The Scoop - http://www.bobharris.com/ New subscribers: thanks for joining up. Yes, the column really is free, and you're always encouraged to forward it to friends. That's how our readership grows. And now a favor to ask: does anybody out there speak Korean? I'm shooting a TV pilot on Wednesday, sort of a cool history thingy, and we're taping here in L.A. at the old hat-shaped Brown Derby restaurant, which has been moved to the back of a strip mall, painted silver, decorated with a UFO theme, and turned into a Korean karaoke bar. Honest. So at the end of the show I want to join the regulars for a chorus or two, and so I need to learn the lyrics to "Feelings" in Korean. God, how I love my life… bh THE SCOOP for August 2, 1999 ___________________________ Public Broadcasting If Only There Was Such A Thing © 1999 Bob Harris http://www.bobharris.com mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ___________________________ According to a poll conducted a few years back, about a quarter of Americans apparently think PBS is too left-wing. Then again, according to another poll, thirty percent of Americans believe in witches. ___________________________ The truth about PBS is somewhat different, as is easily revealed by a quick glance at its July broadcast schedule, which is posted online at http://www.pbs.org/whatson/1999/07/descriptions/index.html. Yes, you'll find a few specials with liberal themes, such as "The ACLU: A History," and "American Masters: The Lives Of Lillian Hellman" (which is liberal primarily in that Ms. Hellman once quite marvelously told Joe McCarthy to piss off). But you'll find little in the way of regular, weekly programs with a lefty outlook. Instead, when an overt viewpoint is present -- there's not much political content in "This Old House," really, although it's way more fun to watch if you pretend Bob and Norm are gay -- most continuing programming is either built around the views of avowed conservatives, e.g.: "Adventures from The Book of Virtues" "Think Tank With Ben Wattenberg" "Tony Brown's Journal" "Wall $treet Week With Louis Rukeyser" or sponsored by conservative corporations. As widely noted in the alternative press (and almost never in the mainstream) "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" has owed its existence to corporate welfare king Archer Daniels Midland for years. Somehow MacNeil and Lehrer never seemed to get around much to ADM's federal subsidies, massive influence over Bob Dole, or numerous legal difficulties. Likewise, "This Old House" -- imaginary gay subtext aside -- is funded by, logically, Ace Hardware, State Farm Insurance, and Krylon paints. The very existence of an entity called "Mobil Masterpiece Theatre" -- on a supposedly non-commercial network -- tells us a lot about who puts the last two letters into PBS. PBS has never been the revolutionary cell some conservatives like to pretend it is. Remember, it wasn't Rupert Murdoch who put William Buckley's "Firing Line" on the air for a generation. It was PBS. But let's not let facts get in the way of a good stereotype. In the wake of the way-overblown PBS donor-list scandal -- in which WGBH in Boston apparently shared its fundraising list with political groups ranging from the Democratic National Committee to the Dole presidential campaign and the Heritage Foundation, and about 30 of America's 349 public TV stations bought lists of political donors and sent out letters hitting them up for cash -- numerous conservatives, like GOP congressman Steve Largent (R-Seattle Seahawks), have expressed outrage at PBS' alleged leftism and called for the abolition of public broadcasting. Keep in mind that nobody who ever told Largent to "go deep" was referring to his thinking. And so House Telecommunications Chairman Billy Tauzin, who just weeks ago was calling for a major hike in public broadcasting funding, has called for an investigation into the sharing of donor lists. So has GOP Rep. Christopher Cox, who will probably soon issue a poorly-reasoned report denouncing the Cookie Monster as a secret agent for Red China. Working title: "Big Bird -- The Yellow Peril." Predictable. However, there's something truly disturbing about the dogmatic right-wing claim that commercial TV might do a better job than PBS at getting diverse views on the air. Thanks to the growing conservatism of public broadcasting, that's becoming the actual situation. ___________________________ Of course, the right is rarely right for the reasons they think they're right. In this case, the mythical "free market" is a total joke when applied to commercial broadcast stations, which are subsidized both directly and indirectly in dozens of ways. And the "liberal bias" of commercial broadcasting is an obvious myth: we're talking about an ever-shrinking circle of multinational corporations making money by selling ad time to other multinational corporations, with all decisions in the hands of upper-class executives who answer to Wall Street shareholders. All of which explains why the new fall TV lineup is a Klan rally with a laughtrack. The main problem with public broadcasting is that it's not really all that damn different. ___________________________ My personal experience might be instructive. (Warning: anecdotal evidence is crap, useful only as an illustration of a larger, verifiable fact. Enjoy the story. And then you can examine PBS' funding, personnel, and broadcast schedule independently.) If you believe most right-wing pundits, PBS is a broadcast version of the Weather Underground. Not quite. Instead, a significant minority of public broadcasting bigshots are first-class corporate types, always