The latest round of the ongoing battle over public broadcasting has concluded, and lo and behold, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting lives. The new budget preserves funding for the CPB at $445 million for 2013, albeit with drastic cuts to smaller public media funds, and the complete elimination of the Department of Commerce’s Public Telecommunications Facilities Program.

This particular chapter of the war was quite colorful, in a nasty sort of way. It included the great Juan Williams firing brouhaha, which ultimately took with it the head of the NPR executive who dumped him. Then there was the Ron Schiller fiasco, in which the development director’s comments on the Tea Party’s alleged Islamophobic xenophobia brought down not only him but NPR’s CEO Vivian [no relation] Schiller.

Yet here we are, and NPR and NPR stations continue to get money from the CPB, which continues to exist. Needless to say, this battle will continue through the decade. The “conservative” case against NPR will thrive. People who call themselves conservatives will continue to insist that NPR has a liberal bias, and that this bias shouldn’t get money from the Federal government.

And NPR backers will counter with statistics that show that most NPR listeners either classify themselves to the center or right.

Which side do you count?

“The facts show that NPR attracts a politically diverse audience of 33.7 million weekly listeners to its member stations on-air,” declared NPR’s Steven Inskeep in a late March op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal. “In surveys by GfK MRI, most listeners consistently identify themselves as ‘middle of the road’ or ‘conservative.’ Millions of conservatives choose NPR, even with powerful conservative alternatives on the radio.”

source: NPR

Sure, but you can also read NPR as a network in which most listeners consistently identify themselves as “middle of the road” (25 percent), “somewhat liberal” (19 percent), and “very liberal” (13 percent). Such was the finding of MRI’s survey of NPR listeners in 2007. That majority was the biggest, taking up 57 percent of the audience, as opposed to Inskeep’s array of columns, which in 2007 counted for only 54 percent.

Basically NPR is a liberal entity. Many of its stations broadcast to university town audiences. And in an ironic way, conservatives force the liberal label on NPR by insisting that Federal funding is an inherently liberal concept. But NPR and NPR stations do try to reach out to conservatives, albeit crudely sometimes (see interviewing David Horowitz about Howard Zinn after the latter’s death).

Bottom line: conservatives would lose out if the NPR solar system were defunded.

Core vs everybody

I’ve heard a lot of happy talk about a defunded NPR. The service only gets about two percent of its funding from Uncle Sam, it is noted, and the NPR stations only get ten. There are all sorts of creative, innovative ways these stations could get by without that money, say the pro-defunding experts.

source: NPR

But I know what most of the university town NPR stations will do if defunded—deemphasize or dump conservative programming. Faced with budget shortfalls, they’ll appeal to their liberal base, and their liberal base will demand changes.

Every public radio station struggles with something like the same audience problem, trying to satisfy its core, subscriber listenership, while reaching out to the broader population. The core listenership never likes that. It wants NPR to say liberal things with liberal voices. The staff know that that’s a dead end that results in bubble radio—liberals boringly talking to themselves.

Federal funding allows public radio stations to reach out beyond the core liberal audience with which public media is historically associated. Without it, NPR stations would have no choice but to move their politics to the left.

Rural stations would be the exception to this rule. Ironically, they’re more conservative and more dependent on federal funding. Many of them, especially those with CPB supported TV signals as well, would be forced to retrench beyond recognition.

Conservatives would lose out in this scenario. Maybe defunding NPR has become such a sweet goal that they don’t care. Maybe Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly and CBS AM radio are enough for them.

I hope not. It all reminds me of the old joke about a Russian farmer to whom God appears.

“I am here to grant you any wish of your desire,” God says. “But keep one thing in mind. Whatever I give you, I will give your neighbor twice.”

The Russian farmer thinks for a minute, then answers.

“Make me blind in one eye,” he says.

As everyone concerned about this issue knows, last week the Republican controlled House of Representatives voted to eliminate federal funding for public broadcasting. The move was approved in the context of the massive spending bill HR1, “Making appropriations for the Department of Defense and the other departments
and agencies of the Government for the fiscal year ending September
30, 2011, and for other purposes” (in case you needed to know the full title).

Here’s the exact language of the section pertaining to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds National Public Radio, and NPR/Public Broadcasting System stations.

SEC. 1838. (a) Of the funds made available for ‘Corporation for Public Broadcasting’ in title IV of division F of Public Law 111–8, the unobligated balance is rescinded.

