• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Should Congress Eliminate Funding and Tax Breaks for Public Broadcasting

Posted on: Tuesday, 19 July 2005, 00:00 CDT

Llewellyn King is chairman and CEO of the King Publishing Co., publishers of White House Weekly and Energy Daily.

WASHINGTON - Every 10 years, conservatives and their Republican allies launch a major assault on public broadcasting. So far, National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System have beaten back the attacks. But this year the enemies of public broadcasting seem to be more determined and more vindictive than ever.

While Congress is seeking to cut the funds, PBS's federal paymaster, Kenneth Tomlinson, president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is seeking to control the content of public radio and television. Here the allegation is that they are too liberal and lack conservative input.

It takes a special cast of mind to think that radio in America does not adequately represent the right wing. Ditto television.

For all of the complaints, public broadcasting in the United States is held together by the most fragile arrangement. It breaks down to about 15 percent of government money and the rest coming from members, business, foundations and local government. By comparison, the giant British Broadcasting Corporation levies a direct tax - in the form of a license fee - on viewers and listeners that brings it a whopping $5 billion a year. No wonder it employs 5,000 journalists - which enables the BBC to establish a gold standard for global reporting.

Public broadcasting is not a healthy institution. It is poorly managed, lacks transparency; and the stations are impenetrable fiefdoms, self-satisfied and self-deceived. Yet they are the flawed jewels in the tarnished crown of American broadcasting.

Rather than examining the whole structure of public broadcasting, its critics are out to weaken and destroy it. They have decided that the patient needs the leeches before the disease has been diagnosed.

The critics' course is a dangerous one. If they succeed in de- funding public broadcasting, it will drift off like an untethered balloon, answerable to no one - an accusation that has been leveled at the BBC for 50 years. If you think that public broadcasting is too liberal now, imagine what it would be if its tether were cut.

My prescription is that PBS should become a membership organization subject to the will of its contributors, who could vote in and out programming and managements as they liked. I believe it should receive some public money for infrastructure and none for programming.

Subsidies to news organizations have always been a ticklish matter, but not beyond intelligent resolution. The British government, for nearly 100 years, subsidized the Reuters news agency, and all other British news undertakings, with a device known as the Commonwealth Cable Rate. This was as elegant a subsidy of news as ever devised. All news organizations benefited from cheap cable transmission, while the government could not be accused of influencing editorial content.

Even American publishers and news agencies found ways to avail themselves of the Commonwealth Cable Rate by routing their transmissions through outposts of the British Empire. Time magazine correspondents, for example, filed their stories through Montreal, while United Press used a subsidiary called British United Press.

If you want to see where public broadcasting might go without any government funding, tune into Pacifica Radio: it is the closest thing to socialist broadcasting in the United States.

While PBS has carried such conservative voices as William F. Buckley and John McLaughlin, Pacifica is untrammeled by conservative thought. Those who would de-fund public broadcasting might end up with an alternative they find even more disagreeable.

Be careful what you wish for.

Source: Sunday Gazette - Mail; Charleston, W.V.

More News in this Category