Who needs it?

Forbes , August 09, 1998

REPRESENTATIVE Billy Tauzin (RLa.), the chairman of the House telecommunications subcommittee, recently proposed a bill to increase the annual funding for public television by 63%, to $475 million. A friend who has spent decades working in and around PBS sent me a stunned e-mail: "Just as PBS is becoming completely marginalized, a Republican committee chair proposes a major increase in their funding. Amazing."

By "marginalized," this broadcast veteran means "redundant." Who needs PBS when Nickelodeon carries kids' shows, Discovery covers science, A&E airs cultural programming, and there are new cable channels featuring BBC shows and Sesame Street—all funded without bothering the taxpayers?

The half-billion dollars a year is not the heftiest toll public broadcasting takes on American life. Government-financed television amplifies conflict. It takes what anthropologist Grant McCracken, adapting a term from the Protestant Reformation, calls "things indifferent"—differences that should not matter, that should not threaten social peace—and makes them polarizing issues.

Consider Tales of the City. When the miniseries aired four years ago, it was wildly controversial. An engaging soap opera set in 1970s San Francisco, Tales drew high ratings and won awards. But it also portrayed casual sex, pot-smoking, bare breasts, a transsexual landlady and gay men kissing. It outraged many people. The program was denounced by the Georgia and Oklahoma legislatures, and a Tennessee station decided not to air it after receiving a bomb threat. Plans for a sequel were axed.

This June a six-hour sequel finally aired. Armistead Maupin's More Tales of the City was racier than the original. It featured full-frontal male nudity and many bare behinds. Although still a sentimental drama at heart, it was also more overtly political. One of its most memorable scenes was of a young man dictating a poignant coming-out letter to his conservative Christian parents, sparked by their support for Anita Bryant's antigay crusade.

Yet this time there were no protests, no bomb threats, no official denunciations. American mores haven't changed that much in only four years. What happened to the culture war?

Quite simply, Tales became voluntary. The original show aired on PBS, which meant it enjoyed the official imprimatur of the U.S. government.

It was pushed into American living rooms to elevate our tastes and teach us the right way to think.

The sequel, by contrast, aired on Showtime, a pay cable network supported by the people who watch it. More Tales was entertainment. Its storytelling was justified not by cod-liver-oil virtue but by audience delight. In that context, a gay son's letter home is not a sermon forced on an unenlightened public by their betters. It is an exploration of the human heart, of the meaning of family ties and of the tensions in a particular character's emotional life. It is dramatic, not didactic.

Several critics noted the irony of PBS' insufferably self-congratulatory slogan: "If PBS doesn't do it, who will?" "In this instance, the answer is Showtime," wrote Tom Jicha of the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Newsday's Marvin Kitman was crueler. "But if PBS doesn't do drama," he wrote, "who will? Well, the USA Network (Moby Dick), NBC (Merlin), HBO (From the Earth to the Moon), A&E (Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue). PBS is being lapped by the field."

Nowadays public broadcasting offers almost nothing that can't be found on voluntarily funded cable networks. Its continued existence serves mainly to drag differences of tastes and values out of the competitive, pluralistic worlds of art, religion and commerce into the coercive, one-best-way realm of politics. PBS perpetuates the culture wars.