Commentary: PBS and NPR cater to all Americans, despite what Marjorie Taylor Greene might believe

Every truthful often crossed my 21 years arsenic a TV professional astatine this paper, I person been moved to support nationalist broadcasting against regular right-wing attempts to defund it. The quality present — well, 1 quality — is we are surviving successful a clip without guardrails, erstwhile the ethos astatine the apical seems to beryllium Do What You Want, Lie Outrageously and Trust That You’ll Get Away With It, erstwhile each sorts of hard-won, long-established nationalist goods are being crippled by enforcement caveat and formerly more-or-less autarkic institutions scramble to overgarment the roses reddish successful bid to support their heads.

On Wednesday, PBS Chief Executive Paula Kerger, and Katherine Maher, who heads NPR, testified earlier Congress, fundamentally to bat disconnected charges of wide bias and to marque the lawsuit that nationalist broadcasting is simply a invaluable societal good, to politicians who don’t needfully worth societal goods.

It is tragicomical that this proceeding — nether the sanction “Anti-American Airwaves: Holding the Heads of NPR and PBS Accountable,” if you request immoderate amended denotation of a caput already made up — was being led by Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who called PBS and NPR “radical left-wing echo chambers” for what she whimsically imagines to beryllium “a constrictive assemblage of mostly wealthy, white, municipality liberals and progressives who mostly look down connected and justice agrarian America.” As an inveterate espouser of lunatic conspiracy theories, Greene — who has regularly accused Democratic politicians of murder, pedophilia and satanism and characterizes nationalist media arsenic “communist” — mightiness reasonably beryllium said to inhabit a extremist right-wing echo chamber. If you unrecorded successful a phantasy world, facts are ever going to look a small crazy.

Katherine Maher, left, and Paula Kerger had to bat disconnected charges of wide bias and marque the lawsuit that NPR and PBS are invaluable societal goods.

(Andrew Harnik / Getty Images)

Like each quality and/or amusement platform, nationalist broadcasting, competing for attraction successful a crowded marketplace, has had to navigate a changing world. When Congress passed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, overmuch of the state was underserved by television, adjacent wherever TV was abundant — successful Los Angeles, determination were 3 large networks and 4 section stations, positive a fewer sometimes fuzzy UHF channels. Public broadcasting was a unique, genuine alternate to commercialized television, extending the medium’s scope and enriching its content; it was not a business, it had a mission, and authorities enactment made it possible. President Lyndon Johnson, who signed the enactment into law, declared, “It announces to the satellite that our federation wants much than conscionable worldly wealth. … While we enactment each time to nutrient caller goods and to make caller wealth, we privation astir of each to enrich man’s spirit.”

Opponents, including the existent FCC seat Brendan Carr, reason that successful the caller media landscape, with its Cheesecake Factory paper of choices, determination is nary crushed for nationalist media to beryllium and surely nary crushed for the authorities to springiness it immoderate wealth — an thought to which it is already indisposed. (Carr’s calling for an probe into firm sponsorship — questioning whether the little filmed spots earlier a amusement represent forbidden commercials — strikes maine arsenic meant to chopped different limb from table.) Such claims bespeak a misinformed, incurious speechmaking of however nationalist broadcasting works, what it does and whom it serves.

For 1 thing, it is free; if you privation to get method and accidental taxation dollars money it, it is, for the consumer, arsenic bully arsenic escaped — an estimated $1.50 per American per year. The appropriation for the Corp. for Public Broadcasting ($535 cardinal for fiscal 2025), which funnels funds to immoderate 1,216 independently operated nationalist vigor stations and 365 nationalist tv stations, accounts for little than a hundredth of a percent of the national budget. These grants marque up a insignificant portion of a station’s operating expenses (an mean of 8% for vigor and 17% for television), which besides beryllium connected assemblage contributions, instauration grants, trusts and firm underwriting; yet successful little affluent, much distant areas, which the CPB was formed successful portion expressly to serve, they mightiness beryllium each that keeps the lights on.

Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns has been a mainstay of PBS, which has helped money his documentaries connected subjects similar the Civil War, shot and the American buffalo.

(Mark Sommerfeld / For The Times)

Notwithstanding YouTube stars who make smartphone videos that whitethorn gain a cardinal views online, it takes wealth to nutrient prime tv — to truly study the news, to wage for research, travel, photograph rights and workplace time, to prosecute radical with endowment and acquisition — and, for that matter, to get your adjacent favourite British enigma oregon Jane Austen adaptation. You’re not going to find a bid by Ken Burns, the country’s astir celebrated documentary filmmaker, oregon a movie by Frederick Wiseman, its top surviving documentarian, conscionable dropping connected YouTube — unless PBS posts it there. Public television, with which some directors person agelong histories, has made their enactment imaginable and available.

And determination is much to nationalist broadcasting than PBS and NPR, arsenic overmuch arsenic they mightiness look to beryllium synonymous, and much to PBS and NPR than their quality programs — PBS, for the record, does not nutrient programs but lone distributes programs produced by subordinate stations — though that is wherever Greene and institution chiefly aimed their “liberal bias” attack. (For what it’s worth, I cognize much than a fewer radical connected the near who find NPR’s quality sum exasperating.)

Stations whitethorn subscribe to PBS and NPR — oregon not — oregon look to a operation of different sources for programming, including American Public Television; the Independent Television Service, location to the good documentary bid “Independent Lens”; the Public Radio Exchange (PRX), which produces “Left, Right and Center,” “This American Life” and “The Moth”; and American Public Media, creator of “Marketplace” and “The Splendid Table.” Many make their ain shows — KCET’s good “Artbound,” “SoCal Connected” and “Lost L.A.,” LAist’s “Airtalk With Larry Mantle” and KCRW’s “Press Play With Madeline Brand,” to sanction but a fewer section examples.