(b) The amounts included under the heading ‘Corporation for Public Broadcasting’ in division D of Public Law 111–117 shall be applied to funds appropriated by this division as follows: by substituting ‘$0′ for ‘$86,000,000′; by substituting ‘$0′ for ‘$25,000,000′; by substituting ‘$0′ for ‘$36,000,000′; and by substituting ‘$0′ for ‘$25,000,000′.

Yeah, this looks pretty bad if you are an NPR supporter (like me). So go sign the Moveon.org petition. But the problem, for several generations of media advocates, is that they’ve been through this routine before.

“It is as predictable as can be,” writes Fairness and Accuracy in Media. “Invigorated Republican politicians announce their intention to kill public broadcasting, which they claim is a bastion of liberal bias. Defenders of NPR and PBS step in to defend the system. The Republicans, who were unlikely to win a vote on their plan, retreat for the moment. Public broadcasting is ‘saved’.”

“The public broadcasting fight of 2011 is playing out the same way,” FAIR adds. “A more productive discussion of public broadcasting is sorely needed—one that is not reduced to ‘save it’ or ‘kill it’.”

Time tested tricks

Indeed, it’s unlikely that this proposed budget is going to get past the Senate or President Obama’s desk. That’s why critics like Jesse Walker of Reason and Timothy Noah of Slate roll their eyes at both Republican claims they really want to dump public radio/TV and activist battle cries to “save public broadcasting!”

Noah outlines the nine stages of this phony kill/save public broadcasting cycle. Stage Five is particularly on-target.

Stage 5. Discover that CPB, in a time-tested Washington trick, gives most of its money to local stations, which in turn give money to the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio. This (legal) money-laundering scheme makes congressional districts around the country consciously dependent on and loyal to CPB.

In fact, the San Francisco Chronicle has a great article noting that the public radio/TV stations of many conservative rural districts depend on CPB money the most. Example: KIXE-TV in Redding, California, which gets 45 percent of its income from the federal government, and serves Shasta County, which favored John McCain over President Obama in 2008.

What’s the solution? For me, the best answer is taking the CPB off the hyper-politicized Congressional appropriations train, and creating an endowment for public media based on Federal Communications Commission spectrum auction proceedings and other sources of FCC and industry income.

The reform group Free Press has a bunch of creative solutions in this area, noting that if the FCC starts auctioning off lots of TV signals to the wireless sector, some of that cash could be siphoned into an endowment. Or a tax on advertising revenue could be considered. Or (calm down advertising industry) just a cut in the tax deduction that businesses can take on advertising expenses (it’s 100 percent right now), and that money moved to the public media fund. A combination of things like this could be enacted—plus help from the usual foundations, businesses, and Listeners/Viewers Like You.

But what’s the chance of any of this happening in the near future? Zero to nothing. And without it, I’m opposed to any federal cuts to the CPB. So expect this goofy ballet of false moves and false alarms to continue, no matter how tiring it becomes for its participants.

So, of course, there’s got to be a politician somewhere who thinks this good deed ought not to go unpunished. His name is Representative Charlie Wilson (D-OH), and Wilson actually thinks he’s going to reduce the deficit by killing this fund.

No kidding. Yes way. He’s for real submitted a bill to kill PTFP. Here’s Wilson’s statement on the issue.

TRIMMING THE FAT

1. Wilson is the LEAD SPONSOR of an upcoming bill to eliminate the Public Telecommunications Facilities Grant Program. In FY 2010, this program received $18M in federal funds. Once all television signals were converted to digital in June 2009, this grant program was no longer needed as it pertained to analog service facilities. President Obama zeroed out this program in his FY2011 budget proposal, but it is unlikely that Congress will pass a budget resolution this year which could result in the program continuing to be funded. Congressman Wilson is proactively making sure that a defunct program will not receive funding or become a place holder for other funding.

Eighteen million whole bucks! Woah. There you go. That’s going to cut down the national debt, like, not at all.

Ending PTFP, however, will hurt a boatload of community stations that really need this money to keep up their infrastructures. It appears from Wilson’s statement that he hasn’t even actually looked at the program and noticed that it funds radio stations, which did not go through the government’s DTV transition program.

Apparently there’s talk that the radio end of PTFP could be funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Please. The CPB hasn’t got any money for this. It’s too busy helping fund the Public Broadcasting System so that PBS can distribute a three hour worshipful TV documentary about Ronald Reagan’s former Secretary of State George Schultz, funded by his pals.

