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The World According to PBS
| Article
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12809 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1987 |
3,473 Words |
| Author
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Dinesh D'Souza
Dinesh D'Souza is Senior Domestic Policy Analyst at the White
House. Research assistance for this article was provided by
Angela Grimm, director of the Catholic Center at the Free
Congress Foundation. |
During the past couple of years, a war has been raging over Senate confirmation of President Reagan's nominees to the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which funds and oversees public television. Slowly but inevitably, conservative nominees have been squeezing through the confirmation process. The result is that the liberal-to-left producers and directors of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) now realize that the balmy days are coming to an end.
For years, PBS simply reflected the ethos of alienated segments of the New York and Washington intelligentsia. Familiar sights were the features and documentaries that aired every fortnight: chronicles of sanguinary dictatorships in the Third World, with hints of American complicity; the specter of hordes of fundamentalist crazies trying to curtail our basic rights and revive the heady days of the Inquisition; spies for the Soviet Union, empathetically presented, as they tell "their side of the story"; the communist bloc, portrayed to dispel cold war stereotypes and heavy breathing; South Africa, revealed as an "evil empire" that could be improved only by revolution. "No question about it," declared Richard Brookhiser, a director of CPB, "there has been a kind of reflexive progressive orthodoxy at PBS."
Recently the renomination of the feisty Sonia Landau, former chairman of Women for Reagan-Bush, to the CPB board was defeated by Senate Democrats led by Jay Rockefeller. Rockefeller helped put the finishing touches on a long-standing vendetta that his wife, former CPB chairman Sharon Rockefeller, had been carrying out against Landau. Alarmed that Landau, in her first term as CPB chairman, threatened to halt the wave of liberal pet projects approved by the board, Rockefeller accused Landau and fellow Reagan nominees of undermining the independence of PBS. She alleged that "the best interests of the American people" were not being served and even hinted at fascist conspiracy. "I can't say it is a master plan. But they act in lockstep. We've never had that before."
Landau, for her part, says that "the Left accuses anyone who disagrees with its agenda of politicization and threatening the independence of the organization. All that we threatened was the old monopoly, the old way of doing things." She dismissed press reports of dissent on CPB as natural: "You have people here who are outspoken and have different views. So what if they disagree?"
Although Landau's appointment has been postponed and she may have to be renominated next year, other Reagan appointees of
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