OPINION: Public media is America’s best friend

At a time when much of the world is facing economic and political disaster, it is perplexing that Congress would direct an assault on public broadcasting — one of the most effective means of communicating an in-depth understanding of important issues.

The devastating tsunami in Japan was first reported and televised live for the Japanese people, and then to the world, through NHK — the Japanese public broadcasting service. And recently, there were reports that the U.S. State Department will fund the BBC with a “significant sum” of money because it is best positioned to help combat the blocking of TV and Internet services in countries including Iran and China.

{mosads}When there is need to reach key audiences with factual and trusted information, public broadcasting delivers.

Ten years ago, Newt Gingrich told me that he was wrong in 1995 to try to cut public broadcasting’s funding. “In the end,” he said, “my message was getting out more effectively and accurately through public broadcasting than through any other means.”

Public broadcasting as we know it today was born in 1967. At first, the industry wasn’t very important. There was no NPR or PBS. But President Johnson, a commercial broadcaster himself, saw the opportunity to reach audiences with important programming that the commercial marketplace, by nature of its structure, could never embrace.

Johnson persuaded Congress to create the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. He appointed a board of significant Republicans, Democrats and Independents with experience running major entities to put their best efforts behind the fledgling idea. Their charter called for a public broadcasting system similar to what we have today.

But if you go to Europe or Asia and study the public media there, you begin to see how public media in the U.S. has fallen short. Public broadcasting here has matured since 1970, but only slowly. We have governing structures that do not always serve us best. We have leadership that is not challenged to excellence by strong governing boards. We have inefficiencies as a result of our disparate structures.

Our mistake in America was to not take this essential tool of democracy more seriously.
Each administration since Johnson’s agreed there is an important but limited role for the federal government in supporting public media. Unfortunately, no administration since has supported its advanced development.

Today, we face the reality of a country that is near bankruptcy. The people who have the power to change that — Republicans, Democrats and Independents alike — are increasingly divided by polarized media. In this environment, there is an important role for public media to serve as a “centering institution.”

Denying public broadcasting funding while branding it as “liberal” or “conservative” is foolhardy. Those who have the wisdom to have attained any significant level of power in this country are often not easily characterized as either. Such branding serves no purpose. Congress is mistaken to use these stereotypes to keep America’s public media system just above starvation, funding it at about 2 percent of the rate of its professional peers in Europe and Asia — or even cutting that 2 percent altogether. That makes it exceedingly difficult for public broadcasting to fulfill its promise — to be what the U.S. State Department recognized and valued when they decided to help fund the BBC.

Public media is America’s best friend. It is Congress’s best friend. It reaches the people who, on every level of our society, from ordinary voters to community leaders to corporate CEOs, make the decisions in this country. Informing them well, as Newt Gingrich discovered, puts the power of factual information prepared by top professionals, with no editorializing or bias of ownership, directly into the hands of the leadership of America. All parties win in that environment. America loses if public media is starved to the point of having to give control of its powerful transmitters and Internet services to whomever may be left — well-meaning but inexperienced and naïve ideologues for whom advocacy is everything.

Public media won’t disappear. But it can be dangerously weakened — or further strengthened. To succeed, it needs not just monetary support, but the kind of attention to governance that President Johnson provided in populating the first board of the CPB; the kind of leadership that is the hallmark of great institutions and that can change a balkanized system into a unified whole with even more professional performance and greater impact.

Taking on this challenge would serve all Americans, and make public media something that all political parties would embrace as essential to their success.

Kling is CEO of American Public Media.