PUBLIC
BROADCASTING SELLS.(OUT?)
By JAMES LEDBETTER
If you want to see the future of American public broadcasting, go visit a shopping mall. Drive up to the massive Stamford Town Center in Stamford, Connecticut, head for the 4G level and you will find a store that acts as a direct outpost for New York's Channel 13, WNET, one of the nation's largest public broadcasting stations. Between Rodier Paris and Casual Corner, two stores down from a Warner Brothers merchandise outlet, is a boutique called Learningsmith. It displays both the Public Broadcasting Service and WNET logos and describes itself as a "general store for the curious mind."
Inside is a smorgasbord of self-advertised brainy materials, from place mats depicting the periodic table to books by Stephen Hawking. There is a wealth of public broadcasting tie-in material, including books by Carl Sagan and Bill Moyers, a video called My Heart, Your Heart (hosted by Jim Lehrer) and almost any imaginable product bearing a Sesame Street character. Playing on three huge television screens in the store's rear is a PBS video, Peter, Paul and Mommy, featuring the aging trio singing the refrain, "Don't ever take away our freedom."
In return for selling these products, Learningsmith, a for-profit retail
chain, gets
on-air promotion--mostly during children's shows. The store, however, does
not
discriminate against non-PBS merchandise; here one may also purchase videos
of
Doug, Nickelodeon's kid hero, or of CNN: The Game. In keeping with
good market-place thinking, public broadcasting is just another product
on the shelf.
Learningsmith is but one example of public broadcasting's scramble to merge with shopping and marketing. Sacramento's KVIE, for example, not only shows commercials on the air, it produces them in-house for local businesses. Boston's WGBH has taken its popular This Old House show and spun off a handyman's magazine, a joint venture with Time Warner. In mid-1996, Los Angeles's KCET teamed up with a direct-marketing firm to form a new, for-profit business with the primary marketing purpose of helping public television stations raise funds. Revenues for the first year were expected to be upward of $10 million.
This cozy commercialism would have startled the men and women who founded public television thirty years ago. Steeped in Great Society idealism, "Public Television: A Program for Action," the 1967 report of the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television, emphatically set its proposed public television apart from network fare: Its programming would embrace "all that is of human interest and importance.'' This meant eliminating the forces of commercialism, which the commission blamed for the pap on network television.
"In the end, commercial television remains true to its own purposes," wrote Carnegie's executive secretary. "It permits itself to be distracted as little as possible from its prime goal of maximizing audience." Public television, as the Carnegie team envisioned it, would strive for excellence and enlightenment, not sensationalism and audience share. PBS and its 348 television affiliates have long used this noncommercial, educational mission as a rationale for federal funding and nonprofit status.
In early 1995, as Congressional Republicans threatened to strip public broadcasting of its roughly $300 million annual federal subsidy, PBS president Ervin Duggan echoed the same dichotomy between public and private television. He warned that if public broadcasting was forced to rely on commercial sources of income, the system would plunge into "the alien world of ad agencies and ratings and cost-per-thousand and merchandising, rather than the world of teachers and historians and journalists and community volunteers."
Duggan's supplications ignore the modern reality embodied in Learningsmith: There is virtually nothing about commercialism that is alien to public broadcasting today. Forced to cope with unstable revenues and rising costs, every level of public broadcasting's byzantine structure has devised some kind of commercial scheme, raising disturbing questions about whether commercialism has overtaken public broadcasting's programs, robbing them of their intended uniqueness.
There has always been some private funding of noncommercial broadcasting, and it would be naïve to pine for any golden age of public television or radio (though many would argue that the late sixties and early seventies represented at least a bronze age). Commercialism has been a consistent concern--and temptation--for public broadcasters. In the seventies, some in the field were scandalized when Mobil Oil was allowed to use a typeface similar to its own corporate logo; the cry of protest was, "Next we'll be allowing them to use a red O!" Today, the program actually calls itself Mobil Masterpiece Theatre.
But the malling of public broadcasting represents commercialism taken to new heights, in which the very assets of public broadcasting--its logos, its airtime, its facilities--are for sale or rent. In the case of Learningsmith, founded in Boston in 1991, there are sixteen stores nationwide with public broadcasting affiliations. They have the right to use the PBS logo, one of the nation's most recognized symbols. Besides WNET's stores (in Stamford and on Long Island), there are stores for WGBH, WETA (D.C.) and WCNY (Syracuse). While a marketing official said that Learningsmith's estimated nationwide 1994 gross sales were $40 million, he declined to divulge the percentage that each station receives, calling that information "confidential." (Commercialization helps cut the public out of public broadcasting.) Los Angeles's KCET began a similar chain called the Store of Knowledge, which opened a WNET-affiliated outlet in New Jersey last year.
When PBS launched its new hit kids' show Puzzle Place, it announced a simultaneous marketing agreement with Toys 'R' Us and Family Circle and Child magazines. All 619 Toys 'R' Us outlets now have permanent floor space dedicated to Puzzle Place. Toy giant Fisher-Price, among others, has been awarded a licensing contract for Puzzle Place tie-ins. All this was set in place before the program aired, making Puzzle Place rather like the latest Disney extravaganza.
No longer content with doling out underwriting credits, PBS station WGVU in Grand Rapids, Michigan, has pioneered "Business Television." Local businesses are encouraged to use the station's studio and satellite uplink in return for a donation. According to assistant general manager Chuck Furman, the businesses mainly broadcast meetings for viewing at remote sites.
"It's kind of the Cadillac of teleconferencing," says Furman. Business Television has been around for about five years, he said, and brings in approximately $200,000 a year, about 4 percent of the station's annual budget. Although Furman declined to name the businesses that use these facilities, he said one of the station's regular clients is a Fortune 500 office furniture store. The content of these private, encrypted broadcasts is usually sales and marketing, but Furman says Business Television can also be effective for crisis management. "One client used it to help resolve a strike situation," he boasts.
