Public Television -- A Separate Reality

 

Public Television:  Introduction to a panel I moderated at Westdocs September 13, 2011 -- Navigating PBS

I’m Michael Rose – your moderator for this session.  Like many of you, I’m an independent producer, sounds like an AA meeting.  And in some ways it should.  I can’t help myself.  This is what I do.  And like many of you, I’ve become increasingly concerned about the decline of the media landscape starting with America’s newspapers, including the LA Times that was taken over by a real estate shark who looted the employee’s pensions in order to buy the paper and then ended up firing many of them because the paper was saddled with an enormous debt.  Paper’s like the Times were once seen as a public trust.  Now many are struggling to survive.  And the public interest isn’t being served.

Local TV news – with its emphasis on celebrities, crime, sports and the weather doesn’t fill the gap.  It’s distraction not news.  Infotainment, not information.

National cable outlets aren’t doing the job to cultivate a well-informed electorate.  Fox News is a propaganda outlet for the Republican party and MSNBC has joined the partisan shout fest on the other side with a sagging CNN offering breathy headlines somewhere in between.  Analysis is left to faux news pundits, Jon Stewart and his counterpart Stephen Colbert. 

Perspective we might have once thought could come from The History Channel has vanished as it shifts its focus from Hitler to tree cutters and crab fishermen.  The Discovery Channel loves its sharks and MTV’s Snooki isn’t exactly Rock the Vote or rock the boat.  A few meaningful efforts sneak through these outlets every year but making programming that matters is not what the shareholders demand.  Then there’s HBO that provides support for half a dozen to a dozen high minded docs a year and airs several more it acquires.  And a few other potential outlets like the Sundance Channel, LinkTV and the documentary channel  do aspire to offering a platform for serious work. 

This bleak landscape exists in a world where a wacky preacher whose congregation is smaller than the number of people in this room diverts the scant resources of the national networks news outlets while we’re embroiled in endless wars that have cost the country nearly a Trillion dollars as the economy stays stuck in neutral.  It’s a landscape where reports of gas natural leaks in a community in Northern California go unheeded for years until a town erupts.  Where aging electrical transmission lines that the local utility no longer maintains come tumbling down setting 85 homes a blaze in Detroit.  We are not wanting for stories that need to be told.  But how to fund those efforts and where can your work be seen?

Our panelists are here to help you think about how to navigate the Public Broadcasting system, what I believe is the one domestic television outlet that offers the most hope for those of you who are interested in producing something besides the latest bit of distraction fluff.  The bad news is that PBS like the rest of the institutions in this country – with the exceptions of several Wall Street firms and banks -- is strapped for cash.  The good news – last year, in a Roper poll, PBS ranked number one in public trust, ahead of newspapers, commercial broadcasters, the judicial system and Congress.  No surprise there.  So if you want to work with the outfit that everyone trusts – PBS is the one