PBS - Fair & Balanced

[HagiaSophia]

"…Amid conflict over the political content of its programming, the Public Broadcasting Service yesterday unveiled editorial standards intended to ensure balance and fairness in its news, science and documentary shows.

Separately, Alexandria-based PBS also said it would hire an ombudsman for the first time to review controversial programs after they air.

Officials said both moves were initiated before public broadcasting in general, and PBS in particular, came under fire in recent months from the head of a primary funding organization. But both actions, at the very least, could help PBS dispel the impression that it is unresponsive to its critics just as Congress is considering public broadcasting’s federal funding for next year.

Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting – the agency that passes those federal funds to public broadcasters – has recently asserted that PBS ignores or marginalizes conservative viewpoints. Last week, a Republican-dominated House subcommittee voted to slash federal support of public broadcasting by 25 percent overall, and to eliminate money for children’s educational programming, satellite technology and digital-signal improvements. Public broadcasters are lobbying to get the money restored…"

washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/14/AR2005061401658.html

 

[jlw]

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I Feel Sorry For PBS
Paul Farhi reports in the Washington Post that PBS has updated its editorial standards and will hire an ombudsman to handle complaints about the network’s programming. Farhi’s report provides clues about why PBS might have undertaken such measures:

The [Corporation for Public Broadcasting] must review and accept [the new standards] before it will release $23 million in funds for PBS’s National Program Service (NPS), which includes online content and the shows “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer,” “Nova” and “American Experience.” If CPB rejects the guidelines, NPS funding that is supposed to begin in October would be jeopardized.This is embarrassing. As someone who enjoys (some) PBS programming, I hate to see the network groveling for government handouts this way. A Media Blog reader points to a way out of this humiliating dilemma:

I was just on my local NPR member station’s Web site and noticed the NPR demographics they proudly touted. If there were ever a case for not subsidizing NPR they just made it:

Seventy-three percent have household incomes over $50,000. Forty-nine percent have household incomes over $75,000.

Do we really need to subsidize this group? Couldn’t those 73 percent support the other 26 percent?As I mentioned before, the CPB only provides 15.5 percent of the total funding for public broadcasting. If Congress could find the will to defund the CPB, public broadcasters wouldn’t have to worry about big, bad Kenneth Y. Tomlinson anymore. To make up the shortfall, they could ask the citizens, corporations and local governments that currently chip in the other 84.5 percent, and then broadcast whatever they wanted without having to go begging around Washington.

Jesse Walker over at Reason doesn’t think that Republicans will give up the CPB now that they’ve got control of it.

Brent Bozell wrote back in February about how the panel that created the new guidelines was stacked with people who would never criticize the network for bias in the first place.

UPDATE: To the snarling NY Times editorial page, the recent CPB budget cuts passed by the House of Representatives were “spiteful” — as opposed to this model of civil, reasoned discourse.