It Didn't Begin with Sesame Street

Jesse Walker from the October 1997 issue

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That's the year Congress created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The CPB was launched at the recommendation of the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television, a nominally independent panel that was in fact largely directed from the Johnson White House. CPB and PBS were supposed to be independent institutions shielded from government influence. In actual practice, they're federal bureaucracies run by political appointees, as susceptible to political pressure as any other part of official Washington.

At PBS, even demands for decentralization often come from above. Richard Nixon distrusted the network, believing--rightly--that it was biased toward the Eastern establishment. So in 1971, Clay Whitehead, head of the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy, tried to weaken the national network by calling for a "return to localism." It was an odd choice of words: How could public TV "return" to an arrangement it had never enjoyed? The ultimate result was not to decentralize or defund, but to neuter. PBS's commitment to controversial programming, already weak, softened even further after the Nixon attack. (Despite its radical reputation, PBS seems less committed to socialism than to the British class system.)

If community radio is noncommercial broadcasting at its most decentralist and anti-bureaucratic, and if PBS represents the other extreme, NPR falls somewhere in-between. Like community radio, educational radio emerged without federal direction: Some schools were sponsoring stations even before World War I, and dozens were born in the 1920s. Unlike community radio, these stations were, to judge from historical accounts, spectacularly dull--"pap for the intellectual masses," in Lorenzo Milam's words. You won't get this impression from Engelman's book, which prefers stressing the stations' allegedly populist roots over describing the enervating lectures that made up their usual programming.

At any rate, the foundations that created PBS weren't interested in radio, and the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 would have ignored the medium altogether were it not for some last-minute lobbying by the National Association of Educational Broadcasters. The result was NPR, founded with CPB cash in 1970. It was William Siemering, the innovative manager of SUNY-Buffalo's WBFO-FM, who conceived the new network and its flagship program. The original All Things Considered plan called for news reports from public stations around the country, with the Washington offices serving more as a clearinghouse than as a command center. Instead, NPR became yet another centralized institution run by political appointees, especially after Siemering was fired as program director in 1972. By 1993, things had gotten to the point where the head of the CPB could seriously call for merging NPR with the Voice of America.

Competition from a rival network--American Public Radio, recently renamed Public Radio International--hasn't reversed the trend toward centralization. In 1987, Engelman notes, 60 percent of public radio programs were locally produced. Today, the ratio tips the other way. Meanwhile, most NPR and PRI programs are upscale and middlebrow, broadcasting hour after hour of candy-coated brie. It's hard to see how one can call this arrangement "public," unless one's only criterion is a heavy influx of public dollars.

Earlier this year, KPFK (Pacifica's Los Angeles outlet) canceled a program called Music of the Americas. The show, whose music ranged from Dixieland to film scores to contemporary experimental compositions, was "too arcane and challenging," station manager Mark Schubb told the Los Angeles Times. Thirty years ago, it would have been unheard-of for a Pacifica station to drop a show for such a reason. Today, it's par for the course.

Schubb also killed the Opera Show, a Sunday-morning fixture for 26 years. Like Music of the Americas, the Opera Show didn't limit itself to spinning records. Host Fred Hyatt interviewed guests, offered informed commentary, and sometimes went beyond the traditional boundaries of opera--all the way out to The Pajama Game. The problem wasn't the show's quality, Schubb explained; it was the ratings. "All that matters is coming up with matching funds," Hyatt complained to the Times. "And now, they're really punching the so-called multicultural thing. It's all very cynical."

Supposedly, government money was going to protect noncommercial stations against the Vengeful God Arbitron. It hasn't worked out that way. Engelman's book would be much better if he spent a little more time wondering why that might be so.