PBS: Behind the Screen

National Review, Feb 10, 1997 by Neal B. Freeman

LAURENCE Jarvik is frequently described by sources in the public-broadcasting world as a gadfly. If by that they mean what Webster did, namely, "one that stimulates or provokes to activity by persistent criticism especially of an irritating, pointed kind," they couldn't be closer to the truth.

Over most of the past decade, Jarvik has served as self-appointed court reporter at the high councils of public broadcasting. He has read all the paper -- the briefing books, the blind copies, the memoranda responding to your earlier memoranda. He has screened the shows -- the furry-animal shows, the Brit shows, the crazy-Left shows, and the token conservative shows. And he has gone to the meetings -- the meetings to celebrate the multicultural shows and the non-meetings to bury the dominant-culture shows and, more than now and then, the meetings to plan other meetings. (One of the founding fathers of public broadcasting, James Day, once said of PBS with memorable precision that it was a meeting interrupted occasionally by a program.)

Jarvik's new book is his report on what he learned. For anybody interested in public broadcasting, it is a provocative read, full of stories of an irritating, pointed kind. In a series of case studies, Jarvik begins at the beginning and plows through the celebrated PBS episodes with impressive diligence and sustained indignation.

His chapter on the kid shows -- Sesame Street, Barney, et al. --makes a strong case for two propositions. First, that there is precious little evidence that any of these educational shows have educated any kids. I am not sufficiently familiar with the data to assess Jarvik's judgment, but it hangs out there like an accusing finger.

And second, that there is big money in producing educational kid shows. According to Jarvik's figures, Sesame Street now has five thousand products under license doing $800 million a year in retail. Revenues of that size would put a for-profit company in the middle of the Fortune 1000. In 1995, the show's production company had socked away $70 million in a stock-and-bond portfolio. That's a lot of nonprofits.

Another financial powerhouse, barely visible behind the begathons on the PBS screen, is the how-to shows, many of them originating from Boston's WGBH. The station got into this lucrative business with Julia Child and has parlayed its franchise with such long-time favorites as The Victory Garden, This Old House, The New Yankee Workshop, and other weekly series. Not only do these series attract corporate funding, but also, according to Jarvik, they permit commercial cross-promotion and even brand-name product placements. That is to say, it's no accident that the camera comes to rest on what is unmistakably a Smith hammer, while Jones's fungible alternative remains unseen. That's a serious charge, given the PBS commandment that funders shall have no control over program content.

Jarvik makes this same incendiary point in a chapter on Masterpiece Theatre, long funded by the Mobil Corporation. In an interview with former Mobil executive Herbert Schmertz, Jarvik extracts en passant the information that Schmertz negotiated directly with British television executives to secure dramas and "Britcoms" for Masterpiece Theatre. In Schmertz's telling, only when agreements were reached between Mobil and BBC principals were the American producers brought into the conversation. (The reader might benefit from other versions of this story.)

Jarvik makes these points about the earning power of PBS not because it is his instinct to shrink from unclean commercial activity. (It manifestly is his instinct to remark, passim, on the hypocrisy of the PBS priesthood.) Rather, he seeks to make the case that public broadcasting would in all likelihood survive and even prosper if the federal subsidy were discontinued.

At the heart of Jarvik's case for a privatized PBS is what he perceives to be a long-running, deep-going pattern of political bias. His chapters on Bill Moyers, The Advocates, and William F. Buckley Jr. lay down the argument that PBS is broken and can't be fixed. Of Moyers, Jarvik has much to say, none of it good and some of it psychobabblish: Jarvik spends too many words chasing Oedipal theories through Moyers's employment history with LBJ, Harry Guggenheim of Newsday, and William Paley of CBS.

But when he moves into tight focus on Moyers's off-again, on-again PBS career, Jarvik scores heavily. He makes a stinging case against Moyers's tendency to promote his own commercial interests while appearing to pursue straight journalistic missions. Jarvik reveals important new details of Moyers's financial stake in the pop spiritualism of Joseph (The Power of Myth) Campbell, a stake so significant that, in Jarvik's view, it drove Moyers to ignore accusations of anti-Semitism against Campbell. When Jarvik gets finished with him, it's clear -- at a minimum -- that Moyers's PBS career has been a celebration of a double standard, one for house liberals, another for everybody else.