The Assault on Good-for-You TV: C-SPAN and PBS Teeter as Trump Attacks

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When money flowed more freely in television, public-service programming was seen as a means of giving back. From educational TV and supporting public broadcasting to cable operators providing C-SPAN, spaces existed where ratings weren't the yardstick — instead, this was TV intended to be good for you.
On Thursday, Congress took a major step toward undermining all of that, as the House narrowly approved a rescission bill that would claw back $1.1 billion in funding to the Corp. for Public Broadcasting, which helps support PBS stations, in addition to cuts to other programs.
The bill passed by the slimmest of margins, 214 to 212, with a few GOP legislators switching their votes to get it through. The funding was part of a larger $9.4 billion allocation that lawmakers had already approved for foreign aid and public broadcasting. Senate still has to weigh in on the matter, and has five weeks to decide.
With PBS and NPR besieged by the political right, with C-SPAN's funding via cable and satellite fees strafed by cord cutting, higher-minded alternatives have been hit by hard times.
The whole point of PBS and National Public Radio was that they would be unfettered by commercial demands, allowing them to offer programming — from children's programming like Mr. Rogers and 'Sesame Street,' devoid of toy commercials, to lower-key news, documentaries and public affairs — that didn't have to justify its existence on a balance sheet.
Ditto for C-SPAN, which cable operators carried for a small licensing fee simply because of the perceived value in allowing subscribers to see what their elected representatives were doing and saying, unfiltered and unedited.
Public broadcasting has found itself swept up in the Trump administration's war against the media, with the perception that any unflattering reporting about the president — whether from PBS' 'NewsHour' or 'Frontline' or NPR's 'All Things Considered' — reveals 'invidious' bias and a liberal agenda, to use FCC chairman Brendan Carr's favorite word.
Conservatives have long argued that public broadcasting represents an unnecessary expense given the abundance of choices available to most consumers. But in its latest incarnation, 'Defund PBS' overtly translates into being less about fiscal responsibility than leveraging the government's underwriting role to silence otherwise-independent media voices by labeling them progressive propaganda.
On the left, the response was unambiguous. The Writers Guild of America East (WGAE) condemned the House vote as 'a radical right-wing ideology that aims to destroy a non-partisan public service despite all evidence of its wide benefits.' The group quickly turned its attention to pleading with the Senate, which holds a GOP majority but has exhibited a bit more restraint than the House in prosecuting the MAGA agenda.
The CEO of PBS, Paula Kerger, remained silent in the wake of Thursday's vote, but she has been lobbying intensively to save PBS, warning that Trump's push to defund public broadcasters would spell the end for a number of local stations, and the service they provide to their communities.
In a recent interview with Katie Couric, Kerger contemplated the end of public funding for the network, which only relies on the government for a portion of its funds. 'I think we'll figure out a way, through digital, to make sure there is some PBS content,' she said. 'But there won't be anyone in the community creating local content. There won't be a place for people to come together.'
Kerger was referring to the fact that the campaign against PBS and NPR disproportionally harms smaller and more rural communities that voted for Trump (even if many listeners and viewers didn't), which lack the same menu of local-media options as major markets.
In a sense, Sesame Workshop — the entity behind 'Sesame Street' — has provided an unlikely poster child for the financial pressures on public TV, having undergone layoffs before losing its streaming deal with Warner Bros. Discovery's Max. Netflix has since stepped into the breach, joining with PBS Kids in providing access Elmo and his pals.
As for C-SPAN, its challenges stem primarily from evolving technology, which has dramatically undercut the financial model upon which the network was founded in 1979.
With viewers shifting to streaming and dropping cable and satellite subscriptions, the number of homes receiving C-SPAN has sharply dropped to a little over 50 million, meaning the nonprofit enterprise — which costs operators just $7.25 a month, a fraction of what they pay for channels like Fox News and CNN — is running at a significant deficit.
One proposed solution would be for entities with streaming subscribers, like YouTube or Hulu's live-TV package, to carry C-SPAN. Indeed, YouTube's 8 to 10 million subscribers alone would provide enough income to offset most of the shortfall in its roughly $60 million annual operating expenses.
Thus far, however, those companies have balked, prompting a rare bipartisan push in the Senate on C-SPAN's behalf, with Republican Chuck Grassley and Democrat Amy Klobuchar among those joining in a resolution calling upon streaming services to carry the network.
'For tens of millions of Americans who have cut the cord and get their content from streaming services, they should not be cut off from the civic content made available by C-SPAN,' the senators stated.
It's a welcome development for C-SPAN CEO Sam Feist, who joined the network a little over a year ago from CNN. Feist noted that 'cord cutting' doesn't accurately characterize what's transpired — since old cable subscribers have generally moved to new delivery systems — meaning the case for carrying the network remains as simple as the public-service ideal that inspired its launch.
'We're the only network that provides what we provide, which is this unfiltered view of American government,' Feist told TheWrap, adding in regard to the streamers, 'It is good for the country for their customers to have access to our product.'
The campaign regarding C-SPAN carriage has seemingly gained some momentum over the last year, with former Federal Communications Commission chairman Tom Wheeler and the Washington Post's Karen Tumulty among those joining the aforementioned senators in taking up the cause.
Wheeler called YouTube's decision not to carry C-SPAN 'baffling and anti-democratic,' writing in The Hill that the company is depriving viewers of 'an unfiltered window into the goings-on in Congress, the White House and other parts of the government.'
As Sen. Ron Wyden told Tumulty, carrying the network would only cost YouTube about $6 million a year — 'crumbs,' he suggested, for a streamer that rakes in billions in ad revenue.
YouTube has stated that its subscribers 'have not shown sufficient interest in adding C-SPAN to the YouTube TV lineup to justify the increased cost' to their monthly bills, although as Wyden noted, that would amount to a relative pittance of 87 cents a year per household.
The two situations aren't completely analogous, especially with the fate of PBS and NPR having become embroiled in politics, as opposed to corporate stubbornness.
More fundamentally, though, both situations speak to the question of civic responsibility, and whether the government and private interests acknowledge such obligations. Because even if C-SPAN and PBS reach smaller audiences in a fragmented world, certain things are worth keeping around not because everybody watches them, but rather for what they offer, symbolically as well as tangibly, thanks to the staid sobriety they provide by being available to the people that do.
The post The Assault on Good-for-You TV: C-SPAN and PBS Teeter as Trump Attacks appeared first on TheWrap.