Ever since the right began crying "liberal media," the challenge for the targets of those tantrums has been to figure out how to respond to the mewling. What PBS has done in the wake of Bill Moyers' retirement is a case study in the futile effort of trying to appease the little brat.
If you think that PBS, NPR, and the New York Times -- and maybe CBS, NBC and ABC -- are liberal mouthpieces; if you think that what Sarah Palin calls the "lamestream media" is biased against conservatives; if you think that FOX News really is "fair and balanced" - well, there's no way I can change your mind.
This dispute can't be settled by evidence. Each side thinks it's advocating accurate, honest and professional journalism. And each side thinks the other is using journalism as a front for waging the culture wars.
Two things are notable about this, and I wish PBS understood them.
One is that the center has been pulled way over to the right. The emergence of MSNBC as a countervailing force to FOX is fairly recent, and there's still no leftward mass-media equivalent in print to the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. By attacking the middle ground that NPR and the establishment press attempt to occupy, the right has moved the goalposts.
The other is that there is no winning this fight. In Congress, nothing short of complete and total surrender by Democrats would cause Republicans to say that the other party is acting in a bipartisan fashion. Their definition of compromise is conversion. In the media wars, it's the same. No matter how many conservative voices you put on the op-ed page or on the air, no matter how supinely you adopt the idiotic notion that every dispute has two equally plausible sides, liberal is what you'll be called.
The program that's replaced "Bill Moyer's Journal" on PBS is a news magazine called Need to Know, hosted by Jon Meacham and Alison Stewart. If its first appearance is indicative of what's to come, PBS's response to the "liberal media" charge is to hope that being nice will stop people from calling them bad names.
The centerpiece of the program was a 13-minute piece about the national movement to enable anyone to carry a loaded handgun in public. It profiled Ed Levine, a regular-guy open-carry advocate in Virginia who posted on the Web site after the show aired that the crew who followed him for three days was "nice as can be and open minded." So much for "'normal PBS liberal' style," he wrote.
The bumper sticker on Ed's Hyundai says "GUNS Save Lives." When correspondent John Larsen says, "I think statistics would say that's not true," citing "the hundreds of surveys that have been done showing that the more guns are around, the more accidents that there are, the more people get shot, the more people get killed, the more people that take their own life," Ed's response is, "That's not true.... The people that are putting out those statistics are the people that want guns to go away."
"That's not true" versus "that's not true": what an opening to commit journalism! A perfect chance for PBS to put the studies on the table, establish or refute the claims of bias, and then let the cameras roll while either Ed changes his mind, or Ed changes ours.
No such luck. With Ed off camera, we hear this voiceover: "But in fact there are a number of studies showing that having a gun in the home increases the likelihood that someone in the home will be harmed. On the flip side, no one pays attention to countless dramatic examples where someone with a gun prevented a crime from happening."
Fabulous: "But in fact" versus "on the flip side." You decide for yourself, dear viewer.
When gun advocate Larry Pratt tells Larsen that 9/11 would have turned out differently had passengers been allowed to bring hidden weapons onto planes, Larsen commendably says, "I gotta tell you, that amazes me, and I suspect it amazes most people watching." He asks Pratt whether a gunfight at thirty thousand feet really would have been an improvement. Pratt replies, "That would have been an improvement on flying into an office building." Larsen's response: "Hmmm."
There it is, in one word. Hmmm. I guess it's meant to be our cue to appreciate how very swell it is, how journalistically responsible of PBS, to help us, in Meacham's words, "understand all sides of passionately held beliefs," and presumably to come to our own conclusions.
Need to Know positions itself as an antidote to the poisonous advocacy of cable news. What it succumbs to instead is the on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand pathology that makes mainstream news so impotent. For this we need public television?
Lloyd Blankfein is as passionate about Goldman Sachs as the Tea Partiers who revile the Troubled Assets Relief Program. Creationists are as passionate about Scripture as Darwinians are about the scientific method. It's not understanding that's missing; that's the refuge of a PBS so intimidated by its "liberal bias" antagonists that it's narrowed its niche to a morally vacuous empathy for all.
I want Need to Know to succeed: PBS needs to prove to foundations and viewers that it deserves the public's money. (Disclosure: its terrific executive producer once executive produced a radio show I hosted.) But I think valuing "Hmmm" more than "Aha!" is too high a price to get Congress to keep kicking in its miserly 15% of public broadcasting's budget.
This is my column from The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. You can read more of my columns here, and e-mail me there if you'd like.
Follow Marty Kaplan on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/martykaplan
Moyers retirement is a loss for those of us that really care about the truth in news. If you think John Meecham of Newsweek is going to be filling that void with this new show - dream on.
Can't stand the Meacham guy.
There can be no analysis of the news because that might lead to an informed conclusion, the enemy of conservatism, and something that NPR and PBS have made the enemy of news reporting. NPR even adopts the language of the right, banishing the word "torture" and using the Orwellian "enhanced interrogation techniques" instead. PBS too?
