White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

PBS Has a Future by Leaving the Past Behind

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Over the years, I have often been critical of the Public Broadcasting Service. That in spite of the fact that for 28 years, I have produced and hosted a program, “White House Chronicle,” which is carried by many PBS stations.

It is an independent program for which I find all the funding and decide its direction, content and staffing.

My argument with PBS — brought to mind by the administration’s canceling of $1.1 billion in funding for it and National Public Radio — is that it is too cautious, that it is consciously or by default lagging rather than leading.

Television needs creativity, change and excitement. Old programs, carefully curated travel, and cooking shows don’t really don’t cut it. News and public affairs shows are not enough. Cable does them 24/7.

My co-host on “White House Chronicle,” Adam Clayton Powell III, a savant of public broadcasting, having held executive positions at NPR and PBS, assures that they aren’t going away, although some stations will fail.

I believe PBS has often been too careful because of the money, which has been dribbled out by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Some conservatives have been after PBS since its launch.

It is reasonable to look to the British Broadcasting Corp. when discussing PBS because the BBC is the source of so much of the programming that is carried by PBS — although not all the British programming is from the BBC. Two of the most successful imports were from the UK — “Upstairs, Downstairs,” which aired in the 1970s, and, more recently, “Downton Abbey” — were developed by British commercial television, not by the BBC.

Even so, the BBC is a force that has played a major role in shaping state broadcasters in many countries. At its best, it is formidable in news, in drama and in creativity. It is also said to be left-of-center and woke. Both of these are things PBS is accused of, but I have never found bias in the news products. What I have found is a kind of genteel poverty.

I once asked the head of a major PBS station why they didn’t do more original American drama. “It would cost too much,” was the response in a flash. Yet, there are local theater companies aplenty who would love to craft something for PBS if they were invited.

Sometimes the idea is more important than the money. Get that right, and PBS will have something it can sell around the world. It should be an on-ramp for talent.

Maybe, stirred by its newly induced poverty, PBS can lead the television world into a new business paradigm.

First, of course, take advertising and don’t be coy about it, as “Masterpiece Theater” is about Viking cruises. Take the advertising.

Second, see what is happening across the television firmament, where more TV is now viewed on YouTube than on TV sets. This happens at a time of the viewer’s choosing. PBS needs to jump on this and create a pay-per-view paradigm so that when it has a big show, as it did with Ken Burns’ “Civil War” years ago, it can prosper, as well as selling the show around the globe.

PBS is a confederation of stations, each one independent but tethered to PBS in Washington, which provides what is known as the hard feed. These are programs pre-approved for central distribution by PBS. Independent producers aren’t acknowledged on this, nor do they get listed as being PBS programs.

I remember how I had heard that WHUT, Howard University’s television station, was open to new programs. So I took a pilot over to WHUT. One young woman said “yes” and a program was born.

PBS needs to open its doors to new talent, new shows and uses of new technologies. Leading the pack in broadcasting innovation would be the best revenge. New money will follow.

NPR is a different story. Its product is successful. It needs to be open to new funding, including much better acknowledged corporate funding. If Google or some other cash-laden entity wants to underwrite a day of broadcasting, let it. Don’t give it the editor’s chair, just a seat in accounting.

Make Public Broadcasting Great Again by Shaking It Up

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The animus that has led President Trump to order an end to federal funding of PBS and NPR isn’t new. Public broadcasting has been an irritant to conservatives for a long time.

Conservatives say public broadcasters are biased against them, especially PBS; they are a kind of ground zero for all things “woke”; and they don’t deserve one penny of public money.

My friend and colleague, Adam Clayton Powell III, who has worked in commercial and public television and was the first vice president of news at NPR in the 1980s, thinks that some of the old rigor about being even-handed may have “fallen away.”

What I think has happened — and conservative critics see this as bias — is that programming reflecting a humanitarian concern about minorities, about the left-out, and about those who are without, rose in volume. That has led to the impression of public broadcasting being left-of-center.

Full disclosure: Since 1997, I have produced and hosted “White House Chronicle,” a weekly news and public affairs show which airs on some PBS stations and is available to all PBS stations via the PBS satellite.

As an independent producer, I don’t receive funding from PBS, and, since my show has had interactions with PBS, it is with individual stations, not PBS headquarters in Washington.

I don’t think PBS and NPR need to be defunded, but they need to be taken by the lapels and shaken. They can be as tired as they are self-regarding. They are losing their audiences and relying on old formulae and old programming.

I once asked an important PBS executive why there wasn’t more original, creative drama on PBS. As speedy as a TV electron, the executive shot back, “It would cost too much money.”

Clearly, there was no preparedness to consider how it might be financed. Genteel poverty is not dynamic.

PBS is dominated by the shows it buys from Britain. The best of PBS is British, either from the BBC or the commercial channels, which go under the rubric of ITV.

The most successful PBS show recently, “Downton Abbey,” came from ITV. PBS also seems to have an endless need to tell us all that is known about the history of the English royal families. Watch enough, and you will know more about them than you wanted to know, all the way down to the duties of the Royal wiper, the Groom of the Stool, scatology in ermine.

What is lacking at PBS is creativity.

