well-organized smear campaign, then no further questioning of their objectives will be forthcoming. PBS programs are first in line to cast doubt on the moral worth of anyone who questions the gay agenda.
Point six of the Kirk/Pill agenda is “Solicit funds.” An all-out campaign to marginalize traditional American values will require funding. Every dollar that PBS solicits from its beg-a-thons and every buck it importunes from the taxpayer helps to promote the transformative gay agenda on PBS. PBS is hostile to even the most mundane image that might upset gays. The next time you watch PBS take note of those interludes between the cozy insights of Deepak Chopra and the creaky British sit-com, notice that between the sleep-inducing programs come the “We are PBS” spots with the irritating ditty and the images of just who PBS thinks “we” are. The image is always one man, or one woman or a single woman with a child, but it is never a man, woman and a child together as a family. That would be too suggestively heterosexual.
As a thought experiment we might ask whether PBS would ever consider devoting this much time, effort and money to programming about minority Christian sects or Hasidic Jews or people who look to the stars to divine the future? Not a chance. Those minorities tend to keep to themselves and are seldom heard from at boardroom discussions and power lunches. Gays have clout because they have colonized influential institutions and could get themselves designated as an “underserved minority.” That’s pivotal because the 1967 Carnegie Commission Report that defined public television’s mission stated that its purpose was to “provide a voice for groups in the community that may otherwise be unheard.” The array of national-circulation newspapers and magazines and newsletters and websites and chat rooms and message boards and bloggers that now serve the homosexual community are not enough because those media do not penetrate your home: this radicalized two percent of the population wants to make its case daily on your television screen and during primetime. Angry gays want PBS to redouble its efforts to showcase all aspects of gay life and to do it in a flattering manner. The only thing that seems to restrain PBS from full compliance with gay demands is the fear of defunding. PBS faced such a scare in January of 2005 when PBS displeased parents and the parents’ congressional representatives by attempting to normalize lesbianism for its pre-school audience. It was just another little beachhead in the ever-expanding PBS homosexual home invasion.
PBS distributes a children’s program called “Postcards from Buster” which features an animated rabbit who hops from state to state and shares his slice-of-life experiences with his pre-school viewers. When Buster hopped into Vermont he befriended two girls who shared a home with two domestically-partnered lesbian farmers. The action is mundane; the lesbians feed cows and harvest maple syrup. The hidden subtext is that lesbians are normal and lesbian parenting is every bit as nourishing to budding heterosexual girls as any heterosexual environment. Some folks took issue with the subtext; some folks were unhappy that PBS, their trusted video baby sitter, was imparting this minority opinion while the parents were occupied elsewhere. There was talk of defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting which bankrolls PBS. That didn’t happen. In fact the CPB was granted even more generous funding.
The Birth of a Dinosaur
Public television is an artifact of the schoolmarmish instincts of the Johnson administration: the Great Society should be watching Great Television. Federal Communications Chairman Newton Minnow had disparaged American television as “a vast wasteland” so the liberal elite were convinced that the average rube was in dire need of some cultural uplift. President Johnson was smitten with the BBC, which was beyond the control of British taxpayers and their elected representatives and yet was funded by the earnings of British taxpayers. Lyndon Johnson wanted to saddle every American taxpayer with a dedicated public-television tax. Wilbur Mills, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, wouldn’t budge. According to Johnson’s aide Bill Moyers, Mills told the president, “But you know, Lyndon, we’re not going to give money to anybody we don’t control.” Johnson wanted to create a far-flung system of public persuasion that was isolated from the people’s elected representatives and, by extension, from the people themselves. Johnson just loved the BBC way of doing things.
A Six-Paragraph Digression
It’s worth a few moments of reflection to examine the British model of public television, the one the great liberal transformer Lyndon Johnson wanted to impose on America, for it offers us an x-ray photograph of the modern liberal mind.
British law compels every television owner to pay the government an annual license fee to fund the British Broadcasting Corporation. This fee was only 50 pence back in the 1920s when all British broadcasting was a BBC production and the fee was levied on everyone who owned a radio. The fee increased to include television in 1946 and it has been increasing ever since, even as the broadcasting environment has bloomed with hundreds of commercial stations that compete for viewers and advertising revenue but do not receive a penny of the license-fee tax. In its 1993 fiscal year the BBC raked in the equivalent of $7.5 billion from this tax. It is a criminal offense for any television owner to not pay the license fee even if he has no interest in ever watching the BBC. The fee is now $233 a year (121 pounds). Anyone caught harboring a clandestine telly could be fined one thousand pounds ($1,923). Last year (2005) twenty people were imprisoned for dodging the telly tax.
Furthermore, all British retailers are required to inform the government whenever someone buys a television set. The government maintains a data base of its 28 million TV owners. Specially equipped vans troll neighborhoods searching for clandestine television viewing; special agents walk about with hand-held devices to ferret out hidden televisions. Enforcement officers make about three million house calls a year.