I'll miss Moyers a lot. When he introduced his replacement show hosts, it was immediately apparent to me that while Moyers's show was about ideas, the show replacing his is about its hosts. With Moyers's retirement, the morph from news to showbiz is complete. I'll watch something else, thank you.
Some people, of course, could be the the corporate shill, the agenda driven politician, the right wing funded think tank, the prostituted talk show host, who purposely planted the idea in order to cast doubt or undermine the impact of the truth. Example: "Some people say that environmentalists deliberately blew up the Deep Horizon oil rig to stop offshore drilling. How do you respond to that criticism?"
Also, we rarely ask, "Who defines the middle?" and "What makes the middle so sacrosanct?" If most people believe the world is flat does that make it somehow the acceptable position for scientists, scholars, and politicians to adopt? When such measures as 'the middle' become the norm for assessing acceptablity then we have the other distortion that appears in the media called the 'false equivalency.' This is where two opposing sides, one fact challenged and the other who base their argument squarely on the facts, are given equal weight by our media outlets.
We should try something new in our news casts. Hold people accountable according to the facts of their case not the popularity of their position. In other words, to how much they adhere to the truth: What a concept.
They couldn't because it is in fact not true. Guns are used for defensive purposes far more than they are in accidental shootings. Do you think the reporter wanted to air data that would reveal he was disseminating misinformation?
Researchers have shown that guns are used defensively as much as 2.5 million times a year (Kleck and Gertz, "Armed Resistance to Crime"). I don't think that accidental gun deaths exceed 1500 per year, and they have been steadily dropping since the 1930s. Doctors accidentally kill many times that number of patients each year...
For example, in a country where everyday our politicians, economists, energy experts, tell us that we cannot wean our selves off of oil the BP oil spill disaster is forcing us to look at the result of deregulation and our trust in offshore drilling. This could result in us truly considering alternative forms of energy. However, overcoming our belief that 'oil' is the best and cheapest form of energy in the face of these facts is still a hard uphill climb.
Journalism, by definition, exists in its purest form to record and reveal truth. Thus in the authoritarian world of belief, it is both by definition subversive and has a 'liberal' (read critical) bias. Conservatives therefore use bullying, shouting, accusation, and demand to limit and silence the voice of real journalism. Today's cowed and timid public TV has succumbed to that bullying and once again authoritarianism is succeeding in weakening the voice of those who dare expose that perhaps the emperor indeed doesn't have any clothes.
While a few stations (WXPN, Philadelphia) have been breaths of fresh air, the great majority of Public Radio cumes toward the near-death crowd. The classics are wonderful, however with individual Public Radio stations having access to multiple channels (Hi-Def, Internet Streaming), uninspired Program Directors have settled into one of two choices: Prokofiev or Public Affairs.
And when it comes to local programming, Public Radio goes community only when they fund-raise. Have you ever tried to pitch a program with your public broadcaster -- radio or television? Public?
Yeah, right.
You know how a passing moment will stick in your memory?
I happened to be listening to XPN during "Shock & Awe" and heard some Bimbo DJ gushing about how the TV in the studio was broadcasting these wonderful pictures of liberation and Iraqis forever in gratitude to the US.
I never forgot that.
When I was a child, I listened to one classical piece seven times before I started to respond to it. However, 50 years later I still can listen to that same piece and be moved. My taste for that piece was cultivated but if that piece had been introduced to me via the free market, I would have never listened to it again and it would have been off the radio in an instant because it didn't hook the listener in the opening riff and bring instant ROI to the music producer, performer, and investors who owned the music production company or radio station. That piece was Tchaikovsky's 5th symphony. I thank God I had a radio station that introduced that piece to me years ago and parents who encouraged me to listen.
Public TV and radio should introduce us to the art, culture, music, and ideas that take us beyond the popular and elevate us by introducing us to depth and high culture.
The show is horrendous. The first airing featured 2 inside-the-beltway yuppie types fawning over Clinton in an interview where he postured as the reasonable, moderate centrist between 2 off-the radar extremes. Except when polled on the issues, the majority of Americans are to the Left of Clinton and his corporate brand of DLC politics.
[Disclaimer: I admit that, thanks to my wife, I've met appallingly home schooled kids and also amazingly home schooled ones.]
What right does he have to retire? Thats what I want to know. ;)
Some recommendations for a *real* left-wing show:
- Why should be taken away from people, and how that will reduce the federal deficit.
- Why all the income after the first million dollars, and all assets over the first billion dollars, should be taken away from people and corporations, and how the federal government can use that to educate, heal, and house its citizens.
- Why we must bring the hundreds of thousands of troops home, not just from Iraq, but from Japan and Germany, etc., and how that would eliminate the federal deficit.
- Why the federal government should immediately seize all assets belonging to private health insurers, and use those seized assets to establish a world-class universal health care system.
Anybody who thinks PBS represents the "left" of anything other than the Republican party has been brainwashed.