Public Television, Tool of the Devil
Big Bird is Satan. ...okay, maybe not, but his home most assuredly is. Public TV, my friends. I have seen its flame-licked face and know the truth.
It's that time of year again, when patrons are expected to open their hearts and pocketbooks and pay $120 for a CD that costs $15 at your local Tower Records. When each 30 minutes of programming is interrupted with 20 of begging, pleading rich folks who are in desperate need of a new hobby. When the "generous" members reveal their true, selfish colours. 'Tis a grim time indeed.
My personal history with public television is a long and varied one. While growing up, I was an avid fan of Sesame Street and The Electric Company. Ah, the young halcyon days of youth. Through middle school and high school, the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) was the home of British comedies of much amusement; Butterflies, The Two Ronnies, Mother & Son, and the king of them all, Red Dwarf.
My senior year of high school was when the veil began to drop. That year, I sat on the board for our local public TV station, LPB. There, I met the woman who was at the head of that board, adorned well with her diamond earrings, pearl necklace and jewel-laden rings. She was thumping the table because the cameras in the studio were all of five years old and needed replacing.
(Perhaps that sounds like a long life span for a televion camera, but I assure you that the opposite is true. The cameras in my high school's TV studio, considerably cheaper than the ones LPB had to play with, were older than that when I first got my grubby little hands on them, and they worked perfectly well. Considering that our station actually used them more than LPB did during the course of a year, these were practically brand new.)
The woman's other topic of much derision was the fact that they had failed to raise enough money during their just-ending fall pledge drive, collecting a paultry $500,000 or so.
Probably needless to say, I did not sit long on the board of LPB, disliking pretty much everything there was to dislike about it. At that time, I ceased watching the station and had hoped my connection to it well and truly severed. Alas, upon accepting my current job, I realized to my horror that we also took their pledge calls. This in and of itself was bad enough when the company was small. Over the course of the years, it has grown considerably and added not one or two more public TV stations, but a whopping EIGHT in addition. This has given me vast exposure to the flip side of the public TV coin -- the donators.
Where to start describing these people? I initially made the mistake of assuming they would be kind hearted and understanding individuals. One harsh dose of reality later and I held an entirely different and unrepeatable viewpoint. Let's take a look at a few of the classes of pledge givers.
Public Television Mission Statement: The entire premise behind PBS is that it gets its funding from government grants, corporate underwriting and viewer contributions. In doing so, the stations are able to refrain from running commercials for advertising dollars and succumbing to programming pressures caused by that avenue of financing. As a result, they can run quality programming unable to be found anywhere else on TV.
Sounds nice in theory, doesn't it?
PBS Point One: "We don't run commecials!" This is verbally true. However, let's dig a little deeper into the spirit of a commercial instead of just the letter. What is the purpose of a commercial? To sell a product or idea to the viewer. What is the purpose of a pledge drive? To sell a product ("pledge x dollars for this!") or idea to the viewer. Let's break it down even more: Commercials want you to spend money. Pledge drives want you to spend money. Where was that difference again?
PBS Point Two: "Quality programming!" Well, quality is an objective word. In some cases, I agree with this wholeheartedly -- the aformentioned British comedies and the Great Performances series spring immediately to mind. Others like The Wide Whimsical World of Wheat ... not so much.
PBS Point Three: "You can only see them here!" Perhaps that is the case in a legal sense -- PBS bought the rights and all <admitted ignorance of how TV show rights work here> -- but in this day and age of specialty channels? Sorry, I can't quite believe there is not a niche for each and every program to be found on any given PBS station. If there is not yet a Brit Com station, there will be eventually. There are already three or four stations which cater to children's programming out there (Nickelodeon, Noggin, etc) who would be delighted to have new episodes of Sesame Street, Arthur and The Teletubbies. 50s Doo Wop? VH-1. Stage shows? A&E. Wall Street Week? CNN Financial. Hell, I wouldn't even be surprised if Home and Garden picked up the wheat series. And for those shows which appeal so select an audience that even cable won't touch them, I introduce Public Access TV.
"But Jet Wolf!" you cry. "They have COMMERCIALS and COMMERCIALS are BAD!" True, my little cantelope, but can they possibly be worse than a pledge drive? At least with a commercial station, you see approximately 22 minutes of program to every 30 of air time. You're looking at about 50/50 with PBS stations ... if we're being generous.
And while we're on the subject of generousity, I'd like to touch for a moment on the dollars that these stations rake in. One night last week, both Mike and myself took one pledge call apiece for individuals who were spending $1200 on glass. GLASS, folks. That's $2400 for something which serves absolutely no purpose whatsoever except to look pretty. That glass won't feed you. It won't keep you warm. It won't even entertain you (although I don't doubt that somebody somewhere will stare at it for hours on end, but those are the people who should be removed from the gene pool anyway, so maybe we'll get lucky and they'll try to eat or wear it too). If those people really wanted to give that money away to charity, surely they could've found something more deserving than television.
LPB collected $500,000 that pledge drive. One pledge drive out of four, month long beg-fests held each year. And they were acting like they'd done poorly. Over 2 million dollars in viewer contributions alone per year to a single television station. And yet this country still has people sleeping in cardboard boxes and living off of discarded McDonald's ketchup packets.
Public television has remained largely unchanged for four decades or so. It's time to evolve or die out, that's nature's way. Let's face it, folks. Nobody likes a whiner and nobody respects a begger. These are about the only things you'll get for free from public television. Or the price you pay for it, one of the two.
And who knows what else eludes me at the moment. But that's far from all the evils found on the pledge lines. Just a few of the other irritations include:
So, with all this in mind, I propose the following: Do away with public television. It is an idea whose time has come. Let's discuss this in some detail, shall we?
