New York—It’s hard for me to feel sorry about the travails of PBS NewsHour where bland has been beautiful for years, and an obsessive loyalty to mechanistic balance—always veering right—has been in command for decades.
The news on PBS survived all these many years because of lavish funding from major corporate sponsors who felt comfortable with its stuffy and unthreatening approach. It’s almost as if The Daily Show took the NewsHour as the antithesis of what it would do. Which is more credible?
In the years when the initials PBS were jokingly known as the “Petroleum Broadcasting System” because of all its backing from oil giants, the then McNeil-Lehrer Report went from a half-hour to an hour. At that time, The New Yorker magazine ran a cartoon featuring a loyal “listener”—there wasn’t much video in those days—asking, “Wasn’t it always an hour?” a comment on its frequently ponderous presentation.
The news in The New York Times, the NewsHour’s favorite journalistic source that it always sought to emulate, was not good:
“WASHINGTON—The PBS NewsHour, the signature nightly newscast on public television, is planning its first significant round of layoffs in nearly two decades.
“Because of declines in support from corporate sponsors, the show’s producer, MacNeil/Lehrer Productions, will close the two offices it has outside of the Washington area—in Denver and San Francisco—and lay off most of the employees there. The company, which is based in Arlington, Va., will also eliminate several of what it calls ‘noncritical production positions’ at its main office.”
The Times reported, “The production company was facing a shortfall of up to $7 million, a quarter of its $28 million overall budget.”
Actually, MacNeil/Lehrer Productions was privatized long ago when it was bought by right-wing cable mogul John Malone, once known as the “Darth Vader” of the industry. Jim Lehrer and Robert MacNeil were beneficiaries of the deal, cashing in on their public television assets for private ends.
When PBS NewsHour takes a deep hit, you know other broadcasters will feel more pain, as is the case in Greece where the whole public broadcasting system is being phased out thanks to the draconian austerity policies imposed on the country after it couldn’t pay the money it owes to U.S.- based hedge funds.
Reuters reports:
“Greece’s government faced an internal revolt and public outrage on Wednesday over the sudden closure of state broadcaster ERT, hours after the humiliation of seeing its bourse downgraded to emerging market status.
“The public broadcaster was yanked off air just hours after the shutdown was announced in what the government said was a temporary measure to staunch an ‘incredible waste’ of taxpayers’ money prior to its relaunch as a slimmed-down station.
“Labor unions called a 24-hour national work stoppage for Thursday and journalists went on an open-ended strike, forcing a news blackout on privately owned television and newspapers.
“‘The strike will only end when the government takes back this coup d’etat which gags information,’ the journalists’ union said.”
Some ERT journalists occupied the broadcaster’s building in defiance of government orders and broadcast over the Internet, showing somber newscasters deploring the shutdown and replaying images of thousands gathered outside to protest.
ERT’s reporters from as far away as Australia appeared on air to describe the outrage of local Greek communities.
“It is our only link with our homeland,” said Odysseas Mandeakis, president of the Greek community in Zambia.
It is doubtful that unions, employees, and viewers would take similar action to save a PBS that has long served an upscale elite audience and is “public” in name only.
After years of battling for more fairness and courage on PBS, media activists, documentary makers, and people’s groups set up alternatives like Link TV, Free Speech TV, and Democracy Now.
I started my TV career in public broadcasting in Boston as a news reporter. When the station came under pressure from commercial broadcasters for competing with them, it killed the 10 o’clock news show on WGBH.
Then as an independent producer at Globalvision, we were never able to get PBS to distribute our two pioneering weekly series, South Africa Now, and Rights & Wrongs: Human Rights television. PBS was offended by Globalvision’s “organizing principle.”
PBS turned Rights & Wrongs down even though it was hosted by public television’s then most-respected correspondent, Charlayne Hunter-Gault.
TV Critic Marvin Kitman asked, “Does that mean that if it was balanced—for torture and against torture—they would carry it? In Norway, Sweden and on the BBC, they think the show is apolitical. Here they consider it ultra-leftist.”
The destruction of Greek Public Television can easily lead to an assault on other public broadcasters by governments that have terribly mismanaged their economies and who are now looking for scapegoats.
In Greece, the problem has been compounded by the fact that the IMF that was supposed to save the Greek economy now admits it made major mistakes and even caused some of the economic misery the country is facing.
And so, a media outlet that has been covering the crisis has now become central to it, as broadcasters Europe-wide, and viewers in Greece, express solidarity.
If ERT goes down without a fight today, others will follow tomorrow.
Anastasia Zigou, a member of Strike Struggle, a group formed by ERT journalists said:
“Many of us haven’t slept for 48 hours, but we won’t give in. We are sustained by the huge response we’ve had from citizens, not only here but at local radio stations all over the country.
“There have been people in tears at local radio stations in border regions—in Crete, in Samos, in Thrace. In those areas, ERT was the only Greek language radio you could hear, and the signals of other TV stations are weak too. Without ERT they feel cut off from the metropolis. But it’s much more than that, more than the firing of 2,600 workers. The sudden, undemocratic closure of a public broadcaster was a kind of coup. This isn’t a private station that someone can just decided to close. This doesn’t happen in democratic countries.”
She added this appeal:
“We need solidarity from around the world, not just from fellow journalists and unions but from ordinary citizens. This matters to everyone.”
News Dissector Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org and blogs at News Dissector.net. Comments to [email protected].
