David Uberti at the Columbia Journalism Review reported that Harper’s Magazine received an angry call from an advertiser on September 18 over a critical story slamming the advertiser the week before. The publisher, John McArthur, “wasn’t surprised that it decided to pull ads from subsequent issues. But he was shocked by who that advertiser was: PBS, the public broadcaster famous for Big Bird and Ken Burns’ epic historical documentaries.”
PBS planned to run ads promoting DVD sales of the Ken Burns series on The Roosevelts. They sell the DVDs now at the same time that the program is airing on television. Sales cannot wait -- on public TV? And who is profiting from these DVDs? Answer? Not the taxpayers.
The Harper's article was headlined “PBS Self-Destructs,” and writer Eugenia Williamson claimed that PBS was a complete disappointment to liberals, mocking the idea that PBS has ever had a liberal bias:
“[I]t doesn’t matter that the Republicans couldn’t defund PBS — they really didn’t need to. Twenty years on, the liberal bias they bemoaned has evaporated, if it ever existed to begin with,” Williamson writes. “Today, the only special-interest group the network clearly favors is the aging upper class: their tastes, their pet agendas, their centrist politics. . . . [T]he present state of PBS is almost an inevitability, the result of structural deficiencies and ideological conflicts built in from the very start.”
CJR thought the “money quote” came from PBS omnipresence Bill Moyers, who has “graced” the PBS airwaves incessantly since the 1970s:
‘Night after night,’ Moyers told me, ‘the realities of life for the vast majority of Americans rarely show up on public television — neither on its public-affairs programming nor its prime-time fare. There has been one documentary all year on the flailing middle class and the forgotten poor. Our Washington coverage, by design or not, serves up ‘news’ the way the butler serves tea on Downton Abbey, so as not to disturb the master class. Even my friends at WETA, our flagship station in Washington, passed up the award-winning documentary Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth to air instead another episode of Antiques Roadshow and a program about the British royal family. And PBS has commissioned a series for next year, using U.S. taxpayer funds, on the ‘great homes’ of Great Britain. Not on homelessness in America. Unbelievable!’
“Our readers are their viewers, which is why we thought it was an important story,” MacArthur told CJR, admitting the liberal synergy. “We’re part of the same family. So to have done such a petty thing does make me suspicious.”
CJR concluded:
Pulling advertisements is an age-old tactic for businesses facing media criticism to seek retribution. But in the case of PBS, which exists in part as a way to limit commercial influence on educational television, doing so just feeds into writer Eugenia Williamson’s thesis — that the idealistic, Great Society-era initiative often behaves more like a corporate or political organism.
But the Moyers-Williamson critique is that PBS isn't enough of a political organism, pushing a socialist revolution.
PBS distributed a list of talking points to station managers which included the claim that they have the sixth largest ratings among all television networks. I thought PBS didn't care about ratings!
