GIVE UP ON PUBLIC BROADCASTING

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000403060005-7
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 27, 2012
• Sequence Number: 5
• Publication Date: March 28, 1986
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/28: CIA-RDP90-00965R000403060005-7
WALL STREET JOURNAL
ARTICLE APPEARED
Pike
N
U
Give Up on Public Broadcasting
National Public Radio. They are tokens
Five years into the Reagan administra-
tion, the conservative revolution has
barely touched the public broadcasting es-
tablishment. When even the executive edi-
tor of the New York Times acknowledges
that his paper had drifted off to the left
and needs to be steered back to a more
centrist course, why has there been no
similar move in public broadcasting,
whose tilt makes the New York Times ap-
pear right wing by comparison? - .
When Congress created the Corporation
for Public Broadcasting in 1967 as a funnel
for the federal funds that were supposed to
be used to produce quality programming
that the private broadcasters could not be
expected to supply, it tried to insure that
the money would not be used for partisan
or propaganda programs. The CPB was to
be run by a bipartisan board, whose mem-
bers were appointed by the president and
confirmed by the Senate. They were given
staggered terms, preventing a new presi-
dent from putting all his own people on the
board as soon as he took office. It took
Ronald Reagan four years to appoint a ma-
jority of the board members, and not all
his appointees shared his conservative
views.
Public Now Has Varied Menu
Mr. Reagan largely ignored the advice
of his transition team on public broadcast-
ing. It asserted that federal funding of
broadcast programming was no longer
necessary to provide the public with a
more varied menu. The advent of cable,
back-yard dishes and videocassettes has
radically increased the availability of
news, entertainment and educational pro-
grams to the general public. For news
junkies, we now have Ted Turner's Cable
News Network providing news all hours of
the day. For public-affairs junkies, C-
SPAN offers not only the proceedings of
the House and many of its committees, but
also a wealth of conferences, speeches, and
even a nationwide call-in talk show.
In these two areas, the private sector
has far outdistanced the offerings of public
television with all of its government fund-
ing, about $400 million a year. There is no
reason to believe that the private sector
could not adequately supply the public's
appetite for drama and documentaries
without dependence on public funding. Cor-
porate financing of high-brow programs
distributed by the Public Broadcasting
Service (PBS) is already a fact of life, and
this would doubtless continue even if fed-
eral funding were eliminated.
The Reagan administration is now try-
ing to phase down federal funding of public
broadcasting. It seeks to cut the fiscal 1988
appropriation for CPB from the $214 mil-
lion already passed by Congress to $170
million, and it projects a cut to $90 million
in fiscal year 1990. Congress. however, has
budget bill lust passeu uy
authorization for CPB has been increased,
rising to $254 million in FY 1990.
This reflects the strong support of key
committee chairmen for public broadcast-
ing and the indifference of most members
of Congress. The public broadcasting bu-
reaucracy has been effective in mobilizing
its small but vocal constituency to oppose
efforts to curtail either its budget or its
left-wing tendencies. It has had strong sup-
port from Sharon Percy Rockefeller, a lib-
eral, who served as chairman of CPB for
two terms, the second one as a Reagan ap-
pointee. Mrs. Rockefeller still serves on
the CPB board, although she has been re-
placed as chairman by Reaganite Sonia
Landau. As the daughter of a former sena-
tor, the wife of a sitting senator and a
close friend of Sen. Barry Goldwater,
chairman of a subcommittee that oversees
public broadcasting, Mrs. Rockefeller has
been a potent force in insulating CPB from
the impact of the Reagan revolution.
Many in the liberal media have been
quick to echo the cry of "politicization"
whenever conservatives have made an ef-
fort to exercise some degree of control
over public broadcasting. The truth is that
the public broadcasting bureaucracy has
long been highly politicized. PBS, which
acquires, schedules and transmits much of
the programming used by 313 noncommer-
cial TV stations in the U.S. and its territo-
ries, has always shown a pronounced
bias. This has been evidenced in the
many far-left documentaries that it has not
only aired but even commended to the sta-
tions, the most recent being a program
denigrating the anti-communist rebels in
Nicaragua and their U.S. supporters. This
was aired on the eve of last week's House
vote on aid to the freedom fighters.
We haven't traveled far from the night,
in 1980, when PBS devoted three hours to a
vicious anti-CIA documentary naffated by
the notorious F11111P Agee. a former CIA
agent who has worked hand-in-glove with
soviet-Bloc Intelligence for man ears to
i en t u c agents overseas.
Barry Chase, now vice president for news
and public-affairs programming at PBS,
commended this disinformation film to the
stations, describing it as "a highly respon-
sible overview of the CIA's history." The
following year, PBS dipped into its special-
events fund to rush onto the air "El Salva-
dor: Another Vietnam?" The question
mark was superfluous and the reason for
the hurry was to get it aired while the
communist-led guerrillas in El Salvador
were carrying out what they called their
"final offensive."
While PBS has also offered programs
from the conservative side, such as Bill
Buckley's "Firing Line" and Milton Fried-
man's series, "Free to Choose," these es-
sentially have filled the same role as tht
occasional conservative commentator on
The entire public broadcasting bureau-
cracy is so insulated from the market,
from public opinion and even from the leg-
islators who vote its funding that there is
little chance that it will be depoliticized as
long as the funding continues to flow with
no strings attached. The 10-member CPB
board has been stripped of its power to in-
fluence programming decisions. Sharon
Percy Rockefeller & Co. took care of that
with a bylaws change while they still held
power. The present chairman, Sonia Lan-
dau, has said that the policy when she
joined the board was that directors should
not even mention programs by name. She
says that directors are discouraged from
asking questions "because once you start
asking, everybody starts hollering, 'Heat
shield! You're interfering in the pro-
cess.' "
The staff wants the board to serve as a
"heat shield" to ward off criticism and ex-
ternal influence, not to give it direction.
About a fifth of CPB's budget is allocated
to direct grants for the production and dis-
tribution of television programs, grants
largely decided upon by staff-selected
panels, with zero input from the board.
About three-fifths of the budget is used for
grants to public television and radio sta-
tions, which use part of it to pay for the
programs provided to them by PBS and
NPR, free of any influence from the CPB
board.
New President `Educated'
The PBS board has an unwieldy mem-
bership of 35, mostly representatives of
public TV stations. There are no represen-
tatives of the taxpayers or other major
providers of funding. The board elects the
president of PBS, and the White House, and
Congress have no voice in his selection.
The entrenched bureaucracy, whose strong
leanings are demonstrated by its program-
ming decisions, appears to have success-
fully co-opted Bruce L. Christensen, the
new president appointed in 1984, who had
briefly shown promise of ventilating the
premises. In June 1985, PBS aired Accu-
racy in Media's documentary response to
the $5.6 million Vietnam series the network
had previously broadcast, and leftists were
infuriated. Six months later Mr. Christen-
sen had been "educated," and he meekly
went along with his staff's refusal to air a
second AIM Vietnam critique, looking at
press coverage during the war.
Through more than five years of the
Reagan administration, it has grown in-
creasingly obvious that the public-broad-
casting establishment cannot be depoliti-
cized. With the era of Gramm-Rudman and
forced fiscal discipline now at hand, the
time is ripe to follow the old advice of the
Reagan transition team and defund the
left-wing bureaucracy that has made pub-
lic broadcasting its private playpen.
Mr. Irvine is chairman of Accuracy in
Media.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/28: CIA-RDP90-00965R000403060005-7