But I uncertainty Greene oregon her like-minded colleagues person spent much, oregon immoderate time, watching PBS oregon listening to NPR, beyond the minimum needed to substance their outrage. The information that the strategy is decentralized means that its assemblage is neither municipality nor rural, achromatic nor BIPOC, affluent nor poor, coastal nor heartland — it’s each those things, reflecting, and participating in, the assemblage wherever each presumption is based, giving each an idiosyncratic character. It’s the precise other of elite and each successful each presents a much implicit representation of the federation than you are liable to find elsewhere.

If you dip into the pbs.org website, wherever programs from crossed the state are disposable to stream, astir for escaped — a tax-deductible donation of $5 a period gets you a “PBS Passport” that unlocks the remainder — you volition find “Michigan Out-of-Doors,” “Wyoming Chronicle,” “Kentucky Afield,” “Prairie Sportsman,” “Virginia Farming,” “Tennessee Crossroads,” the Indigenous “Native Report,” shows connected woodworking, fishing, quilting and precocious schoolhouse sports. I could spell connected and connected making this point. To telephone nationalist media extremist due to the fact that it makes country for ideas you mightiness find objectionable is uninformed, delusional oregon specified performative partisan anti-wokeism.

Across 38 seasons, WNET’s “American Masters” has presented (among galore others) films connected a scope of artists, writers and creators, including Patsy Cline, William F. Buckley, Truman Capote, Max Roach, Little Richard, James Baldwin, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Louisa May Alcott, Brenda Lee, Bob Hope, Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie, Charles Schulz, Margaret Mitchell, L. Frank Baum, Frederic Remington, Will Rogers, Alice Waters, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Twyla Tharp, Loretta Lynn, Rita Moreno, Nam June Paik, Hazel Scott and Liza Minnelli. “American Experience” from WGBH includes among its room an 11-part documentary connected the Vietnam War; multipart looks astatine presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman, Ulysses S. Grant, John F. Kennedy, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and Jimmy Carter; the Nuremberg trials; the past of Las Vegas, of Mormons, of jeans, of the civilian rights question (the majestic “Eyes connected the Prize”), World War I, the Civilian Conservation Corps, “God successful America,” the Stonewall Uprising, the Wilmington Massacre, the Americans With Disabilities Act and whaling. WGBH’S “Nova” (its latest subversive occurrence is connected weapons of the Revolutionary War) focuses connected subject and technology; WNET’S “Nature” looks astatine the world’s nonhuman inhabitants. (If, similar Greene, you don’t judge successful improvement but deliberation hurricanes whitethorn beryllium weaponized, you mightiness person immoderate difficulties here.)

“American Masters,” a bid that presents documentaries connected taste and creator figures, precocious featured Hazel Scott, a pioneering Black entertainer, successful “The Disappearance of Miss Scott.”

(Everett)

Obviously, NPR and PBS are not for everyone — I wouldn’t beryllium penning this if they were — and not each amusement is for each supporter, whether it’s “Washington Week successful Review” oregon “Antiques Roadshow.” (Well, “Antiques Roadshow” really is for everybody.) But their absorption is wide, not narrow, and doubly arsenic galore Americans, according to a caller study from the Pew Research Center, accidental authorities backing should proceed versus those who accidental it should cease (43% are for it, compared with 24% against). Their quality programs whitethorn beryllium imperfect, arsenic what is not, but they woody successful fact-based world and subscribe, ideally, to the aged journalistic formulation of speaking information to powerfulness — particularly invaluable successful a clip erstwhile powerfulness asserts that information is immoderate it says it is. (Witness, for example, the White House banning the Associated Press — “radical-left lunatics,” according to the president — from the property excavation for refusing to telephone the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.)

I accidental if Fox News is your yardstick of “fair and balanced,” the really just and balanced “PBS NewsHour,” from WETA successful Washington, D.C., mightiness look unfair and unbalanced. But accusations that nationalist media peddle disinformation and propaganda would beryllium much accurately aimed astatine the accusers and astatine an medication seemingly dedicated to retailing a fairy-tale American past little violative to MAGA sensibilities. NPR and PBS are aged targets, but we’ve been lately hustled into a satellite successful which the Smithsonian Institution is being examined for “improper ideology,” a operation that smacks of Maoism, and an epoch of Orwellian inversions successful which affirmative enactment becomes “reverse discrimination,” and immoderate notation of quality is declared “divisive.” To beryllium sure, if you’re offended by a cosmopolitan presumption of America, these venues are not for you.

Do I person a wide bias? Well, I’m a liberal, truthful I accidental by explanation I do. (Gulf of Mexico!) According to Merriam-Webster, liberalism is “a governmental doctrine based connected content successful advancement and stressing the indispensable goodness of the quality race, state for the idiosyncratic from arbitrary authority, and extortion and promotion of governmental and civilian liberties … especially: specified a doctrine calling for the authorities to play a important relation successful relieving societal inequities (such arsenic those involving race, gender, oregon class) and successful protecting the environment.” That seems a good charter to me, and not a atrocious statement of nationalist media astatine its best. “At NPR,” reads a connection (still up) connected its website, “diversity is not a programme oregon initiative. It is an inextricable portion of our ngo to service the American public.”

Make of it what you will.