roundtable: PBS STANDARDS (LONG)

roundtable: PBS STANDARDS (LONG)

PBS STANDARDS (LONG)

jack@his.com
Fri, 24 Feb 95 22:43:11 

From: jack@his.com
Message-Id: <9502242243.0VX0R0B@his.com>
Date: Fri, 24 Feb 95 22:43:11 
Subject: PBS STANDARDS (LONG)
To: roundtable@cni.org


Terry, thanks for finally letting your special pleading abate, and your 
willingness to acknowledge - and to some extent agree with - the 
criticisms of PBS which have been posted here, mostly from the left of 
center.  When I asked you to qunatify your dependence on PBS, I meant 
only to illustrate my main point about how the politics that drives the 
"distribution" arm ends up influencing the actual output of even the 
most independent public stations.  Like it or not, PBS *acts* like a 
network, even if it's "only a distributor" and has the same impact on 
the public TV viewing population that the networks do on commercial TV.  
In fact, commercial TV is far more diverse from the point of view of 
influence, because there are so many more stations in any given market, 
and because they have no "mission" to support community educational 
needs during the daytime hours.  Yet you would not deny, I think, that 
the "boys up at network" have an inordinate impact on what people see 
on TV (diminishing now on account of cable, but still quite powerful).

If I seemed particularly combative (I admitted up front to an anti-TV 
bias), it was in response to your defensiveness, and the coyness with 
which you chose to express it.  You and I took differing paths out of 
the commercial media game, and each of us is likely to "take positions" 
which justify our behavior.  From what you have said, you appear to 
uphold a high standard given your acceptance of public TV as non-
commercial, and I applaud you for it.  If I am embarked on a different 
crusade (to help the intelligentsia become more aware that public TV 
is only their special flavor of an insidious addictive narcotic), I 
nevertheless am able to appreciate the public service outlook which 
does drive many people in public TV and most of the people in cable 
access (although there are still plenty who see it as their way station 
on the way to fame and fortune).

Readers of this list may wonder what all this has to do with telecom 
policy.  But as we have seen, an awful lot of the policy discussion 
gets mired in political wrangling when people feel they are in 
possession of the only truth, and feel they must prove their superior 
knowledge by treating people who disagree with them as though they are 
stupid or ignorant.

--
Jack Hirschfeld         I like a Gershwin tune, how about you?                
jack@his.com

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