I worked at the BBC in London during the great explosion of satire, which was manifested in such shows as “Beyond the Fringe,” “Good Evening” and “Monty Python.” Another BBC satirical show, “That Was The Week That Was,” gave the broadcast world David Frost, who started as a comedian and became one of the great interviewers.

The BBC took chances, and it worked. I feel that if you walked into PBS with a blueprint for “The Daily Show” or “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” you wouldn’t get far.

It is time for public broadcasting to think beyond its self-imposed creative chastity. Over time, it overcame its aversion to working with industry. A fear of commercialism pervades PBS and NPR. It is written into their protocols.

Powell suggested on a current episode of “White House Chronicle,” which he co-hosts, that public broadcasters might look at what William Paley, who built CBS, did in its radio days before television.

Paley, noting that NBC had all the talent and all the income, went to top stars of the day, like Jack Benny, Bing Crosby and Red Skelton, and said he would let them control and produce their shows on CBS, and, at the end of the runs, they would own their material free and clear.

It changed the fortunes of CBS, which then went on to become the dominant network.

If PBS produced great entertainment programs, it could sell them worldwide, as the BBC does. Two documentary series, “Frontline” and “Nova,” produced by Boston’s WGBH, show that PBS can reach its high when it seeks to do so.

Great entertainment might not be enough income to solve all its problems, but at least it would open up a new revenue stream.

At the end of the day, what public broadcasting needs is to be known as a creative hub: the first place for new ideas, performers and writers.

To do this, it should be less timid about collaborating with creative sponsors and letting them have a say. Why not the “Google Hour”? Or the “ChatGPT Theater”? The golden age of television was marked by that kind of sponsor involvement.

A Wake-Up Call for Public Broadcasting

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The U.S. House of Representatives, in an act of retribution that is vicious, punitive and crass, voted to eliminate the modest funding provided to public broadcasting through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB).

The $430 million in federal funding for public broadcasting is somewhat less than the $500 million purportedly spent by the Pentagon on military bands. Like Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries, the House has ruled that everything must go.

The cut would be another thread pulled out of the tapestry of our national culture. Without public broadcasting, MSNBC and Fox will set the tone for a generation or more; Twitter will set our thought processes. Already dispassionate news is in retreat.

Fortunately, Republican leaders rewrote the House bill because they knew it would never sail in the Senate, where Democrats hold a majority. The cleansed version didn’t whack CPB funding but instead met the goals of deficit hawks by cutting other spending.

Let me state that I produce and host “White House Chronicle,” a Washington talk show that airs on a number of Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) stations. I offer my television show free of charge to all stations. I pay for the program's closed-captioning, and pay PBS to put it on its satellite.

The action of the House will, if anything, benefit independent producers such as myself, Dennis Wholey and Rick Steves. Our product, for which we find the funding, possibly could be more acceptable to the stations than expensive programming like “Frontline,” “Nova” and the Ken Burns' series.

But I must say that PBS programming, already burdened with reruns and resuscitated British comedies, will be the worse for it. Its promise, never fulfilled, will be dashed.

CPB is the creation of Congress for helping fund the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio. NPR, a ratings behemoth, will survive better. It has a loyal following and has proven that there is a market for down-the-middle news programming.

PBS, unlike NPR, has no central programming function, but instead is a loose confederation of television stations that have different owners. Yet PBS does control the “voice” of PBS television. It does this through programs it supports and sends to the stations on what is called the “hard feed.” You know these as the aforementioned “Frontline” and “Nova,” but they also include “The NewsHour,” “Washington Week with Gwen Ifill,” “Charlie Rose,” “Consider This,” and the heirs to “Masterpiece Theater.”

These programs, unlike mine, are fed to the individual stations in a bundle for which the stations pay. They are produced by well-heeled stations like Boston's WGBH-TV, New York's WNET-TV and Washington's WETA-TV.

Some of these PBS programs have been around a long time — and they show it. Television is a cruel medium and it demands innovation, experimentation and retirement. In commercial television, life is short and death is brutal. Even the Sunday-morning programs go through dramatic iterations. Less so PBS programs.

But the more egregious failure of public broadcasting is there isn’t enough fun in it: There are no high-jinks. If “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” had been offered free of charge to PBS, it probably wouldn't have made it to the coveted world of the hard feed, where tedium and quality are dreadfully mixed in the manager’s minds. I'd like to think my program's originating station, WHUT, and WETA, which carries my program on Sunday mornings, would've picked up something so revolutionary. But PBS itself? No.

In the 1950s, the most staid broadcast entity on earth was the BBC. I worked there as a news film scriptwriter. We could show pictures of blood, but not tell people what it was. Hard to believe, huh? But elsewhere in the corporation, things were moving: Brilliant young people were pouring out of Oxford and Cambridge and setting the Thames on fire with programs like “That Was the Week That Was” with David Frost and “Not Only … But Also” with the comedy team of Dudley Moore and Peter Cook. It was explosive, dramatic, exciting, uninhibited television. The best place to be in the evening was in front of your television set.

Maybe the brush with Congress will be good for the managers of PBS, and they'll lift up their skirts a bit, as the BBC ­– that old matron — did in the 1960s.

Public broadcasting can save itself, but not with “The Lawrence Welk Show” or that tired, old British show, “Are You Being Served?” – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate