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Publisher's Note
The threat to cut public funding for public television was the subject of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism's First Amendment Leadership Breakfast on April 26. Bill Moyers, television correspondent and producer, debated "PBS: To Be or Not To Be" with New York Post television critic John Podhoretz. Floyd Abrams, William J. Brennan Jr. Visiting Professor of First Amendment Studies at the school, moderated. The following are excerpts of Moyers's comments.
I'm not here this morning to say that public broadcasting has lived up to all the expectations that attended its birth. Like every human enterprise, it is a narrative of designs, many of which have failed. It is a cracked mirror.
Nor am I here to argue that public broadcasting should be exempt from the general belt-tightening made necessary by the inability of our political system to sort out priorities and to finance government responsibly. All of us, including public broadcasting, have to accept a proportionate share of austerity in this time of reckoning.
Public broadcasting's share is a pittance, though, compared to the billions spent every year on corporate welfare, local pork, and other subsidies. (Rupert Murdoch himself, one of the world's richest men, was recently awarded a tax break by Congress equal, by one estimate, to about one-fourth of public broadcasting's annual appropriation.)
What I would ask you to think about is whether every good a society seeks can be served by the marketplace. For good or ill, and it's both, television has become the all-encompassing environment of American society. You cannot escape its pervasive presence even if you turn your own set off.
It is the mix of programming which establishes the density, the quality, and the character of the overall media environment in this country. And I would contend that American society is somewhat less coarse, somewhat less vulgar, and that television entertainment is considerably less violent, because public broadcasting is in the mix.
My right-wing friends deplore the crudity, vulgarity, and violence of popular culture even as many of them staunchly defend, and even subsidize, the market forces that create and drive this unprecedented flood of mass-produced and mass-consumed images. This is the anomaly.
The appalling excretion of violent entertainment and instant gratification that so many Americans are concerned about are all driven by the market. I appreciate the market. I understand the market provides people with their wants, but I would not want to live in a society where it is only the market that determines the total mix of the influences that shape our psychological, moral, and political mentality.
I'm not sure what it means to society that MTV would run repeatedly a hit song about a teen incest victim pumping a bullet into her daddy's brain. But I know it profits the market. I don't know what it means to society that my friend Barbara Walters can get huge audiences interviewing convicted murderers. But I know what it means to the market.
What these profit society I don't know, but I do know that a psychologist at the University of Illinois who studied a set of children for twenty years found that kids who watch significant amounts of television violence at the age of eight were consistently more likely to commit violent crimes or engage in child or spouse abuse at thirty.
What we are witnessing in America today, caused by many forces, is a devaluation of life and public discourse that requires in response a strategy of affirmation by society as a whole. Homes, schools, churches, synagogues, newspapers, all the institutions that transmit values need to respond with affirmation to such vile images. I believe that public broadcasting, for all our flaws, is part of that strategy of affirmation.
Leo Strauss once wrote that liberal education is liberation from vulgarity. He reminded us that the Greeks had a beautiful word for vulgarity; they called it apeirokala, the lack of experience in things beautiful. Vulgarity is the lack of experience in things beautiful. In its own modest and halting way, public television has something to offer -- performing arts, extended conversation, travel, nature, children's programs, the many interests of art and life that cultivate the moral imagination and human sensibility show up in one way or another sooner or later on public broadcasting.
If life is a continuing course in adult education, television can be a universal classroom for the arts and the humanities. When Richard Strauss's opera Electra aired last December, the biggest segment that watched at least some of that programming, 39 percent of the audience, earned less than $40,000. This is public education in one sense of the word -- available to all, irrespective of means.
I say we are enjoined to try to find a way to protect this fragile but important institution from the new majority in Congress that instead of trying to reconstruct and recreate it, would smash it instead with a wrecking ball.
