New York Times<\/p>\n
PBS Is Still TV\u2019s Best Path to Better Citizenship<\/p>\n
Long before it was fashionable, PBS educated us about the realities of American life, and spoke some truth to power along the way.<\/p>\n
By Mike Hale October 13, 2020<\/p>\n
The greatest hits of PBS, which was formed 50 years ago to serve what were then known as educational television stations, could broadly be described as instructive. \u201cSesame Street\u201d and Julia Child and Ken Burns, no argument. \u201cDownton Abbey\u201d and \u201cAntiques Roadshow,\u201d well, they\u2019re primers on the management of inherited wealth, perhaps a topic of some importance to the service\u2019s viewership.<\/p>\n
I jest, a little. As a more-than-full-time TV watcher I have a tremendous fondness and respect for the Public Broadcasting Service \u2014 and for the public-TV ecosystem that surrounds it \u2014 that aren\u2019t based on grumpy butlers or colorful puppets. They\u2019re based on something PBS and its member stations do more thoroughly than anyone else in TV: educate us to be better citizens.<\/p>\n
Given PBS\u2019s nature, that education is not a coordinated, eye-in-the-sky effort. The service doesn\u2019t make TV programs, and the news, public-affairs and cultural shows at its heart are produced by different members of its amicable but competitive family.<\/p>\n
\u201cAmerican Experience\u201d (history), \u201cNova\u201d (science) and \u201cFrontline\u201d (investigative journalism, occasionally in collaboration with The New York Times) come from WGBH in Boston. The no-nonsense daily newscast \u201cNewsHour\u201d comes from WETA in Washington during the week and from WNET in New York on weekends; WNET also produces the interview show \u201cAmanpour & Company\u201d with CNN. Los Angeles\u2019s KCET provides the environmental magazine \u201cEarth Focus.\u201d<\/p>\n
Other parts of the mosaic are filled in by noncommercial TV-making and -distributing organizations that are allied with PBS and largely invisible to the public. The documentary showcases \u201cPOV\u201d and \u201cAmerica ReFramed\u201d are produced for PBS by the New York-based American Documentary. The most recent of Bill Moyers\u2019s invaluable series of shows \u2014 in 2014, it was mainstream American TV at its most insurrectionary \u2014 was distributed to PBS stations by American Public Television, PBS\u2019s smaller cousin, whose current offerings include the African-diaspora documentary series \u201cAfroPop.\u201d<\/p>\n
That was a bit of a laundry list, but there\u2019s a point to it. Decentralized by definition, focused on its glossier shows for fund-raising purposes and, perhaps, wary of political turbulence, PBS doesn\u2019t package or promote its journalistic and documentary content (outside of Burns\u2019s marathons) as strongly as it could. But the viewer who partakes of the breadth of PBS\u2019s public-affairs offerings will be much better informed about the realities of contemporary American life than the more numerous citizens who depend on cable news.<\/p>\n
In the last month or so, that viewer could have watched an evenhanded comparison of the political histories of Joe Biden and Donald Trump, as well as an examination of efforts at police reform in Newark, on \u201cFrontline.\u201d The \u201cVoces\u201d series offered a documentary on mobilizing Latino voters; \u201cPOV\u201d carried \u201cThe Infiltrators,\u201d about a pair of Dream Act immigrants who got themselves arrested in order to see inside a detention center.<\/p>\n
From \u201cAmerican Experience,\u201d there was a four-hour history of women\u2019s voting rights. In the near future: Ric Burns and Gretchen Sorin\u2019s \u201cDriving While Black,\u201d on the role of the car and the road in African-American life, and a \u201cNova\u201d segment on the possibilities of geoengineering climate change called \u201cCan We Cool the Planet?\u201d<\/p>\n
A couple of observations. First, those of us who write about TV could do a lot more to bring attention to worthwhile and, for the most part, engaging shows like these. It would be as simple, and as difficult, as stepping aside more often from the self-perpetuating buzz pursuit that pulls so many eyeballs to Netflix and HBO. Mea culpa.<\/p>\n
Second, it is striking how often and openly PBS programs pursue investigations or present information that is not likely to please the overseers of the service\u2019s (relatively small) federal subsidy, particularly during the past four years of the Trump administration.<\/p>\n
\u201cFrontline,\u201d in particular, has been tough on the powers that be and their supporters in recent reports like \u201cUnited States of Conspiracy,\u201d \u201cThe Virus: What Went Wrong?\u201d and \u201cGrowing Up Poor,\u201d whose working title was \u201cGrowing Up Poor in Trump\u2019s America.\u201d (PBS science and nature programs were also early accepters of the science of climate change.) Explorations of injustice and inequality may be presented in neutral terms \u2014 probably more a result of institutional culture than of political calculation \u2014 but they are no less damning for that.<\/p>\n
PBS and its noncommercial colleagues are not the only places on TV to find tough-minded, honest accounts of the fractious American situation, and political content, in particular, has exploded in recent years and even months. Showtime, with \u201cThe Circus\u201d and \u201cDesus & Mero,\u201d stands out, along with Vice, which on TV can look like PBS\u2019s poorly behaved teenage sibling. But these efforts still tend to be scattershot and, often, stronger on emotion or drama than on authority.<\/p>\n
Commercial TV often funnels its public-affairs impulses into comedy and late night, and the strongest program in the field, HBO\u2019s \u201cLast Week Tonight With John Oliver,\u201d sits at the intersection of the two. \u201cLast Week\u201d is a jewel, one of the most essential shows \u2014 along with \u201cFrontline\u201d \u2014 on American TV. But in the commercial world, it\u2019s an extreme outlier. (It has less than a quarter of the audience of that far inferior provider of late-night satire, \u201cSaturday Night Live.\u201d)<\/p>\n
The current presidential election has stirred even the old broadcast networks, and they have generated some decent politically minded efforts in recent weeks, though again in the soft shell of comedy. ABC\u2019s \u201cblack-ish\u201d produced a pair of election episodes that had sharp things to say about Black disenfranchisement. Fox, of all networks, offered \u201cLet\u2019s Be Real,\u201d a Robert Smigel puppet show that savaged both Biden and Trump. (Both shows are available on Hulu.)<\/p>\n
Telling uncomfortable truths may be in vogue now, but PBS has been doing it, quietly and consistently, for decades. \u201cFrontline\u201d premiered in 1983; Moyers was a progressive voice on PBS in a series of programs dating back to 1971. \u201cAmerican Experience\u201d has been fleshing out the historical record since 1988 and has been a primary venue for the documentarian Stanley Nelson\u2019s rich, continuing history of Black life in America (including \u201cThe Murder of Emmett Till\u201d and \u201cFreedom Riders\u201d).<\/p>\n
The record isn\u2019t perfect \u2014 everyone will have examples; my most recent one would be the notably uncritical \u201cCreated Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words\u201d from this summer \u2014 but the record is peerless; no one else in American TV comes close.<\/p>\n
In a step toward promoting that heritage, the service this month inaugurated an Amazon Prime Video channel called PBS Documentaries that collects a lot of the programming I\u2019ve mentioned here. This being America, though, you\u2019ll need to pay a small monthly subscription fee (plus the Prime Video fee) for the convenience of watching all that noncommercial, previously free content. It\u2019s a fairly small price to pay for an education.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
New York Times PBS Is Still TV\u2019s Best Path to Better Citizenship Long before it was fashionable, PBS educated us about the realities of American life, and spoke some truth to power along the way. By Mike Hale October 13, 2020 The greatest hits of PBS, which was formed 50 years ago to serve what […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[10],"class_list":["post-78222","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research-paper-writing","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78222"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78222\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}