The Sunday Magazine in the New York Times runs a regular feature where one of its reporters, Deborah Solomon, poses a series of questions to a well-chosen interviewee. Mostly this feature is lighthearted and irreverent, but the interviews often reveal more than they intend. This seems to have been what happened with a recent subject, Ken Feree, the new Chief Executive Officer of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB).
The CPB is a private, nonprofit entity financed by Congress to ensure the vitality of public television and radio in the US. The hundreds of National Public Radio (NPR) and Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) affiliates across the US are dependent for money and overall direction from this body. Feree is a former commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission – the media regulator – so he is perceived to be well-qualified for the job.
In a sea of advertiser-driven television and radio content, public television and radio keep liberal Americans sane with its dispassionate news and information. That probably meant that sooner or later it would rub up the current administration and its supporters the wrong way. So Solomon’s very short interview got really interesting when Feree told her that the CPB wanted to “attract some new viewers.”
When she pressed him on whether he meant conservative viewers, Feree responded: “Yeah, I would hope that in the long run we can attract new viewers — Does public television belong to the Democrats?” Later when pressed on whether he watched PBS himself, he said its news shows were “too slow” and continued: “Sometimes I really just want a People magazine, and often that is in the evening after a hard day.” When asked whether he then preferred NPR, he shot back that he travels mainly by motorcycle and installing a radio on his bike would mess with it being “cool.”
Feree’s comments, which indicate a disdain for public television’s crucial role in a dumbed-down American media market, could have passed by unnoticed. But scrutiny by journalists of the changes at the CPB indicate a more insidious (though public) process to turn public broadcasting in the direction of such handmaidens of the Republican Party as its stylistic and political opposite, Fox News.
The new chairperson of the CPB board, Kenneth Tomlinson, gave the game away when last August he told a meeting of public television stations that they should make sure their programming “better reflected the Republican mandate”. Tomlinson, it turns out, is a key Bush fundraiser.
Surveys of NPR and PBS programming indicate that most viewers feel that they are adequately informed, with most of the programmes, according to the New York Times, scoring high “favourable” ratings. Nonetheless, according to the monitoring organisation Media that Matters for America, Tomlinson recently asked a staff member in the Bush-run White House to write guidelines to critique NPR and PBS shows.
Programmes that rile the Republicans and corporations — such as “Now” by Bill Moyers, an investigative journalism show – have been under pressure for a while. Also, funding on certain shows has been withdrawn – a fictional drama about a Mexican immigrant family was withdrawn when one storyline depicted the eldest son refusing to serve in Iraq.
Tomlinson has pushed for a show anchored by the economically conservative Wall Street Journal‘s editorial board members to “balance” Moyers’ admittedly liberal – but hardly radical — stance. Tomlinson has also introduced a show anchored by young, conservative talking head Tucker Carlson. And there have been plans for a show aimed at teenagers produced by Lynne Cheney, wife of the country’s vice-president, and well-known crusader for “values”-based education reform.
It seems more and more that what the Times cautioned in early May — that “the last thing Americans need is public broadcasting where the politics of the moment limits the news of the day” — may be become reality sooner than later.
Sean Jacobs is The Media’s correspondent in New York.