The December 28th, 2004 New York Times included the sad story of Mr. Graham Smith of Southampton who had been “traumatized by a childhood in which the television was never off; his family had four people and five televisions.” Mr. Smith’s decision to renounce the television habit fell on the unbelieving ears of the telly police who began exhorting him to pay the telly tax. He received 30 pointed missives in one 10-month period.
Finally, he received an “official warning” of an impending home visit “containing alarming allusions to legal activity and potential prosecution.” When Mr. Smith complained, the licensing authority apologized – then sent him another warning days later. Mr. Smith lamented, “I don’t see why I should be essentially persecuted for not having a television.”
This is the model Lyndon Johnson admired. This is the obnoxious Orwellian underbelly of the system that produces “Masterpiece Theater” and all those stodgy British sit-coms on PBS. [End of digression]
The 1967 Public Broadcasting Act mandated that public broadcasting must serve “instructional, educational, and cultural purposes.” It envisioned programmers taking “creative risks” to serve “the needs of unserved and underserved audiences, particularly children and minorities.” Public broadcasting would be shielded from the influence of critics by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting which would act as a taxpayer-funded paymaster for PBS and its associated local stations. The CPB has no authority to tell PBS or the local stations how to behave. PBS does not own its associated stations nor does it produce programs. The stations, some of them quite powerful, produce the programs but do not control the PBS airing schedule.
What was unforeseen was the odd way in which PBS programmers would interpret their mandate to take “creative risks.” There was neither a hint of the non-traditional way in which they would “instruct” and “educate” America nor a whisper of the peculiar way they would interpret the word “minority.” For example, the notion that homosexuals are a minority is only as old as television. The first gay manifesto was put to paper in the kitchen of Communist Party member Harry Hay in 1946. Harry had re-imagined homosexuals in the terms of the Marxist dialectic; he proposed that homosexuals see themselves as an oppressed minority, not as just a bunch of folks who by one route or another had come to share an odd personality quirk. It wasn’t until the 1970s that Harry’s invention captured the liberal imagination, which was just about the time of the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act with its mandate to serve “underserved minorities.” The stage was set. With PBS conveniently isolated from its critics by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, PBS was free to take “creative risks” in an all-out campaign to “instruct” and “educate” your kids, and you as well, about the “culture” of homosexuals. It isn’t obvious that homosexuals are a minority, underserved or otherwise; PBS sees homosexuals as a minority because PBS chooses to see homosexuals as a minority; their choice is emblematic of their political inclinations.
All these years later everyone is hip to Harry Hay’s “oppressed-minority” paradigm, which has encouraged the formation of skads of self-identified “oppressed minorities.” Harry’s twist on the Marxist dialectic taught middle class white feminists how to out-suffer blacks in a contest for the prize of Most Oppressed Victim. Everyone had an up-hill battle to out-suffer the Jews. The Armenians are still smarting from abuse by the Turks; America’s swelling population of fat folks is now claiming oppressed minority status. Just as Picasso taught countless second-rate daubers how to wow clueless art critics with his novel technique, so Harry Hay taught every neurotic how to aspire to nobility and political influence through an artful blend of whining and displays of temper.
Today identity-group deaf people are claiming to be a unique culture with a unique experience and a unique language (signing) with its own special syntax. This group claims that hearing parents who seek cochlear implants for their deaf children are “kidnapping” members of the deaf community. There is rivalry among the deaf for the high status of being the most authentically deaf; the deaf offspring of deaf parents enjoy the highest status. This is an odd echo of the lingering tension between light and dark-complexioned African Americans. Would PBS think it proper to enter these arguments and begin advocating for one side against the other? Aren’t the deaf an “underserved minority”? Shouldn’t PBS be taking “creative risks” on their behalf? The twisted logic of meddlesome liberalism says that PBS should get involved . . . and they might at any moment. PBS is isolated from its critics, so it can do as it pleases. My point is this, should the American taxpayer be compelled to part with his earnings so that government can bankroll such identity-group advocacy?
There exists a blossoming network of websites that argue that anorexics and bulimics are an oppressed minority of kindred souls. These sites have such names as Starving for Perfection, Anorexicbeauty, and Totally in Control. They belt out such aphorisms as “Say it now and say it loud: ‘I’m anorexic and I’m proud.’” The most emphatically anorexic persons gain entry to an elite community which sees itself as battling for the right to a lifestyle choice. Surely the genesis of anorexia has a social dimension and the personalities who gravitate to this control obsession may also have a biological dimension. So, if these people declare themselves to be an underserved community shouldn’t PBS offer them a taxpayer-subsidized soapbox as well? Is a person who rents space in her brain to a control fixation any less worthy of a subsidy than someone who rents space in his brain to a same-sex fixation?