eager to demonstrate they share the same investor-friendly values of the private sector. I've often wondered how many consider themselves merely slumming in the public domain, until they can land "real," better-paying gigs. In 1994, I was hired to host a talk show by the Fox TV station in Cleveland, specifically because of my lefty political views. They thought we could do something nobody else was doing on TV: a radical, yet commercial talk show. I gave it a shot, because I'm a total ham, but I also thought the project was plainly doomed. I was right. The pilot never even aired, because (I heard; they didn't have the class to tell me directly) one of the higher-ups killed it precisely for the political content that had gotten me hired in the first place. (For those of you in Cleveland guessing along, his initials spell out the name of something that itches in a very uncomfortable place.) For anybody familiar with the standard left critique of commercial broadcasting, that much of the story was predictable. I then took a tape of the pilot and tried to shop it around to several PBS stations, including the one in Cleveland. Surprisingly, however, every single public broadcaster I approached turned it down cold -- specifically because of the progressive content. I still have the letter from the Cleveland station saying I was "too biased" to the left. Which meant I actually got a lot closer to getting on the air at the Fox station. Hmmm… So in 1996, I moved to L.A. A friend at the NPR station in Cleveland (remember, most public broadcasting folks are still pretty damn cool, especially as you move out of the board room) convinced me I should record some of my commentaries -- which at that time were routinely published in the left-as-they-come Z magazine -- and shop them around to the half-dozen NPR, Pacifica, and university-affiliated radio stations around Los Angeles. So I did. And again, I was turned down cold by every single one. They wouldn't even return my phone calls and emails. The one email response I did receive said I was (the same phrase again) "too biased to the left." So I trotted the tapes out to the rest of the radio dial, figuring there wasn't the slightest chance the stuff I have to say would ever get on the air in the commercial world, but what the hell… CBS hired me the very next day. Huh? I didn't get hired for my views, but in spite of them. In fact, the guy who hired me is a religious conservative who thinks Orrin Hatch is one the coolest guys in the world. But he's also a reasonable man (hold those ideas together for a while if you can; my brain hurt the first time I tried), whom I'm now honored and proud to call my friend. He hired me because I was funny, and people like funny, even if they disagree (as he often does) with my politics, and CBS is in the business of pleasing its audience. Actually, that last isn't true. CBS, like all broadcasting corporations, is in the business of pleasing its stockholders. To do that, they're almost always in the business of pleasing their advertisers. And, in turn, that sometimes means pleasing their listeners and viewers, although too often it simply means aiming for the familiar middle and hoping not to piss anybody off. (This is why Donny & Marie will be on one TV or another for the rest of their lives, and probably for some time after.) As it happened, my new boss was aiming high and actually trying to please his audience. Such things are rare, but they do happen, even in commercial media. Don't misunderstand. I'm not saying there's an efficiency to the free market here. Not even close. Otherwise, you'd hear a lot more people like me on the radio, somebody on TV would have mentioned Rambouillet Appendix B during the war in Yugoslavia, and you'd occasionally even see a black man on a CBS primetime show. (OK, that's not quite fair. I just checked the CBS website, and they have a big banner group photo of all the cast members of all the new fall shows at http://marketing.cbs.com/primetime/images/ps_2000.gif. There is, in fact, one black guy. Can you find the lone non-caucasian? It's like a Where's Waldo designed by David Duke.) I'm just pointing out that over several years of effort, it was actually easier to get progressive ideas on the air via a profoundly conservative commercial station than any public outlet. The fact that I did get on the air shouldn't be misconstrued as a measure of the mainstream media's alleged liberalism, a fiction which has been conclusively debunked numerous times by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (http://www.fair.org) and others. It's merely a measure of how conservative "non-commercial" broadcasting has become. ___________________________ Here's a far better and more important example than my own: Howard Zinn's magnificent (and as lefty as you can imagine) A People's History Of The United States is receiving a fast-track adaptation into a ten- or twelve-hour miniseries with a budget of $50 million. And the production contract specifies that the final product must be faithful to the "class, race and antiwar consciousness of the book." This isn't a PBS show. PBS reportedly turned the idea down. Fox is producing the program. That's right: Rupert Murdoch is financing possibly the most openly leftist look at the underbelly of U.S. history every broadcast on American TV. Why? In Zinn's own words (reported last April in The Nation): "The fact that there's a controversial set of messages is precisely what might attract a large audience, which is really what Fox cares about." ___________________________ Mao was partially right: the capitalist really will sell you the rope