Wise Peggy Noonan makes the conservative case for federal funding of PBS, and how the network can continue to deserve it. She's exactly right. If you care about our culture, read the whole thing.
Conservative argue that in a 500-channel universe the programming of PBS could easily be duplicated or find a home at a free commercial network. The power of the marketplace will ensure that PBS's better offerings find a place to continue and flourish.Posted by Alan at June 18, 2005 10:54 AMThis I doubt. Actually I'm fairly certain it is not true. And I suspect most people on the Hill know it is not true.
We live in the age of Viacom and "Who Wants to Be a Celebrity," not the age of Omnibus and "Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts." A lot of Democrats think that left to the marketplace, PBS will die. A lot of Republicans think so too, but don't mind.
At its best, at its most thoughtful and intellectually honest and curious, PBS does the kind of work that no other network in America does or will do.
[S]ome great work [has come] from PBS's detachment from marketplace realities. And it has even been work--such as "The Civil War"--that helped our country by teaching our children the things they must know to go on to become adults who love their country. This, in the world we live in, is no small thing. It's huge.
Why, then, doesn't Congress continue to fund PBS at current levels but tell them they must stick to what they are good at, and stop being the TV funhouse of the Democratic Party? Nobody needs their investigative unit pieces on how Iran-contra was very, very wicked; nobody needs another Bill Moyers show; nobody needs a conservative counter to Bill Moyers's show. Our children are being raised in a culture of argument. They can get left-right-pop-pop-bang anywhere, everywhere.
PBS exists to do what the commercial networks should and won't. And just one of those things is bringing to Americans who have not and probably will not be exposed to it the great treasury of American art, from the work of Eugene O'Neill (again, ABC won't be producing "Long Day's Journey" anytime soon), outward to Western art (Shakespeare) and outward to world art.
And science. And history. But real history, meaning something that happened in the past as opposed to the recent present, with which PBS, alas, cannot be trusted.
Art and science and history. That's where PBS's programming should be. And Americans would not resent funding it.
It is true that if you tell PBS producers they are now doing a play series they will immediately decide to remount "Angels in America." How about a rule: It takes at least 50 years for a currently esteemed work to prove itself a work of art, a true classic. It proves this by enduring. Do plays that have proved themselves to be enduring contributions--i.e., art. Look to the permanent, not the prevalent.
PBS should be refunded, because it does not and will not exist elsewhere if it is not. But it should be funded with rules and conditions, and it should remember its reason for being: to do what the networks cannot do or will not do, and that somebody should do.