An Overblown Reputation
The reputation PBS enjoys as a wellspring of high culture is vastly overblown. Last year PBS devoted only 4% of its air time to drama and only 6% to cultural programs. The largest segment of its programming consisted of 801 hours of children’s programs. Their weekly schedule is heavily padded with bland fare such as “Antiques Roadshow” and the tedious “Wall Street Week with Fortune” and films anyone could see on Turner Classic Movies. If you’re too cheap to buy the Yanni concert tapes or the Peter, Paul and Mary back-from-the-dead concert tape, then you can see them on PBS. As one New Yorker profile of PBS put it (6/7/04):
Two long-running programs – “Masterpiece Theater” and “Scientific American Frontiers” – may be cancelled in the future, for lack of funds, and viewers in great numbers turn to much maligned commercial television for such first-rate news programs as “60 Minutes” and “Nightline”; to HBO for entertainment of high quality such as “The Sopranos” and to the cable channels Trio, Discovery, Bravo, and BBC America for the sort of programming that once belonged only to PBS.
A Few Words about Bill Moyers
No one captured the essence of liberal hauteur and presumption better than Bill Moyers, the former aide to Lyndon Johnson who produced programming for PBS from the 1970s until recently, including such variations on the world according to Bill Moyers as “Bill Moyers’ Journal” and “NOW.” Three days after Republicans swept both houses of Congress in the 2002 midterm elections, Bill Moyers was darkly intoning that those frightening creatures called conservatives were plotting to “force pregnant women to give up control over their own bodies,” and were paving the way for corporations to “eviscerate the environment” as well as “transfer wealth from the working people to the rich.” It was the Bill Moyers signature spiel about the gears of capitalism being oiled with the blood of the workers. Bill is silent about how he himself grew rich by stuffing his pockets with working people’s earnings. Here’s how Bill Moyers turned so-called non-commercial PBS into his personal money mill.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which is the paymaster for PBS, has an annual budget of $2.2 billion. Over $400 million of that amount is extracted by coercion from American taxpayers. Bill Moyers has a production company called Public Affairs Television which is bankrolled by PBS. PBS keeps the amount it hands over to Moyers’ company a closely guarded secret. In returned for this undisclosed funding Bill Moyers did weekly programs and some documentaries. Here’s the slick part: Bill Moyers retained ownership of the documentaries. That trick transformed every PBS broadcast of a Moyers documentary into a free commercial for all the associated Bill Moyers tapes, CDs, DVDs, etc. Profits from these sales went into the pocket of Bill Moyers. In other words, this scheme worked to transfer wealth from America’s workers into the pocket of rich Bill Moyers.
As president of the Florence and John Schumann Foundation, with assets of about $100 million, Bill Moyers gave grant money from the foundation to PBS. Then PBS turned around and paid Bill Moyers’ production company money to make documentaries which Bill used as free commercials for his personal line of merchandise. In Lawyerland that’s called a conflict of interest. Bill greased PBS and National Public Radio with hundreds of thousands of dollars during the 1990s. NPR is the left-leaning audio-only version of PBS that scrapped its plan to hire cop killer Mumia Abu Jamal as a “prison correspondent” after howls of protest from normal Americans. NPR, like PBS, denies any leftward bias. Well, Bill Moyers, a PBS fixture, skimmed two million dollars from the Schumann Foundation and gave it to his left-wing son John to run the left-wing website TomPaine.com. So much for neutrality.
In the year 2000, Bill Moyers received the coveted Columbia/DuPont Gold Baton award for a documentary he produced about South Africa. Pardon my cynicism, but could the Columbia award decision have been influenced by the big bucks Bill Moyers had lavished on the Columbia Journalism Review?
A Few Final Words
It’s pretty clear that the voters who elected a Republican president and Republican majorities to both houses of Congress have little ownership stake in taxpayer-subsidized television. It’s a popular baby sitter, but it’s also a creaky relic from another time. The commercial success of dedicated documentary-based and children’s educational programming on cable stations in the private sector is a total refutation of the argument that PBS is a necessary part of the American cultural landscape.
As a confederation of local stations, PBS is far less efficient to maintain than a commercial network, so it’s a money waster. PBS profits very little from the income and merchandising profits generated by programs such as “Sesame Street.” Some programs such as “Great Performances,” are produced at a loss. The $400 million taxpayer subsidy that PBS receives every year (that’s $4 billion in ten years) would be better spent on stuff that the average viewer can’t get just by flicking the channel selector. The fact that millions of traditional Americans are compelled to finance advocacy for anti-traditional identity groups further erodes sympathy for this antiquated, money-wasting and unnecessary broadcasting service.
If ever there were a glaring example of welfare for the rich, it’s any television tuned to PBS. If the well-to-do folks who constitute the bulk of PBS viewers want to chip in another $400 million each year so that Big Bird can baby-sit their offspring, then that’s fine. But don’t point the gun muzzle of governmental taxing authority at those of us who don’t want to finance a cozy sandbox for the tightwad rich. This leftist Neverland is hostile to traditional America; it’s an alien place where leftist assumptions are never challenged, where faux history and cosmetically-enhanced “documentaries” preserve the hermetic culture of Manhattan liberalism.
There is excellent children’s fare on the Discovery channel and anyone can hear all the British accents they can stand on the BBC cable link. One suspects that the average PBS viewer fancies herself a closet European anyway, someone above and beyond traditional American values. Well, there’s a place for delusional North Americans who think they’re really British . . . it’s called Canada.
Thomas Clough
Copyright 2006
January 31, 2006