The October 2014 issue of Harper’s Magazine includes an article by
Eugenia Williamson, “PBS Self-Destructs” that, for those of us who have a history with public broadcasting and value its
role, is troublesome.
The
article focuses largely on how public television funds major programs, how the
sources of funding have changed over the years, and the challenges that
producers and the system itself face as funding has migrated from direct
federal support to foundations and private donors to corporations. Williamson argues that funding sources
have always been a cause for tension and, in some cases, compromise in
production and scheduling decisions.
She notes that “For one brief, shining moment—which occurred before its
actual creation—PBS was an uncompromised thing. It began as a Great Society initiative under the Johnson
Administration and, like other public works programs of the era, was conceived
as a way to level the effects of poverty and close the education gap.” (p. 47). However, over the years, PBS and, by extension, the
producers who create programs for national distribution over the system, have
had to seek other sources of funds.
Williamson notes, “ . . .
the present state of PBS was almost an inevitability, the result of structural
deficiencies and ideological conflicts built in from the very start” (ibid).
Clearly,
the issue of who funds national public television productions and what impact
the funding has on editorial decisions (both the short-term editorial impact on
an individual project and the long-term impact on strategic thinking and
program decisions), is an ongoing concern. In fact, it has been an ongoing concern for decades. However, it is critically important
that we not take a narrow view of public broadcasting. PBS is not like commercial
networks. The pressures on funding
documentaries that Williamson describes is one part of the public media
environment in the United States, but not the total story by any means.
At
this point, I should note that I have a long history in this arena. I worked for a public television
station for almost two decades and, in subsequent positions, worked closely
with individual stations and with the PBS Adult Learning Service for another
seven years. I have a perspective
that colors how I see issues.
Williamson
notes that the media age of the PBS prime time audience is sixty-two. That may be true—and certainly,
the fund-raising programs targeted at that audience do tend to reinforce the
idea. However, this kind of
generalization is a gross misunderstanding of the system’s purpose and
structure. While the PBS primetime audience is bigger than many national
commercial channels, PBS doesn’t go after a single audience (as commercial
stations target the prime “consumer” market segment—people aged 18-35). Instead, they target programs to a wide
spectrum of specialized audiences to meet the needs of specific groups of
citizens. Here, from the PBSwebsite
are some examples:
- Over the course of a year, nearly 90% of all U.S. television households - and 217 million people - watch PBS. The demographic breakdown of PBS' full-day audience reflects the overall U.S. population with respect to race/ethnicity, education and income. (Nielsen NPower, 9/24/2012-9/22/2013)
- In a typical month, 104 million people watch their local PBS stations. (Nielsen NPower, 9/30/2013-10/27/2013)
- 80% of all kids age two to eight watched PBS during the 2012-'13 season. (Nielsen NPower, 9/24/2012-9/22/2013)
- PBS had seven of the top 10 programs among mothers of young children in July 2014. (Nielsen NPower, 7/2014)
Local Stations: The Heart of Public Broadcasting
Another
way that public broadcasting differs from commercial broadcasting is that its
strength lies greatly in the local station and the connections between
individual stations and the communities that they serve. The nation’s 161 public
broadcasting licensees (who together operate 351 local stations) fall into
three major categories: 84 are community organizations, 52
are colleges/universities, 20 are state authorities and five are local
educational or municipal authorities. These stations are the true heart of public
broadcasting.
Originally,
many of them were founded in order to extend educational and cultural resources
into their communities. Until the
1990s, many stations devoted their daytime schedules to instructional
television programs targeted to the K-12 curriculum. Every year, station personnel would meet with local school
representatives to preview new programs and identify those that met local
educational needs. The station
would then acquire broadcast rights and schedule those programs for broadcast
during the academic year. When PBS
moved to satellite distribution in the late 1970s, they added an Adult Learning
Service and distributed college-level courses that local colleges and universities
could license and offer for credit around local broadcasts.
Today,
PBS maintains PBS LearningMedia.org, a free online collection of educational video modules in science, math,
social sciences and English language arts that teachers may download and use in
the classroom. The collection is
complemented by PBS Teacherline which provides access to related teacher professional development opportunities.
This
is one example of how public broadcasting’s strategies for serving the
community have changed over the years as technologies and needs have
changed. When I first started in
public broadcasting at Penn State in the 1960s, we had one channel that served
29 central Pennsylvania counties.
Today, WPSU delivers programs over three channels (one broadcast, two
cable). In addition, it offers
three public radio channels with a mix of classical music, news and discussion,
and jazz. And, our community also
has access to a cable-based children’s channel—Sprout—from the Children’s
Television Workshop, which developed Sesame
Street and other children’s programs that are identified with public
broadcasting and that includes many of the same children’s programs broadcast
on the main public TV channel.
And, even more, there is a PBS application for iPAD that allows viewers
to watch full episodes of many nationally delivered programs.
Time,
changing technology and changing need, as our communities adapt to a new
economic and social context, have created both new challenges and new
opportunities for how we use media to inform, educate, and enlighten citizens
of the communities served by this unique system. Public broadcasting is better described today as public
media, because it uses multiple media delivery systems—continues to be an
important way to bring high-quality information and artistic expression to
communities and individual citizens.
Ultimately,
the key to success lies in the links between local communities and their local
station, between that station and the national PBS service. For instance, local stations could work
with their local school districts to encourage the use of PBS Learning Media services,
testing them against local teacher needs, identifying unmet needs, and
encouraging sharing of ideas across school boundaries.
Increasingly,
there is also a need to create links among stations that have similar missions to
collaborate in the development and use of programs). One example is
University Place, a partnership among three university-licensed Public
Television stations at Ohio State University, the University of Wisconsin, and
Penn State University to develop content in collaboration with stations'
affiliated universities, and delivery of content to teachers and other
audiences via the web, podcast, video-on-demand, and television broadcast.
University Place was funded in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The project included development of a University Place Content
Sharing Portal—a web-based service designed to help
stations share, search and retrieve each others' programs.
In
today’s multi-platform environment, public media organizations can be, more
than ever, agencies that make the match between community need and media
resources, whether for instruction, community development, or cultural
expression. Innovations like
University Place and PBS LearningMedia suggest some starting points for the
next generation of public broadcasting.
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