The National Federation of Community Broadcasters is fighting to keep PTFP alive. Go to NFCB’s site and help them.

Free Press has a provocative new report on the state of public media and how to more adequately fund it. Many of the reform group’s proposals involve siphoning income from commercial station advertising revenue or Federal Communications Commission spectrum auctions. I’ve got an overview of the document up on Ars Technica, which has generated quite a few comments. They largely focus on the question of whether the government should get more involved in media—always a subject for heated debate.

I’m not inclined to hash that out here, but do wonder about one of the report’s smaller recommendations. A section of the piece titled “Restoring Public Media’s Heat Shield” focuses on the very legitimate concern that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting fails to protect public media from external political pressure.

“The current appointment process for leadership at the CPB is overly politicized. Presidential appointments govern the entire process — into which neither the public nor the core constituency of public media producers have any input. It also often leads to appointments as rewards for political support, rather than simple calls to service for qualified people, including those who have broadcasting or media experience.”

Part of the Free Press cure for this problem is restructuring the CPB—curtailing the President’s power to just make appointments out of his (and hopefully someday her) hat. Here’s another section, concerning governance at community or school/college public radio stations:

“These stations often lack a community advisory board. Of course, even at the community-licensed stations where these boards are required by law, they can be largely symbolic and have little power to weigh in on programming or station decision-making. Though community advisory boards should serve as a mechanism to increase community oversight and public participation in public broadcasting, this is unfortunately not always the case. The legal framework that established the boards is vague and lacks specific definitions for the precise role and responsibility for them. This means that while some boards are very active, others meet rarely. The successful examples could serve as a model for stations to be more engaged in their communities.”

My concern with this complaint is that it assumes that there is an almost Rousseauean entity out there called “the public” or “the community” that, when consulted, will always serve up selfless suggestions about how to make a community or public radio station better.

Admittedly, my experiences around this issue stem from my involvement with the Pacifica radio stations, but I don’t think I’m alone in my skepticism. Lots of people who attend public media board meetings go there for self-interested reasons. They want some portion of the stations resources. They want a show on the station. Or they want access to the station’s air time. Or they’re a programmer who has some dispute with station management. Or they’re friends or allies with that programmer. Or they’re partisans in some local political dispute, and want to pressure the station to change its coverage of that issue.

I agree with Kathy Merritt that

“At their best, community advisory boards can play an invaluable role for stations by acting as a conduit for information, bringing it from corners of the community staff members don’t normally access and taking it back to a network of friends, colleagues and co-workers who might not hear about public radio otherwise. By providing input on programming, CABs can enhance stations’ efforts to connect with listeners.”

But pumping up the programming-related authority of CABs also comes with risks. These sort of boards can pressure stations to disconnect from their listeners by capitulating to small factions who have little interest in anything besides their own narrow agenda.

Free Press’s recommendation assumes that unhealthy “heat” can only come from top down. But it can also come from the bottom up. Let’s keep that in mind as we ponder giving community boards the “power to weigh in on programming or station decision-making.” How much power and weigh-in are we talking about here?

As we’ve reported, National Public Radio has been filing comments with the Federal Communications Commission a lot these days, talking up its localism initiative, Android app, and new mobile site. NPR’s latest commentary to the FCC on its National Broadband Plan reiterates all these points. But here’s the paragraph in the filing that got our attention:

“Rights: Copyright laws, especially those relating to music, have become highly complex and confusing, causing significant difficulties for public media entities striving to expand and improve their public service offerings to a growing audience on multiple platforms. While it is widely recognized and accepted that content creators have undeniable rights, attention must be given to the use of content for public service by public media entities. In a general sense and for purposes of simplification, Congress needs to consider the creation of a common public media waiver enabling the use of music regardless of distribution platform.”

Doubtless you’re wondering what this “common public media waiver” would look like, detail-wise. Sorry folks. That’s all NPR has to say about the matter in this document. But it’s no surprise that NPR might have some issues here. As the service points out, radio listeners download NPR podcasts over 15 million times each month and its new mobile device site gets 4.5 million views a week. So we’re talking about a shifting array of royalty challenges on every conceivable platform—terrestrial, Internet, and mobile. That can’t be much fun.