The most troubling development, however, has been public broadcasting's headlong embrace of commercial media conglomerates--the very broadcasters whose mediocrity the public system was designed to avoid. There are virtually no major media conglomerates that today lack some form of "strategic business alliance" with public television. PBS has developed so many deals with international media firms that public television has begun to look like a marketing arm for commercial media companies.
This has not come about by accident: It is a deliberate policy crafted by public television's leaders. When Duggan took over the presidency of PBS in February 1994, he announced sixteen initiatives he intended to accomplish in his first 120 days, known collectively as "Operation Momentum." Operation Momentum involved a number of multimillion-dollar partnerships, including:
§ a $20 million deal between PBS and Turner Home Entertainment to market and distribute PBS Home Video. The terms included an agreement from Turner to match PBS's investment in new programming for new titles to be aired on PBS and marketed under the PBS Home Video label. Thus Turner--now a division of media giant Time Warner--is seeding its own video distribution business by helping to create programs on public television.
§ a joint venture of PBS, KCTS (Seattle) and Buena Vista Television to bring Bill Nye the Science Guy to public television. During weekday afternoons, the program runs on public television stations; on weekends, it runs on commercial television stations courtesy of Buena Vista, which is a division of Disney (which owns ABC).
§ a $3.2 million grant from the CTIA Foundation and a
$2 million from AT&T, one of the world's largest telecommunications companies, to produce PBS Mathline; US West also announced in 1995 that it was hooking up with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for a similar project.
And since Operation Momentum, a program developer/distributor called Devillier Donegan Enterprises--a division of Disney--is co-producing a three-part PBS science series, Coming of Age, the beginning of some $50 million worth of programming it has pledged to produce for PBS.
The existence of such alliances is largely kept from viewers, the vast majority of whom are no doubt unaware that supposedly noncommercial programming is being developed and distributed by commercial media firms. This takes the degree of corporate influence and input a step beyond underwriting (when a private company agrees to sponsor previously produced programs) and makes the supporting companies more like executive producers in that they pick up all or most of the production costs.
If the Carnegie Commission were to reconvene today, it might well ask how public broadcasting's special missions--to education, to community service, to alternative views on public affairs--can survive amid the forces that turned commercial television into a vast wasteland. The answer is plain: They can't. There is already pressure to choose programming popular enough to make viewers open their wallets to fundraising drives. The more PBS and National Public Radio rely on merchandising, the more merchandising will help determine what they put on the air.
Some would argue that the malling of public broadcasting is inevitable, or irrelevant. After all, today's television dial offers a vast set of choices undreamed of thirty years ago--who cares about PBS? This ignores the tens of millions of Americans who can't receive or afford cable television. As former PBS president Lawrence Grossman recently observed, truly public television "is more desperately needed now than ever." Already PBS provides the last weekly documentary series on broadcast television, Frontline. If its federal funds are cut, they are unlikely to be replaced with sales of Frontline T-shirts.
In addition, cable diversity exists largely in theory. Most cable channels still resist programming that might bring them political scorn. In the early nineties, PBS refused to air Defending Our Lives, a documentary about domestic violence that won an Academy Award. While PBS took a great deal of heat for that obvious act of political censorship, the supposedly diverse world of cable--including channels like Lifetime, tailored to women--did not exactly trip over itself to show the film.
It's also true that when merchandising drives programming, local shows suffer: It's much harder to raise money for programming about New York City's AIDS or affordable-housing crises than it is to sell a Barney doll. Despite public television's explicit mandate to serve local communities, that's one reason WNET devotes less airtime to New York City issues today than do the city's for-profit stations.
Public television and radio continue to produce moments of excellence; the challenge lies in how to restructure financing and focus to preserve and expand those moments. Rather than recognizing commercialism's inherent traps, however, most in Washington are encouraging PBS and NPR to go further in the malling direction. Congress has yet to agree on a specific recipe for eliminating federal funding, but public broadcasters don't need Big Bird to help them read the writing on the wall.
When trying to placate a privatizing Congress, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting plan turned not to some nineties version of the Carnegie Commission but to Wall Street's Lehman Brothers to evaluate alternative funding sources. Though Lehman found that advertising would be a "net money loser," its analysis did recommend a "carefully controlled experiment" using advertising.
A second plan, drawn up by a coalition of broadcasters, goes far beyond the experimental stage: It advocates opening up underwriting options for stations to allow what Jeff Clarke, general manager of Houston's KUHT, calls "super-enhanced underwriting" spots. Most people would call them commercials, and they are already running on more than a dozen public stations.
Of course, the money to run public broadcasting has to come from somewhere besides foundations, corporations and member contributions. The Carnegie Commission proposed a version of the British model of a 2 cent excise tax on radio and TV set sales, earmarked for public broadcasting. Some in public broadcasting favor a tax form checkoff; others recommend a multibillion-dollar trust fund whose earnings and interest could support the system. Still another proposal would be to levy a 1 percent tax on commercial television's advertising revenues and use the funds to pay for an independent and noncommercial public television.
These ideas may need to be tinkered with, but at least they attempt to stay out of the mall. If public broadcasting continues to move toward full-blown commercialization, it will inevitably look more and more like a promotional outlet for the very networks it was meant to supplement. And it will leave unfilled the vacuum for creative, challenging programming--still as hard to find on the dial today as it was thirty years ago.
James Ledbetter is a staff writer at The Village Voice. This essay is adapted from Made Possible By...: The Death of Public Broadcasting in the United States, to be published this month by Verso.
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