Dollarocracy (27 page)

As with their global counterparts, U.S. public and community broadcasters have routinely done a better job of covering political campaigns than the commercial news media do. It is there that viewers are most likely to see debates or see in-depth interviews with candidates, even obscure candidates. But here the marginal status of American public media, combined with budgets that
are microscopic on a per capita basis compared to those of nearly all other advanced democratic nations, means that the public media election coverage has considerably less substance and influence than it might otherwise. And the serious budget cuts public media have taken in recent years make their ability to do even rudimentary coverage far more difficult. But it is worth noting that in the recent past, leading American politicians understood that public broadcasting was a key to credible democratic politics in the United States, as elsewhere.

The time was 1967, a period of great tumult, and President Lyndon Johnson was vexed by a concern that had troubled him for more than a decade: a sense that American democracy needed to be repurposed to meet the new economic and technical demands of the television age. So it was that the most powerful man in the world devoted long hours to assuring that, instead of having American politics defined by commercial broadcasting, Americans would define the intersection of media and politics so as to reinforce “the bedrock of democracy.”
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To that end, Johnson became determined to return to the fight that had been lost in the 1930s and establish a muscular public and community broadcasting system that would “be free . . . be independent and . . . belong to all of our people.” We already discuss in
Chapter 1
the remarkable campaign-finance initiatives of the Kennedy and Johnson eras and how close the United States came to a bipartisan consensus in favor of clean politics. For the purposes of this chapter, and the broader discussion about the role television plays in our politics, we focus briefly on the thirty-sixth president's equally remarkable attempt to create an “American BBC.”

Johnson was a man of politics and media, a veteran of more than twenty-five years in the U.S. House, the U.S. Senate, the vice presidency, and the presidency. His family controlled a Texas radio and television empire that began with an Austin radio station that would eventually be dubbed “KLBJ.” Readers of the epic biographical series penned by Robert Caro are well aware that Johnson used his political influence to build that broadcast network and his media influence to build his political career. But Caro readers are also aware that Johnson was a far more complex thinker—and doer—than might be suggested by the stereotype of the uncouth powerbroker stealing elections or threatening reporters.
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Like a striking number of world leaders in his moment, Johnson understood that at a point where developed nations were forging their futures in “the white heat of [a technological] revolution”—to borrow of a phrase from British prime minister Harold Wilson—governments were called upon to frame and shape the role those technologies would play in future societies.
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And technologies that could define the political debates of a great nation—be they broadcast or digital (and both Wilson and Johnson were fascinated by the emergence of the computer)—were a particular concern.

Johnson put it another way in his speech ushering in a new era of public and community broadcasting:

           
It was in 1844 that Congress authorized $30,000 for the first telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore. Soon afterward, Samuel Morse sent a stream of dots and dashes over that line to a friend who was waiting. His message was brief and prophetic and it read: “What hath God wrought?”

                
Every one of us should feel the same awe and wonderment here today.

                
For today, miracles in communication are our daily routine. Every minute, billions of telegraph messages chatter around the world. They interrupt law enforcement conferences and discussions of morality. Billions of signals rush over the ocean floor and fly above the clouds. Radio and television fill the air with sound. Satellites hurl messages thousands of miles in a matter of seconds.

                
Today our problem is not making miracles—but managing miracles. We might well ponder a different question: What hath man wrought—and how will man use his inventions?
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Bill Moyers, LBJ's press secretary and confidant on public broadcasting matters, argued that as someone who had “become wealthy through a virtual family monopoly on media in Austin, Texas,” Johnson “knew that something was missing from American television. There was more to what the medium could be if it were not measured by ratings and the bottom line.” Presidents are often the last to know where a policy proposal is headed, but Johnson, said Moyers, knew exactly where he wanted this one to go:

           
We thought democracy deserved better. It was one thing for information to be commercialized, privatized, and devoted exclusively to profit. But democracy doesn't live by bread alone; it lives on ideas, too, and occasionally it needs a full-course banquet of truth. Once television became the tool of commerce, only the price tag mattered. Contrary ideas, critical journalism, public debates, and programs that served the tastes, interests, and needs of significant but less than mass
audiences were rare items in the inventory of the marketplace. In only a few years television had become, in the words of the FCC chairman “a vast wasteland,” a phrase that quickly entered the lexicon of lost opportunities.

                
We talked about how television could be much more of an open marketplace of ideas, available to everyone.

                
We talked about how instead of merely offering predigested views of current events or defining “debate” as the off-setting opinions of two politicians with vested interest in the issue, television could be more of a real battle of ideas, where one person might actually change another's mind.

                
We talked about how television could be more of a storyteller, providing people with some coherent sense of the broader social forces that affect their everyday world—portraits of the world and not just snapshots.

                
We talked about how television could be more diverse, exposing us to the experiences and thoughts of people living on the other side of the country or the other side of the globe, including thoughts that might rattle the cage of our own settled opinions.

                
We talked about how television could be more independent and how it could encourage journalism that would help check the corruption and abuse of power—something that was very much on the minds of our founding fathers when they provided for the constitutional freedom of the press.

                
We talked about how television could be more of a mirror held up to America, revealing that we are not all white, or male, or tall, or blonde, or blue-eyed, or brave, or Protestant, or rich, or powerful.