Then there’s some vague language suggesting that NPR would like to spend more of its Corporation for Public Broadcasting money on web based initiatives, at least that’s one way to read it:

“Any effort to increase funding for public media must include a re-examination of and
changes to the outdated methods currently used for distribution of federal funds. While maintaining scrupulous adherence to transparency and accountability, and while maintaining funding support for existing stations serving their communities, flexibility must be provided to use public funds for deeper, expanded and more responsive local and regional information needs. Exploration and adoption of digital, web-based content creation and distribution assets, for example, are essential components of a public media construct that meets the needs of today’s America.”

“On radio, with the exception of all-news stations in some large cities,” they write, “most commercial stations do little or no local news reporting.” And they continue:

“A growing number of listeners have turned to public radio stations for national and international news provided by National Public Radio. But only a relatively small number of those public radio stations also offer their listeners a significant amount of local news reporting. And even fewer public television stations provide local news coverage.”

The authors mention a few bright spots, but overall: “local news coverage remains underfunded, understaffed, and a low priority at most public radio and television stations, whose leaders have been unable to make—or uninterested in making—the case for investment in local news to donors and Congress.”

What to do? Schudson and Downie say Congress, specifically the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, needs to get busy on this problem. It should declare local news reporting “a top priority for public broadcasting and change its allocation of resources accordingly.” And the CPB should require every public radio and TV station to produce a minimum amount of local programming and require stations to report to the funding agency on their progress. And Congress should change the CPB’s name to the Corporation for Public Media and give it more money.

Finally: “Congress should also reform the governance of the reformed corporation by broadening the membership of its board with appointments by such nonpolitical sources as the Librarian of Congress or national media organizations. Ideological issues that have surfaced over publicly supported arts, cultural activities, or national news coverage should not affect decisions about significantly improving local news reporting by public media.”

“We must caution that this data does not, on a station-by-station basis or in the aggregate, provide a meaningful representation of the role minorities and women play in shaping the programming and services that public broadcasting stations offer,” they wrote on June 26. “Thus, the purpose and efficacy of such a data collection is questionable.”

The warning comes from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, National Public Radio, the Public Broadcasting Service, and the Association of Public Television Stations.

Some background here: Several months ago the FCC launched a new proceeding on how to boost the number of radio and TV stations owned by women and minorities. The present situation is pretty pathetic. A recent study by Free Press estimated that minorities own about 7.7 percent of full power commercial radio stations. Women own about 6 percent.

The Commission announced that it wants to explore ways to more accurately count who owns what, among them by possibly expanding the questions on Form 323-E, which non-commercial educational [NCE] radio and TV stations have to send to the Commission from time to time. At present the form just asks for basic stuff—the station’s address and telephone number—that sort of thing. But the FCC says it wants to get a lot more up close and personal.

“We tentatively conclude that obtaining gender, race, and ethnicity information [from non-commercial stations] would further our goal to design policies to advance diversity in the broadcast industry,” the agency’s notice suggested. “We believe that data from the entire universe of NCE stations are necessary to provide a comprehensive picture of broadcast ownership, including ownership by women and minorities in the broadcast industry.”

Keep in mind that when the FCC says it has “tentatively concluded” something, it means that the decision is a done deal unless somebody talks the agency out of it.

So public broadcasting is clearly trying to change the FCC’s mind here. Public broadcasting stations are fundamentally different from commercial stations in their ownership structure, the June 26 CPB et al comment argues. Nobody holds investment or equity interest in them. They’re usually the property of foundations, colleges, or school systems, and overseen by governing boards.

“While the governing boards of trustees of stations have responsibility for overall station affairs,” the filers write, “including setting appropriate policies to govern station goals and operations, they do not, and should not, involve themselves in day-to-day operations, including, significantly, the selection of programming to air on the station. This is crystal-clear particularly in the case of state or institutional licensees, where the governing boards are appointed by the state governors or legislatures.”

—or in some instances voters. The comment cites KSDS-FM in San Diego as an example. That license is governed by a five-member, city wide elected board with a student member, CPB notes, “but the day-to-day operation of the station, a full-time mainstream/traditional jazz radio station, is managed by the station staff.”

In the end, “aggregating data from commercial and noncommercial broadcasters would muddle, rather than clarify, the true picture of broadcast ownership,” the quartet of public broadcasting organizations told the FCC, “which is by definition a purely commercial construct.”

I’m with the CPB on the principle that public radio/TV station board members should have little if anything to do with programming at their respective station. But NCE board members do influence the overall direction of stations, especially in the hiring of managers and overseeing of strategic plans. It’s not as if they bear no resemblance at all to commercial license holders.