Public
broadcasting’s getting plenty of attention these days, nationally and locally.
Corporation
for Public Broadcasting chair Ken Tomlinson made headlines by applying
political pressure to the Public Broadcasting Service to correct a perceived
liberal bias in the network (see “What Next,” June 8).
That
incident and a push by local activists to influence public-radio programming
here (see “Radio daze,” below) likely accounted for the good-sized crowd that
turned out last Wednesday night to see PBS President and CEO Pat Mitchell, who
used Rochester as the launching pad for a nationwide tour she’s embarking on.
Though
billed as being about the future of PBS, Mitchell’s address, and the Q&A
session that followed, were divided equally between that and promoting PBS. For
a synopsis of the latter, check out her remarks to the National Press Club in
late May (www.pbs.org/aboutpbs/news/20050524_pressclubspeech.html).
About
the former, the tidbits Mitchell shared were interesting, if a bit incomplete.
Digital Futures Initiative is the bland name PBS gave its plan to overhaul the
way it serves up content. The project calls for the conversion of content to
digital files that will be searchable and available in every conceivable
format, from television to handheld mobile devices. “Media on demand” is the
catchphrase Mitchell used to describe this goal.
WXXI’s
already ahead of the digital curve, using its TV signal to broadcast four
separate digital channels simultaneously. Of course, WXXI and PBS can’t take
all the credit for the sea-change that’s coming to public broadcasting. The
federal government has already mandated that analog television stations switch
to digital in the next several years (the frequencies freed up by this move
will be sold off to telecommunications firms and other companies). But they do
get credit for taking the challenge as an opportunity to rethink how they offer
programming.
City Newspaper caught up
with Mitchell for a quick interview during her stop. Following is an edited
transcript of that conversation.
City: Tell us a little bit about this tour and why you chose to
start it in Rochester.
Pat Mitchell: The campaign
begins here for a lot of reasons. One of them is that Rochester is modeling
that digital future right now. Because they are fully digital, because they are
broadcasting digital multi-cast channels, and because they’re already doing a
lot of the services that we know we’re going to focus on going forward, this
seemed an ideal place to come and talk to a community about “what benefits are
you getting now from WXXI? What services do you value the most?” and then to
lay out our plans for this digital future.
We’ve
spent the last nine months or so with this group of what I call “thought
leaders.” They looked at what we do now all across the country in communities
like this one — the vast amount of our educational services and the work we
do in workplace training, the work we do in public affairs and civic
engagement, and the work we are beginning to do in homeland security and
emergency procedures — and they said “OK, going forward, technology’s going
to make it possible for you to do more in every one of these areas.” So they
mapped out a kind of blueprint.
We
have at the national service hundreds of thousands of hours — if you counted
up the 35 years of programming in history, science, children’s programs, just
so much — and to make that a searchable archive, that really becomes a sort
of national learning archive for all ages. Rochester’s already doing that.
Rochester is leading this whole state with an educational program that right
now is distributing — what is it now, 26,000 video clips? So this would
essentially be an education-on-demand service, but it would be done through our
local public television stations and the contacts they already have.
City:What do you hope this tour will accomplish?
Mitchell: Raise the
awareness of what public broadcasting is doing right now. So much of what we do
is an unknown story. The press and the public know our programming, but we do
so much more beyond programming, and that’s going to be large part of this
tour.
Secondly
to lay this blueprint for the digital future and say to the community: What
other community groups do we need to work with more closely? How do we
strengthen what the health-care providers are doing with our health-care
information? How do we strengthen our teacher prep with what we know about
technology and teachers? So reaching out to the education institutions, to the
hospitals, the museums, libraries, etc…
And
then the third thing is to raise support. We cannot pursue any of these grand
plans if we don’t find new revenue sources. We barely have enough to do what
we’re doing now.
City:There’s been a lot of talk about why we even
need public broadcasting anymore with cable and other new media. You’ve
probably read [media critics] Jack Shafer [of “Slate”] and Dave Shaw [of the
“LA Times”] —
Mitchell: I’ve read them
all and yet they’re comparing apples and oranges.
