Reports indicating that the House Appropriations Committee plans to slash $531 million in funding for public
broadcast companies such as NPR and PBS has sparked a number of online petitions and other efforts to stop the cuts. The anticipated cut comes
after the Republican majority in the House of Representatives
proposed $61 billion in budget cuts that would severely impact poor
and working-class people already hit hard by the economic crisis.
Among
the proposals was one to entirely eliminate federal funding for the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The CPB, a non-profit
corporation established by Congress in 1967, is a source of funding
for NPR and PBS, but 70 percent of its money goes directly to 1,300
public radio and television stations. The funding supports shows such
as “Sesame Street,” “The NewsHour,” NPR’s “All Things
Considered” and “Morning Edition” among others.
Public
broadcasting executives are encouraging people to write letters to
Congress expressing opposition to the cuts. In a recent statement, Vivian Schiller, NPR’s president
and CEO, said the anticipated budget cuts would “diminish stations’
ability to bring high-quality local, national, and international news
to their communities, as well as local arts, music, and cultural
programming that other media don’t present.”
But how “public” is public broadcasting? Undoubtedly,
public broadcasting stations can and do present worthwhile cultural
and educational programs to the public when we might not have them otherwise. At the same time, much of their funding comes from private sources. Public broadcasting depends heavily on funds from private underwriters, usually in exchange for promotional messages that have become virtually indistinguishable from standard advertising. This is hardly condusive to independent reporting that puts the public interest before corporate interests.
A look at the corporate
funders of public broadcasting is a “who’s who” of corporations that have profited from U.S. militarism, engaged in super-exploitation of workers and wreaked havoc on
society: BP, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Monsanto, Bank of America
Corporation, Dow Chemical Company, McDonald’s and Pfizer to name a
few. A close look at the “high-quality” news that CEO Schiller
touts makes clear that those corporations are getting a good return
on their investment in public broadcasting.
According
to a report on ABC News, about 2 percent of NPR’s funding comes
from the federal government, as compared to 15 percent for PBS. The
proposed cuts would most severely impact local PBS stations, some of
which receive as much as 40 to 50 percent of their funding from
federal and state grants. The cuts will only increase their reliance on—and bias toward—private funders.
Studies
have repeatedly shown that public broadcast news shows are heavily biased in
favor of the corporate interests on which they rely for funding. Fairness
and Accuracy in Reporting, an organization that monitors news media,
describes numerous examples of “public” broadcasting serving
corporate interests. In November 2010, it released a study that
examined the PBS NewsHour in the months of May and June of that year.
In
the course of the study, 10 percent of the guests on the show were
affiliated with corporations, but only 2 percent came from labor,
environmental groups or consumer rights organizations.
In
coverage of the BP oil spill that devastated (and still impacts)
residents along the Gulf of Mexico, 13 percent of guests on The News
Hour were representatives of oil companies, but only 3 percent were
from environmental groups.
A
look at coverage of the war in Afghanistan showed that 70 percent of
the 60 guests who appeared on the show were either current or former
military or government officials. Not one single guest represented an
anti-war organization or even expressed anti-war opinions on the
show, in spite of the fact that the majority of U.S. citizens oppose
the war.
The
absence of anti-war voices is easily explained by the funding that
public broadcast stations receive from the military-industrial
complex. One such company, Northrop Grumman, is a major funder of
Cyberchase, an animated show which airs on the PBS Kids GO network,
and is aimed at children 8 to 12 years old.
Often
public broadcasting’s pro-corporate bias is deceptively subtle,
revealed in the selection of voices to be heard and the framing of
issues. Other programming is more blatant, such as “Turmoil and
Triumph,” a puff piece celebrating George Shultz, Ronald Reagan’s
secretary of state, that aired in July 2010. Funders for the three-hour
documentary included The Stephen Bechtel Fund and Charles Schwab,
founder of the Charles Schwab Corporation. Shultz was president of
Bechtel from 1975 to 1982 and served on the boards of both companies.
Public
broadcasting reporting and analysis, adopting a soft and moderate
tone, is perhaps more deceptive than the right-wing ravings heard on
Fox News and cable TV, but its mission is to support entrenched
corporate interests. The fight for public broadcasting is worthwhile—but it will take much more than stopping the budget cuts to create public media that is not beholden to the interests of big capital.
