A New Vision for Public Television
by A retired public broadcaster offers his vision for the future of the medium.
[Fred Flaxman is a former vice president of public broadcasting stations WXEL-TV-FM, West Palm Beach; WETA-TV-FM, Washington, D.C.; WTTW-TV, Chicago, Ill., and KSYS-TV, Medford, Ore. He was the founding manager of WETA-FM, Washington, D.C. He is the producer and host of a nationally distributed classical music radio series called Compact Discoveries, and the author of a forthcoming memoir, Sixty Slices of Life... on Wry: The Private Life of a Public Broadcaster.]
Public television has not become an issue in the 2008 political campaigns, as it has so many times in the past. But it is only a matter of time before the Republicans, once again, will advocate cutting federal funding out completely, on the grounds that public TV is no longer needed, and the Democrats will argue, as usual, for leaving things as they are, on the grounds that if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. And they will both be wrong.
Republicans have a point when they say that PBS, as it is now, is no longer as important to the Republic as it was many years ago when it competed for viewers with just three major commercial TV networks — before cable, satellite TV, DVDs and the Internet. PBS was once the only U.S. TV medium for long-form documentaries, concerts, science and history programs. That is no longer the case.
But it doesn’t follow that PBS is no longer needed. What follows is that PBS needs to change drastically if it is to remain viable, fundable, and a necessity to our democracy, our culture, and our American way of life.
Here’s one man’s vision for a bright digital future for public television:
PBS would have four digital program services. The first would be a video imitation of highly successful NPR News, bringing in-depth news and public information programs like “All Things Considered,” “Day by Day,” and “Morning Edition” to the TV screen, 24 hours a day. It would be totally unlike CNN, MSNBC and Fox News, bringing viewers what is most important for them to know rather than what is most entertaining, and it would do this without commercial interruptions and annoying scrolling messages on the bottom of its screens. PBS News, like NPR News, would produce its own programs and ally itself with NPR, the BBC and other reputable international news services to cover the world as well as the U.S., and the arts and sciences as well as politics and crime.
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Post CommentNat Katzman
On October 26, 2008 at 11:31 am
As always, Fred is provocative and thoughtful. I would only propose that his channel configuration merge pre-school and adult education into one (easily done by time of day), and that the 4th service be informational in a general sense for science, history, and such.
Unfortunately, to think that such change is possible (”perhaps even probable”) stretches wishful thinking to its limits. Government will never (and perhaps should not) pick up most of the bill for a first-rate non-commercial system. Maybe there will be someone who emulates Mrs. Kroc with a bequest of a few billion to endow PBS. Meanwhile we must stream on.
Karl Miller
On October 28, 2008 at 1:55 pm
I believe that public broadcasting has lost its way. It has, from my perspective, become a slave to the ratings.
Sadly, our other information sources have also become slaves to the bean counters. We have the classics in literature being removed from our libraries because those books don’t circulate as frequently as other books. Through the extension of our copyrights, even our cultural heritage is locked away from us.
I believe that most of the ideas Flaxman has expressed are worthy of our consideration, but while his focus is public broadcasting, I find his statement, “a necessity to our democracy, our culture, and our American way of life,” to be applicable to education and the uncensored flow of information. For me, that is where public broadcasting has faultered. I believe it has become entertainment at the expense of education and access to information. The access to uncensored information is essential if we are to maintain our form of government.
Karl Miller