Public Broadcasting Signs Off

The shutdown of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is being viewed through the lens of partisan politics — cheered by the right and decried by the left — but a clearer-eyed view is to see it as a step toward constitutional government. Where, after all, did Uncle Sam get the idea of going into the news business? What provision in the Constitution suggests that the federal government has the power to involve itself in a private-sector activity like broadcasting?These questions have all too readily been overlooked in the debate over the future of the CPB and its flagship outlets, the Public Broadcasting System and National Public Radio. In that regard this has been a missed opportunity for the GOP to stake out the high ground on a traditional conservative issue, the ideal of limited government. Indeed, the end of the CPB could well open the door to further rollbacks of the power of the federal leviathan.This is not to overlook that the CPB, along with PBS and NPR, has been the beneficiary of billions of taxpayer dollars since they emerged amid the lavish profusion of federal spending in LBJ’s “Great Society.” The whole enterprise got under way with a rhetorical head of steam courtesy of President Johnson, who, after signing in 1967 the Public Broadcasting Act, mused, “What hath man wrought?” and “how will man use his inventions?”Johnson presented the new federal broadcasting enterprise as a sign that “we in America have an appetite for excellence, too.” He suggested the CPB “will assist stations and producers who aim for the best in broadcasting good music,” along with “exciting plays,” and “reports on the whole fascinating range of human activity.” That’s a far cry from what PBS, with the saccharine sermonizing of, say, “Sesame Street,” or NPR, with its tilted news, would come to offer.A Wall Street Journal editorial in 1967, headlined “The TV Takeover,” proved prescient on this head. “Somehow it seems doubtful that television has the same potentials for excellence in politics and art, even if the various proposals for drastically uplifting its content come to fruition,” the Journal wrote. “Let it remain primarily a mass medium, one amid a diversity of diversions,” the editorial said, lest we end with “merely a conformist mass culture.”Some six decades later, public broadcasting hardly fulfilled LBJ’s vision of cultural excellence and instead emerged as a punching bag for its liberal slant. President Trump, for one, excoriated the federal broadcasting behemoth over “the kind of money that’s being wasted, and it’s a very biased view,” as he put it in March. “And I’d be honored to see it end.” The CPB’s head, Patricia Harrison, conceded the point about bias at a board meeting the other day.During the somber meeting, as our Bradley Cortright reported, Ms. Harrison asked: “Is there bias?” and replied, “Sure, we’re not perfect, but we were working on that.” Yet for an enterprise as old as the CPB, it would seem a little late in the game to be grappling with the issue of leaning to the left, which has been a gripe of conservatives for decades. Yet the bias, she averred, is “not a legitimate reason to shut down everything.”Ms. Harrison seemed to grow tearful, Mr. Cortright reported, as she ended her remarks by quoting from Shakespeare’s “Henry V.” Quoth Ms. Harrison: “King Henry said, sort of, after winning the battle, ‘And those now against us shall think themselves accursed they were not here. And hold their honor cheap when any speaks that fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s Day.’” In an apparent rallying cry, she concluded: “Aim for that win for public media.” Had the CPB endeavored to put forward more content on a par with Shakespeare, instead of serving as a liberal mouthpiece, Ms. Harrison today could well be celebrating an Agincourt, not lamenting her Waterloo. If the CPB’s demise casts doubt on the future of many PBS and NPR stations, the end of a federal role opens the door for private enterprise or philanthropy to take up the slack. Just as the Framers of the Constitution intended.

Public Broadcasting Signs Off

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