The most effective work Jarvik offers is his examination of PBS's top-down educational and cultural philosophy (in, for example, Sesame Street), and the growth of corporate involvement in building a schedule (especially the case of the Mobil Corporation's role). The least effective reflects his conservative concern with evenhandedness, especially when addressing such programs as Frontline, a longtime target of conservative ire. Even if one concedes for the sake of argument that conservative complaints about government-funded "propagandizing" of viewers have public policy legitimacy, Jarvik himself is arguing for the privatization of the system, which would make the fairness question moot. Besides, the imposition of a Fairness Doctrine on PBS was always a prescription for blandness and a likely excuse for establishing a direct censorship mechanism, and in the end would have served no one. Better just to pull the plug; better yet to privatize.
Jarvik's conservatism has littered his argument with a number of questionable judgments. PBS programs about televangelists like Jim Bakker were not "anti-Christian," as Jarvik asserts; they were anti�con men. There was nothing wrong with a PBS show that painted Father Charles Coughlin as a fascist; that's a restrained characterization. Suggesting that The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, a film about the role of women in wartime industry, was a work of feminist revisionism is unfair; the film portrays something that happened.
A whole chapter of Jarvik's book is devoted to one program, Liberators, and that is disproportionate. The story the 1992 film told of concentration camps being liberated by black American soldiers was revealed to be false; the program was, deservedly, a severe embarrassment to PBS. But documentaries and news stories that are fraudulent are hardly peculiar to public TV. There's only so much legitimate mileage to be gained from such cases without falling into mere bashing.
Still, readers who are neither reflexive defenders of PBS as a fount of culture, nor reflexive critics of it as a left-wing propaganda machine, will find useful material in Jarvik's history, not least because public TV as it has developed is a riveting example of unintended mass media consequences arising from state intervention in cultural exchange.
Established as a medium of social and educational uplift, public TV is by now a redoubt of self-professed enlightenment. It is rare to hear its pitchmen speak of either education or uplift anymore; they speak of bringing their viewers more of the shows they like.
That's far from the elitist philosophy that shaped PBS's establishment. "Excellence," as defined by those of education and taste, was preached by Harvard educator John Gardner as a social good in his influential 1961 book of that title, and applied by such philanthropies as the Ford Foundation; PBS was intended as an antidote of such excellence to lowbrow commercialism. Yet PBS's schedule today is heavy with middlebrow entertainment and self-help shows, from the "spiritual" pronouncements of Deepak Chopra and Yanni, to the music of John Tesh, to often-repeated programs about personal investment strategies and even dog training.
Intended as a showcase of television at its best, PBS has developed a schedule of programs surprisingly redolent of what the commercial networks were offering in an earlier stage of their development. People remember that commercial networks once showcased impressive original drama, but they also used to present opera singers and cinéma vérité documentaries. PBS still presents full-length opera (so does Bravo), but the direction in which it is leading its viewers' appreciation of opera singers--to Dodger Stadium, where The Three Tenors can belt out Broadway show tunes--has disturbed genuine elitists. Bel canto on PBS is increasingly like the old Voice of Firestone on an unimagined scale.
Indeed, though PBS was supposed to raise the general level of culture to which the mass audience was exposed, the very existence of a public broadcasting network tending to a particular slice of the demographic pie was a likely factor in the networks' abandonment of the cultural gatekeeper role they inherited from network radio. The result was that the commercial network schedules were stripped of their slightly more upscale shows and became cheesier than ever.
While PBS was set up to create television that was unfettered by commercial interest or restraint, an impressive amount of its air time is now given over to programs that corporations are willing to be associated with, and to support. Better their money than ours, of course, but the promotion of corporate patronage as an essential aspect of elite American culture is an ironic fulfillment of the original pretentious vision underlying PBS.
There's nothing inherently wrong with seeking corporate funding (REASON does so); there's nothing wrong with giving an established viewership programs it likes. But it smacks suspiciously of a marketplace. There's really only one thing missing to set the network free and let PBS be PBS.
Jailer! The key!
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