to hang him with. What Mao forgot was this: the capitalist also already owns the tree. And trespassers will be prosecuted. Bu you're perfectly welcome to have the rope. ___________________________ For the last several weeks, I've received regular emails from readers in the Bay Area, asking me to somehow illuminate the situation regarding KPFA, the local Pacifica station, whose management has of late behaved less like pacifists and more like Gilded Era robber barons. For those who came in late, KPFA is (or rather, was) this really cool station that for half a century really tried to live up to the idea of community radio. But this icon of public broadcasting might be worth as much as $75 million if sold to a private media company, and many observers interpret the recent behavior of the Pacifica board as a prelude to exactly that. Which in turn has led to management/staff conflicts, a top-down prohibition of any on-air discussion of the subject, the physical removal of staff disobeying the edict, and the wholesale locking out of station personnel. All of which sucks. (There. That's my illuminating analysis. I bet you're glad you asked.) Local activists and listeners have put up a vigorous and admirable fight to hang onto their station. Like anyone vaguely familiar with the role KPFA has played in the community and the (too rarely followed) example it has set for other stations around the nation, I support them wholeheartedly. However, a sad truth: much of the broader public in the rest of the U.S. simply doesn't understand all the fuss. So a public radio station is going under. Big deal. That's not because the commercial media is twisting the story. (Although to some extent they are, of course.) It's because for all the reasons outlined above, for the rest of America, "public" broadcasting stopped serving the public a long time ago. ___________________________ America truly needs public broadcasting, now more than ever. Perhaps someday we'll eventually have it. ___________________________ ___________________________ If you've ever wondered if rich people are lazier, stupider, or just less sensitive than regular folks, there's new reason to think you might be right. British car manufacturer Rolls-Royce has recalled over 1700 Silver Seraph and Bentley Arnage automobiles worldwide. A heat sensor embedded in the plush leather seats sometimes malfunctions, and so the car gets too hot. This is the point where a normal person thinks, "a heat sensor embedded in the seats?" Yup. Turns out if you can afford $237,000 for a car, it comes complete with special electronic sensors designed to turn the heater on and off in reaction to your current keister temperature, maintaining your grace in a constant blissful state of rump comfort. However, Rolls-Royce has learned of four instances where the little thermostat thingies didn't turn off the heat quite when they were supposed to. No one was hurt, but a few of their customers' butts got a few degrees too warm. So Rolls-Royce is recalling 1700 vehicles. This is where I get off, thank you. Apparently the rich can't be expected to bother reaching over and figuring out how to work a car heater by themselves. Either that, or Rolls-Royce is worried their customers are literally too stupid to notice their ass is on fire. ___________________________ ___________________________ Bob Harris is a stand-up comedian, political writer, and syndicated radio humorist. His new book, Steal This Book And Get Life Without Parole, will be published soon by Common Courage Press. To receive a free email subscription to The Scoop, just send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___________________________ Bob's Big Plug-O-Rama™ (updated 7/26/99): Http://www.bobharris.com has finally been updated, and we seem to finally have the bugs out of the streaming content. If you have the RealNetworks G2 player -- which is free to download at http://www.real.com -- you can see stand-up comedy clips, hear radio commentaries, and enjoy other such stuff sprinkled around the site, along with early writing samples from National Lampoon magazines, a growing archive of past columns, and lots of other fun stuff. The new book, Steal This Book And Get Life Without Parole, is at the printer. It’ll be out in September, replete with cartoons by Tom Tomorrow and a foreword by Paul Krassner. You can visit the fine publisher at http://www.commoncouragepress.com. I’ll be doing readings at bookstores around the country during my fall college tour. So far, the book has already received hugely kind praise from Jim Hightower, Jeff Cohen, Michael Moore, and lots of other cool people. This is way exciting. Syndication of "This Is Bob Harris," the daily radio feature, is rolling along: 75 stations and counting. Call your favorite station and ask for the feature. They pay attention, honest. The radio stuff is also broadcast in over 140 countries by Armed Forces Radio -- and during the Rush Limbaugh program at that! Partly as a result, this column now has regular subscribers in 41 countries on six continents. You can also hear an audio version of my commentaries at Soapbox, http://www.webactive.com/webactive/soapbox/monday.html. Finally, you can find recent columns reprinted in the current print editions of Dollars & Sense, Extra!, and the Funny Times. Meanwhile, Mother Jones online (http://www.motherjones.com) now carries The Scoop every week. I am honored to be associated with these people. They rule. ______________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED] MSN Messenger Service lets you stay in touch instantly with your family & friends - Visit http://messenger.msn.com
