Public TV Under Assault

By Richard Zoglin

What is public television made of? Snips and snails and Big Bird tales, many viewers might answer. For them, PBS is the home of Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood and all that's best and most wholesome in American TV.

But for a vocal band of conservatives, including a growing number of election-year critics on Capitol Hill, public TV is something else again: a government-feathered nest of subversive, indecent and politically biased programming. The increasingly intense assaults are turning public-television funding into a controversy that could become hotter than the one that recently engulfed the National Endowment for the Arts.

-- Republican presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan used a PBS show as Exhibit A in his attacks on President Bush for condoning "pornographic and blasphemous art" funded by the NEA. A Buchanan TV ad featured scenes from Tongues Untied, a documentary about the gay black life-style that ran on 114 PBS stations last July.

-- A Senate bill to provide a three-year authorization of $1.1 billion for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funnels money to PBS and its member stations, was delayed early this month after conservative Senators railed against the alleged leftward tilt of the shows. Republican John McCain of Arizona blasted Maria's Story, the profile of a peasant woman who joined the left-wing insurgency in El Salvador, which aired last summer. Minority leader Robert Dole criticized PBS election commentators Bill Moyers and former Washington Post editor William Grieder -- "two excellent journalists who also / happen to be two excellent liberal Democrats."

-- These complaints have dovetailed with free-market economics to inspire a spate of calls to end federal support for public TV altogether. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, released a report in January arguing that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting should be privatized. The growth of new cable channels offering similar fare, the report argued, "makes today's public-broadcasting system unnecessary and wasteful."

The current ruckus may be more political grandstanding than a real threat to public TV's future. Despite vociferous attacks by Senate conservatives, led by Dole and Jesse Helms, proponents plan to bring the CPB funding bill back to the floor in the next week or so and are confident they can beat back any crippling amendments.

The attacks on the CPB, moreover, seem somewhat misdirected. The agency accounts for just 17% of all public-TV funding; the rest comes from individual subscribers, corporations and other sources. The shows that have drawn the most ire were produced without CPB help at all. Tongues Untied was made by Berkeley lecturer Marlon Riggs for $175,000, $5,000 of which came (through two intermediary sources) from the National Endowment for the Arts. Maria's Story, which cost $225,000, was funded by Britain's Channel 4 and other sources.

Both shows, to be sure, were part of a CPB-funded series, P.O.V. But the CPB plays no role in approving individual projects in the series, which was created expressly as a forum for independent, out-of-the-mainstream filmmakers. "It's not that we're out looking for controversy," says P.O.V. executive producer Marc Weiss. "But if we're going to shrink from it, then we might as well put P.O.V. out of business altogether."

Conservatives are even more outraged at a series of documentaries being funded by the Independent Television Service. The organization, created by Congress in 1988 to help bring more minority voices to PBS, has released an initial list of projects that sounds like a TV Guide schedule from George Bush's worst nightmare. Among the titles: Endangered Species: The Toxic Poisoning of Communities of Color; An Act of War: The Overthrow of the Hawaiian Nation; and Citizen Dhoruba, a portrait of a former Black Panther convicted of attempting to kill two New York City policemen.

A survey by the Center for Media and Public Affairs asserts that sources quoted in PBS news and documentary programming over a one-year period in 1987-88 were much more likely to support liberal causes, like environmental activism and opposition to the arms race. Even if true (and PBS supporters dispute the study), the public network has drawn fire from liberals as well. The same study also found that women and minorities are underrepresented as talking heads on PBS. The network's longest running commentator is conservative William Buckley. And the importance of corporate underwriting has led to blander, not more provocative, fare: companies concerned about their image tend to favor kindly nature series and benign historical epics.

In any event, PBS defenders point out, the audience seems satisfied. A 1990 survey commissioned by PBS found that 79% of viewers see no political bias in public- TV fare; the remainder were divided as to whether it leans left or right. "If people perceived a bias," contends PBS president Bruce Christensen, "they wouldn't contribute as they do." And if politicians did not perceive a bias -- whether it exists or not -- they would have one less hot-button issue in an election year.

With reporting by Elaine Shannon/Washington