For those of us who grew up on Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street -- shows which taught us values foreign to the sugar-coated, commercial-drenched cartoons on network TV -- PBS has a special place in our hearts. Sure, I could do without Masterpiece Theatre and the seemingly endless supply of British sitcoms about senior citizens, but gosh darnit, I'm glad they're there, holding the line against our culture's complete submersion into ad-space. Even NewsHour, with its drab lighting and unimpeachable reporting, represents the kind of journalism -- journalism! -- of a bygone age, completely alien to the mindless opinionating that dominates cable news as the latter scrapes the bottom of the barrel for the last few ratings points.

As it turns out, that's the point. PBS exists to provide culturally and educationally valuable programming that would never be provided by corporate television. If you aren't bombarding children with epilepsy-inducing visuals and boot-camp orders to BUY BUY BUY, then you aren't worth a dime to advertisers. And apparently, if you aren't willing to surf the wave of right-leaning conventional wisdom, while kowtowing to interchangeable professional blowhards in a kabuki dance of empty "balance," you won't get a dime then either. (There's reason to hope, but things look pretty bad now.)

It seems that there are some things the market won't provide. There's no incentive for ad-free, content-driven television, because it actually costs money to produce it. (Gasp!) So no matter what's on in particular (please, no more modern dance), it's important to remember that the mission of PBS is vital and good.

But there are those on the right who doggedly insist that the market will give us the best possible outcome -- while tacitly assuming that outcome is the moral definition of good -- and who are appalled that some government money -- taxpayer dollars! -- is going into a unique project like PBS. This just happens to dovetail with another fringe specialty of the right, currently in ascendence: the media bias bugbear.

Now, with conservative Ken Tomlinson in bureaucratic control of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), they might get their wish.

MYTH: Public broadcasting is propaganda

When government is involved in producing or subsidizing news coverage or political and historical documentaries — even entertainment — it amounts to state-supported propaganda....

That some folks or most folks or nearly everyone fails to see a bias in public TV and radio matters not at all to me. Part of my day job is dealing with the media and that requires some consideration of where media outlets and personalities are coming from. I've been interviewed countless times by people at PBS or NPR. There is no slant more socialistic, and more consistently so. (Paul Jacob, "A more balanced Pravda," Town Hall, 5/22/05)

If you got to the 22nd paragraph [of a May 2 New York Times story], continued back on page 19, you found that the CPB chairman, Kenneth Tomlinson, was insisting that the programs it supports and funds adhere to the federal law requiring objectivity and balance. That law was passed back in 1967 and has been flaunted by public TV and radio ever since....

What's needed is a congressional effort to de-fund public broadcasting. In a 500-channel universe, public broadcasting should survive on its own-if it can. (Cliff Kincaid, "Abolish public TV and radio," AIM, 5/23/05)

REALITY

In the past, we exposed and decried the use of PR techniques such as "video news releases" (run by TV stations as regular reports) and fake-grassroots campaigns to advance partisan political agendas surreptitiously. When used by the Bush administration, these techniques were called "covert propaganda" by the Government Accountability Office, and they are against the law. So we take the propaganda charge very seriously.

But there is nothing covert about PBS. Everybody knows that they are able to run without ads and lose money by appealing to Congress, corporate underwriters, and "viewers like you." Corporate television stations also have sources of funding -- corporate advertisers, and during campaigns, even political ones. Everybody knows this too.

The difference is that programming decisions at PBS, unlike at Viacom, GE, or Disney, are made without considering the bottom line. They don't answer to advertisers or shareholders -- instead, they are held to the standard of independence and public interest set forth by laws such as the one that created the CPB, in 1967, "to facilitate the development of public telecommunications and to afford maximum protection from extraneous interference and control."

The Congress hereby finds and declares that —

1. it is in the public interest to encourage the growth and development of public radio and television broadcasting, including the use of such media for instructional, educational, and cultural purposes;

[...]

3. expansion and development of public telecommunications and of diversity of its programming depend on freedom, imagination, and initiative on both local and national levels;

[...]

5. it furthers the general welfare to encourage public telecommunications services which will be responsive to the interests of people both in particular localities and throughout the United States, which will constitute an expression of diversity and excellence, and which will constitute a source of alternative telecommunications services for all the citizens of the Nation;

and so on. In other words, its agenda is not that of the political administration (as with Bush's PR-spending), but rather the ideal of the public interest in information outside the corporate channels. And it works as long as there is, as the law says, "maximum protection" from political "intereference and control." It's not "Pravda" any more than public schools are brainwashing camps.

Unfortunately, it appears that Tomlinson, the new CBP chair, seeks to change the model. His other job in town is chairman of the Board of Broadcasting Governors, which oversees unapologetic foreign propaganda like Voice of America -- which is designed, as public diplomacy, to broadcast our government's line -- and it may be that thinking which has led him to publicly embrace the fringe critics of PBS.

Are American households the equivalent of freedom-starved East Berliners? Could Tomlinson be the one, ironically, to bring "state-sponsored propaganda" to PBS?

Tomlinson's comments are closely watched within the system. Some public broadcasting executives became wary after the election last fall, when Tomlinson allegedly told a gathering of PBS and station executives in Baltimore that the country had moved rightward and that public broadcasting should reflect that. (Washington Post, 5/19/05)

Although he notes that "a lot of my friends are against [any] taxpayer support," he said he disagrees and is working "for the health of public broadcasting." To ensure that, he added, "people in public broadcasting would be very wise to work on the perceptions that they leave." (Post)

"All I'm trying to do is advocate that both sides be fairly represented" in news programs, he said. "There is a perception among a lot of politically sophisticated people that that balance is not always there." (Post)

Pressed repeatedly for examples of public broadcasting bias, Tomlinson cited only one program that he found objectionable: Moyers's show, "Now." (Post)

Our guest blogger Laura addressed the campaign against Bill Moyers last week, as well as some of the crude steps Tomlinson is taking to exert political pressure on PBS programming. Moyers himself gave a defiant speech in response at a media reform conference in St. Louis, and we highly recommend it.

A free press is one where it's OK to state the conclusion you're led to by the evidence. One reason I'm in hot water is because my colleagues and I at "Now" didn't play by the conventional rules of Beltway journalism. Those rules divide the world into Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, and allow journalists to pretend they have done their job if, instead of reporting the truth behind the news, they merely give each side an opportunity to spin the news....

These "rules of the game" permit Washington officials to set the agenda for journalism, leaving the press all too often simply to recount what officials say instead of subjecting their words and deeds to critical scrutiny. Instead of acting as filters for readers and viewers, sifting the truth from the propaganda, reporters and anchors attentively transcribe both sides of the spin invariably failing to provide context, background or any sense of which claims hold up and which are misleading.

I decided long ago that this wasn't healthy for democracy. I came to see that "news is what people want to keep hidden and everything else is publicity." (Moyers)

And if you are concerned about the news-anemic state of corporate media, check out this brief account of that media reform conference by Danny Schechter (producer of Weapons of Mass Deception) for a start.