Dollarocracy (28 page)

In the summer of 1968, the National Citizens Committee for Public Broadcasting issued a report on the state of public broadcasting, and Hoving, a talented publicist, went on a media blitz for the next six months to push the cause of public broadcasting.
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In the midst of the 1968 election campaigns, Hoving quickly gravitated to the issues that provoked an enthusiastic response: the horrible coverage of campaigns by the commercial broadcasters, the inundation of the airwaves by political advertising, and the desperate need for a noncommercial alternative. Commercial networks are premiering “new season trivia when our times literally scream out for relevancy,” Hoving proclaimed. Candidates “are being seen primarily in paid political announcements—commercials—where they are shown to their best advantage. . . . The institution of free elections in this country is being reduced to the level of selling soap ads and dog food.”
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The networks refused to air presidential debates unless they could get a waiver to prevent third-party candidates from participating. Hoving dismissed this as “an artificial issue and a stalling tactic.” He noted that the existing public broadcasters had already announced their willingness to air presidential debates with all the candidates on the ballot participating.
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The solution was obvious: “a fourth, noncommercial network” that could go toe-to-toe with the commercial players and raise the standards for everyone.

To judge by press accounts, with his emphasis on campaign coverage, Hoving struck a powerful nerve. “Mr. Hoving has a point. The debates should be held, even at the risk of including other than major party candidates,” the
Boston Globe
wrote.
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“It is unrealistic to think that a fourth, noncommercial network could be set up in time for the election,” the
Christian Science Monitor
editorialized. “But the current lightweight electorate-information efforts of the commercial networks argue that one is needed as soon as possible.”
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The National Citizens Committee for Public Broadcasting's campaign floundered thereafter. Hoving committed the unforgiveable political sin of “arousing the wrath . . . of the commercial broadcasting lobby,” something proponents of public broadcasting had steadfastly avoided doing at all costs.
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The blowback
was intense—from the fearful noncommercial broadcasters as well as from commercial interests—and effectively ended the campaign. He soon left the group, which was reformed as a public-interest group based in Washington to push for more public-interest work by the commercial broadcasters. The brief moment for fundamental reform, for muscular independent public broadcasting, to the extent it existed, had passed.

Almost since its inception, public broadcasting has been in the crosshairs of Dollarocracy. Conservatives in Congress use what little money it does provide as leverage to continually badger public broadcasters to stay within the same ideological range found on the commercial networks.
⁸⁰
Conservatives are obsessed with public broadcasting because the traditional sources of control in commercial media—owners and advertisers—are not in place, and that means there is a greater possibility that the public system might produce critical work.

Milton Friedman wanted public broadcasting to be subject to “market discipline,” while Rush Limbaugh characterized PBS as “an elitist group of politically correct millionaires.”
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In 1995, following the Republican takeover of Congress in the 1994 elections, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich announced his plan to “zero out” federal support for public broadcasting. In 2012, Mitt Romney returned to this idea in the first presidential debate. Over the years, Democrats have proved timid in their defenses of the institution, and after LBJ none of their leaders ever expended political capital to elevate it from its marginal status, especially on the television side. At best, Democrats defended the status quo.

Ironically, while the conservative attacks on public media have created a rallying cry among the loud, hellfire elements of the right, they have never been embraced by the general population. Many conservatives actually
like
public broadcasting. And conservatives who value supporting a quality political culture over gaming the system to increase the odds of victory regardless of the consequences want no part of this battle. In 1984, no less a conservative icon than Barry Goldwater decried cutting any government funding to public broadcasting. Goldwater argued that the rise of commercialism on public broadcasting “marks the end of the only decent source of broadcasting in this country.”
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The Republicans dropped their plan to zero out public broadcasting in the 1990s when Congress was flooded with public opposition, much
of it from conservatives who, presumably, enjoyed watching Bill Buckley chat with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher on the PBS program
Firing Line
.
⁸³

Without muscular public broadcasting serving the public interest, without commitments to replace advertising that sold candidates like toothpaste—as Adlai Stevenson had complained—without free airtime, and without the real campaign-finance reforms that would guard against the buying of elections, America met the high wave of the electronic age without adequate breakwaters against abuse. The extent of the abuse would become increasingly evident as television evolved from its initial role as a campaign tool to become the defining force in American politics.

In the 1970s and 1980s, there was continual grousing about political advertising and its perceived deleterious effects on the electoral process. There were also a number of reform efforts, though none led to anything that would change the system in any substantive sense. By the mid-1990s, however, the connection between money and politics was widely recognized as a very serious issue and as a threat to credible elections and governance. Warren Beatty's acclaimed 1998 political satire
Bulworth
addressed squarely the very issues that drive this book. Foundations devoted many millions of dollars to create organizations that would rally support for campaign-finance reform at the state and national levels. There was a concerted effort by top Democrats and Republicans—among them Senators Russ Feingold and John McCain—to require commercial broadcasters to provide free time to candidates so as to deemphasize the role of Big Money in corrupting the election system. This effort had widespread popular support. Yet it got so little attention that media analyst Howard Kurtz would note in an interview with McCain, “Now the major networks as best as I can determine have devoted zero airtime to this provision of yours.”
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Kurtz and McCain established where the challenge lay:

       
KURTZ: In pushing this bill for free airtime, you are taking on the National Association of Broadcasters. Let me ask you a serious political question. What are you, nuts?