                
We talked about how television could be more than the boss' stenographer—how it would convey the interests and opinions of more people than the economic and political elites; how it could in fact help those elites understand the questions regular people asked every day—how to get a job, how to pay the doctor, how to put food on the table, how to get the kids through school, how to afford old age—the very questions corporate media scarcely valued.

                
All this talk led to something. It led us to believe that what democracy needed was a truly free and independent broadcasting service—free of both state and commerce. The President sat in on some of these meetings. He liked what he heard, and when he sent to Congress what became the Public Broadcasting Act of l967, it was with a ringing request that “the public interest be fully served through the public airwaves.”
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Bill Moyers well recalled how close they came. The Carnegie Commission prepared a report that LBJ used as the basis for his legislation; it coined the phrase “public television” in calling for “a broadcasting system that would be publicly funded but not government run, an important distinction to keep in mind.”
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U.S. public broadcasting was seen as providing cutting-edge political and creative programming that commercial broadcasting found un-profitable,
and as serving poor and marginalized audiences of little interest to the commercial networks.
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As Pennsylvania Republican senator Hugh Scott said during the congressional debates on the matter in 1967, “I want to see things on public television that I hate—things that make me think!”
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The vision was bold: in the
New York Times
James Reston compared the Carnegie Report to the 1862 Morrill Act creating land-grant colleges and universities. Public broadcasting would change media, journalism, and politics just as land-grant colleges had begun “the great experiment of mass higher education in the United States.”
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To the view of the Carnegie Corporation, this would be a well-funded service, based on an excise tax on the sale of television sets eventually reaching 5 percent and placed in a trust fund where politicians would not have direct control.
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When the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 was passed, this was the one key element of the Carnegie plan that was dropped. “It was a bold idea,” recalled Moyers, “and it went nowhere.”
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Had it been fully implemented, public broadcasting would enjoy an annual budget that would be approaching the $4 billion range in 2012 dollars.
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That is almost ten times more than the present federal budget for public radio and television.

What happened to put the kibosh on the crucial funding mechanism? Unfortunately, the men who controlled the congressional purse strings did not share Johnson's enthusiasm for “rededicating a part of the airwaves, which belong to all the people . . . for the enlightenment of all the people.” House Ways and Means Committee chairman Wilbur Mills, a wily Arkansas Democrat whose committee developed and advanced legislation dealing with taxes, was called to the White House, poked and prodded by Johnson. But Mills, who despite initial reservations had helped the president establish a funding stream for Johnson's Medicare program, was not going along this time. “Well, that's all well and good, Lyndon,” he told Johnson. “But you were up there long enough [in Congress] to know we ain't gonna give money to folks without some strings attached. We don't work that way.”
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Mills was in those days known as “the most powerful man in Washington.”
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And he refused to use that power to create an independent public broadcasting system robust enough to hold men like him to account. “That was that,” recalled Moyers. “It meant a life on the dole for this new enterprise. And it left us vulnerable.”
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Vulnerable—not just to bad television, but also to bad politics. Johnson's and the Carnegie Commission's vision of a dissident, edgy, and provocative broadcasting service to drive American culture and democracy to ever-greater heights was doomed from the start because the independent funding mechanism had been sabotaged. Before 1967 ended, nascent public broadcasting journalism was in the midst of controversy for programming it did on racism and for examining the dubious claims in television advertising.
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When the newly formed Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) aired muckraking programs such as
Banks and the Poor
, it sent some politicians into a tizzy. President Nixon vetoed the public broadcasting budget authorization in 1972 to express his displeasure.
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The Democratic platform that year, arguably the most left-wing Democratic platform since the New Deal, stated, “We should support long-range financing for public broadcasting, insulated from political pressures. We deplore the Nixon Administration's crude efforts to starve and muzzle public broadcasting, which has become a vital supplement to commercial television.” PBS eventually did get its funding, but the message was made very clear to public broadcasters: be very careful in the coverage of political and social issues, and expect unwanted controversy if you proceed outside the political boundaries that exist in commercial broadcast journalism.

Although the Carnegie report and all the related documents surrounding the creation of public broadcasting emphasized the importance of the service to extending and deepening democratic citizenship and participation to the great mass of Americans, its importance for election campaigns was never directly stated; it was implicit. The importance became explicit with a revealing episode during the 1968 election campaign. The Carnegie Corporation gave a two-year $300,000 grant to Thomas P. F. Hoving to launch the National Citizens Committee for Public Broadcasting in 1967 to push the government to get the public system funded and operational.
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Hoving, a Princeton PhD, had served as New York City parks commissioner before becoming director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1967, his job at the time, all before turning forty.
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Hoving assembled an impressive membership, a veritable who's who, of intellectuals including John Kenneth Galbraith, artists such as Harry Belafonte, civic leader Walter Sandbach of the Consumers Union and other leaders like him, and some business leaders and heads of nonprofit organizations. This group's purpose was to create a “people's lobby” that would
pressure Congress to “pay off” on its “public broadcasting pledge.”
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Not only was Hoving frustrated that Congress was dragging its heels; he also thought the commercial TV networks and AT&T, which controlled the necessary wires to make a national network possible, were in no particular hurry to launch a fourth network.