City:Well what can public television offer that
we can’t find on cable?
Mitchell: Even if we’re
just talking about the programming level, the choices themselves tell the
story. But beyond that, twice as many Americans every night of the week are
going to PBS as going to any of these cable channels. PBS in a 500-channel
universe is still number six in the choice of viewers. Now that means somebody
thinks it still is essential even as a programming option.
When
I said they’re comparing apples and oranges, these channels don’t do what we
do. We do so much more than television. We not only put out a top-notch
schedule — that I’d put up against their schedule any night of the week and
make the same choice viewers are making, which is PBS — but we take our
programming as the beginning of a learning experience for all ages. We don’t
produce it to get ratings or sell products. We have a whole different system of
evaluating what we do.
Do
you know what Discovery’s number one show is? Monster Garage. It may be a very entertaining show, but I don’t
think I’d put it up against the educational value of Ken Burns or the science
of Nova.
City:This whole notion of balance and the whole
thing with Ken Tomlinson —
Mitchell: You guys sure
are making this man famous. You just keep talking about him. He’s just an
unpaid political appointee. You certainly are giving him a lot of press.
City:Well how would you define balance?
Mitchell: It’s not a
matter of how I define balance; it’s a matter of how our standards define
balance and how the congressional statute that created public television
defines balance. We have the same editorial standards of all media
institutions, only ours are even stricter. We define balance as a schedule.
Over a schedule we are reflecting the great diversity of opinions that make up
this country.
It’s
a big tent. And we not only do a variety of genres of programs but we bring in
ideas and approach them from as many different ways as possible.
Across
our schedule we have standards of fairness, objectivity, transparency, and
balance. And they’re very clear to every producer who works with us.
And
so my answer to Ken Tomlinson and anyone else is that our editorial standards
are ensuring that our content is balanced, transparent, fair, and objective.
And additionally all the public opinion polls verify this. Eighty percent of
the American public — and that has to include every political perspective if
it’s 80 percent — believes there is no bias.
And
I’m not as obsessed with political balance. We ought to be just as concerned
about ethnic balance, cultural balance, background balance, economic balance,
and when we look at our schedule we take all those things into consideration.
We
didn’t have the African-American experience, and that’s why Tavis Smiley’s on
the air. We thought Tucker Carlson would bring us a youthful perspective. He
was not hired for a conservative perspective; he was hired to bring in a
different group of people.
So
much of the media has become partisan. We’re not going to be defined that way,
because we belong to the public and that means everybody.
Radio
daze
Even
though Democracy Now! is primarily a
radio show, Mitchell’s appearance provided an opportunity for a rally by the
activist group Metro Justice, which has a committee working to get the show
aired on WXXI-AM 1370. Before the event, supporters stretched out roughly 3,000
petitions near the Strong Museum Auditorium. And inside during the talk there
were plenty of hats, pins, T-shirts, and signs promoting the program.
During
the Q&A session, audience members submitted written questions to Mitchell.
The first, a complaint of liberal bias on PBS, was interrupted by a chorus of
boos. The second dealt with the station’s refusal to air Democracy Now!
“You’re
not going to like this, but we stand up to pressure from the right; we’re going
to stand up to pressure from the left, too,” said WXXI President and CEO Norm
Silverstein, who shared the stage with Mitchell.
Indeed,
many did not like that. Amid much grumbling, 20 or so audience members got up
and left after that answer.
The
Metro Justice campaign’s media spokesperson, Beth Meyers, said she was
disappointed in the audience’s rude reaction to the first question. But she was
also not satisfied with Silverstein’s response.
“It’s
more about WXXI being responsive to the community,” she says. Where should that
responsiveness give way to editorial independence? Meyers didn’t have an
answer.
But
Mitchell, doing her best to stay above a fray that wasn’t hers, gave a clue in
a comment about bias and balance that followed Silverstein’s response.
If
you’re pushing one show to correct bias in another, “then you’ve really gotten
into the game of political equivalency,” she told remaining audience members.
“That doesn’t lead to balance.”
This article appears in Jun 15-21, 2005.