       
MCCAIN: They are the most powerful lobby in Washington.

       
KURTZ: Why is that?

       
MCCAIN: I think one of the reasons is, is because they can say we'd like for you to meet with the general managers of every television station in your state. You go into a room, hear the people that carry your message, and they never—they're very sophisticated. They're not saying do what we want done. Don't get me wrong, it's not that kind of a scenario, but it's very clear that these are the people that shape the opinion to a large degree of the people who are your constituents.

       
KURTZ: It's going to be awfully hard to beat in both Houses of Congress . . .

       
MCCAIN: Yes.
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Free airtime for candidates was a reasonable and modest demand; the commercial broadcasters received their monopoly licenses and rights to the scarce air channels at no charge in return for serving the public interest. The pertinent law assumes that these are firms that must go beyond just maximizing their own profits to justify their getting these lucrative monopoly licenses over other prospective licensees. Those broadcasters that refused to make concessions to the public interest would see their monopoly licenses turned over to a different firm when the term expired. (That this was the case in the letter and spirit of the law, but not in the application of the law, attests to the power of the commercial broadcasting lobby over the years.)
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In legislation and rulings, both Congress and the Supreme Court explicitly stated that providing campaign coverage was a definitional component of the public-service requirements for a broadcaster. The FCC even has a formal expectation that local broadcasters would cover state and local races, and until 1991 candidates in such races had an affirmative right of access to the extent the race could be considered significant.
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As political advertising and the costs of campaigns mushroomed in the 1980s and 1990s, the amount and quality of commercial television's campaign coverage seemed woefully inadequate, and, on the whole, television's contribution to electoral democracy was regarded by more than a few Americans as increasingly destructive.

By 1997, the matter reached its apogee as a viable public issue. President Bill Clinton came out publicly for free airtime with the formation of the Gore
Commission. This was a body recommended by the FCC and appointed by the White House in 1997 to determine the public-service obligations of commercial broadcasters in exchange for their having received lucrative digital broadcasting spectrum for free—valued by some as worth $70 billion—in the 1996 Telecommunications Act. The president noted upon forming the Gore Commission that, although the move from analog to digital signals would give broadcasters “much more signal capacity than they have today,” broadcasters had “asked Congress to be given this new access to the public airwaves without charge”—an end result the president found inadequate. “I believe, therefore, it is time to update broadcasters' public interest obligations to meet the demands of the new times and the new technological realities. I believe broadcasters who receive digital licenses should provide free air time for candidates, and I believe the FCC should act to require free airtime for candidates.”
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The FCC chair at the time, William Kennard, was an ardent supporter of free airtime. No radical—he followed the FCC pattern and went on to a lucrative career as a wheeler-dealer in the telecommunication industry following his tenure—Kennard hoped that the Gore Commission would adhere to the president's wishes. But with several commercial broadcasters among its members, the Gore Commission proved next to worthless.

“At the end of the day,” Kennard said, “the broadcast industry was fundamentally unwilling to accept any requirements that they broadcast more public interest programming.”
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“When President Clinton asked that broadcasters set aside free television time for candidates,” columnist Jeff Cohen wrote at the time, the “NAB reacted with the indignation one might expect from the National Rifle Association if the president had proposed banning not only assault weapons, but hunting rifles, handguns and toy guns.”
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Kennard understood the core problem. “The Gore Commission report came after the spectrum had been given away. And so the leverage was lost.”
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Clinton would eventually let the matter drop, but Kennard persisted in his efforts to secure free airtime for political candidates. He knew from getting out on the road that the idea was popular everywhere, across the political spectrum. “I'd go out to talk to groups, grassroots groups, and I'd say, ‘Well, what about breaking some of this dependency of politicians on money by requiring broadcasters to give away some of their time for free?' and people
would say ‘Yeah, that's a great idea,' and we'd talk about how to do it.” He quickly learned that popular sentiment notwithstanding, the range of discussion was far narrower in Washington. “You say the same thing at a cocktail party in Washington and people would look at you like you were crazy.”
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Congress was certainly not listening to Kennard, or the people, on this one. In fact, when Kennard broached the idea of free airtime for candidates, key members of Congress made it clear that Kennard should drop the matter or risk seeing the FCC's budget cut severely. “The job has been made much harder because of the influence of money in politics.” Kennard explained what happened behind the scenes:

           
When I first started talking to people about free airtime for political candidates, some of my oldest and closest friends in Washington took me to breakfast, and they said, “Bill, don't do this; it's political suicide, you know. You're just going to kill yourself.” And, you know, they were right. I thought it was so sad that we have so distorted the concept of what it means to be a public trustee that you can't even talk about these issues as an independent regulator without people castigating you. It's really sort of outrageous.
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No regulator or politician close to the levers of power has dared to expend political capital advancing Kennard's cause subsequently. The issue has all but evaporated since 2000, even among staunch progressives on the FCC such as Michael Copps. The various campaign-finance groups either folded their tents or reconciled themselves to the distant margins of polite society. The U.S. Supreme Court's
Citizens United
decision of 2010 seemed to lock in unlimited political spending and TV commercialism for all time, or until a constitutional amendment could be passed.