During the 2012 Presidential Debate, Mitt Romney advocated cutting funding for the Public Broadcasting Service:
“I’m going to the stop the subsidy to PBS. I’m going to stop other things. I like PBS. I love Big Bird. (...) But I’m not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for it.”
In the spirit of conservative philosophy of minimal state involvement, the Republican critique of PBS has recently revealed an altogether similar thematic emphasis: the state has no purpose in involving itself in domestic media, arts, culture, and entertainment. Central to this argument is an implicit criticism of an ‘unbalanced’ political message in American public media. In other words, Republicans would not be strongly pushing for funding cuts if the party did not perceive public TV programs as liberal. However, what seems to be at stake in this debate is not the relationship between deficit, taxes, and spending, but more fundamentally the limit to state’s involvement in public education and its didactic role. Therefore, the question I kept in mind while watching PBS and listening to NPR this past week were: “how does the problem of state-funded TV connect taste and class with politics and power?” and “how has PBS responded to the accusation of being elitist?”
In the immediate aftermath of Mitt Romney’s statement, thousands of Big Bird memes, tweets, and posts flooded social media channels; even the Obama website declared: “Save Big Bird! Vote Democratic.” 
Instantly, democrats claimed the Public Broadcasting Service as theirs to save while Republicans continued to vilify the image of privileged liberal elites taunting small town values . In a sense, the critique of PBS became a facet of a larger discussion on whether education is a class problem in the United States. Interestingly, the debate seems counterintuitive. From an objective political perspective, Democrats as traditional backers of labor and educational unions should be more aligned with lower-income, working-class Americans and supportive of their judgments of taste (using Bourdieu’s terminology). However, over the past 30 years Republicans have successfully challenged this narrative by making taste and class useful political tools. This wedge cumulated in Pat Buchanan’s 1992 “culture war” speech at the Republican National Convention:
“There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself. (…) The agenda [Bill] Clinton and [Hillary] Clinton would impose on America — abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat — that's change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America wants. It is not the kind of change America needs. And it is not the kind of change we can tolerate in a nation that we still call God's country.”
To illustrate this change in American discourse, I researched the abnormal increase in usage of “liberal media/liberal bias” that started to take root during President Reagan and climaxed under President George W. Bush:
Suddenly, the religious and cultural wars created a paradoxical situation where Democrats are associated with elitism far removed from American heartland values. Nowhere is this debate more easily seen than in the discourse surrounding PBS and education.
Conservatives claim that alienation of parts of the audience is a reason enough to change or limit the public programs spending. As a response, PBS’s most recent efforts have focused on emphasizing the mass-appeal and popularity of its programming (such as the popular programs ‘Downton Abbey’ and ‘Sherlock’ which have generated new PBS audience members). PBS’ public relations focus goes against the common belief (that Sebnem references in her post) that “popularity is accepted as an impediment for quality by many while mass culture (and popular culture) is associated with consumerism and reproduction of consent”. PBS is proud of its popularity and uses its growing audience to reject the accusation of being elitist (for details see: http://valuepbs.org/). Now, the sentiment of PBS being “America’s largest classroom” has taken on a new meaning:
As a sidenote, the concept of state-funded TV didacticism brings to mind extreme cases of Soviet TV propaganda and educational didactic programs of Eastern European broadcasting, which eventually also became tools for party propaganda. It also reveals a question of promotion of a common view of history, science, and culture. Russia serves as an interesting example of a country that does not have a common shared view of its own history. In the aftermath of the dissolution of the USSR, Russian historians have struggled to bring about new perspectives for examining historical events and how they relate to cultural memory production. Until this day, they have not found a common ground.
To respond specifically to the final paragraph, I'd like to highlight the function of the notion of "objectivity" in NPR/PBS news reporting, and its role in establishing a "balanced" coverage of events that ultimately fits the larger meta-narrative supported by the American political and economic establishment; a common view of contemporary events and ideology that ultimately serves to reaffirm the common ideological components in both major political parties (the validity of the so-called free market, the triumph of liberal democracy as the best system for political/economic organization, etc.). There are three major communicative strategies at work beneath the larger umbrella of objectivity; first, the notion that "balanced" coverage will present both sides as having equally valid points; second, that both rhetorical "sides" are engaged in the same pro-social agenda that is then elevated to an objective, common-sensical truth, albeit with different perspectives on how to arrive at the same positive outcome; and third and most importantly, that by reporting using "slice of life" perspectives from the interviewees, a fair picture of the situation is painted.
ReplyDeleteBeginning with the third and final strategy, NPR's coverage of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem serves as an illustrative example. In Sheera Frenkel's "Vigilantes Patrol For Jewish Women Dating Arab Men",a series of interviews are granted to the vigilantes themselves and a Jewish woman who agrees with their position. The "slice of life" function intercedes through this second subject, who is placed in the story as a "man on the street" figure and a disinterested source to verify the motivation of the vigilantes. The result is the creation of an appearance of broad consensus that the vigilantes' actions are reasonable and helpful through the nominally disinterested point of view of the woman, a point that is further reinforced through the reuse of the vigilantes' language (ie. the vigilantes will "save" another girl dating an Arab) by the reporter filing the report. The result is a story that embraces the narrative that Jewish girls are being victimized by their Arab lovers, and that the sabotage of such relationships serves to liberate them. The "slice of life" framework presents this as simply a fact of daily life, glossing over the ethno-nationalist rhetoric through a premise of practical reason. Thus, the ideological reality of Israeli ultranationalism (which is similarly ignored out of political convenience by American policymakers) is held up as a non-ideological, pragmatic response to the situation as it exists, couched in the "objective" framework of allowing the interview subjects to simply speak their mind. all in spite of the fact that no Palestinian men or Jewish women dating them are interviewed.
ReplyDeleteThe "objective" framework via the presentation of both sides in a dispute as sharing a common pro-social agenda is particularly common in coverage of American domestic politics, especially in PBS' flagship Frontline. One segment in "The Untouchables", Frontline's examination of why there haven't been any successful prosecutions of Wall Street bankers, goes to particularly great lengths to establish this "balance"; a clip (32:20) of Senator Carl Levin is shown in which the Michigan Democrat praises the free market, professing his faith in the institution, during an otherwise unrelated segment during which a number of bank executives are brought before his commission. Thus, the free market is established as the common goal of such prosecutions, a shared principle that isn't under attack by the commission, and the point in which both Republicans and Democrats can agree. The issue doesn't become an ideological question as to whether the principle itself is at fault, but instead it simply becomes about both Republicans and Democrats uniting against the problem of corruption of this ideal using two different methodologies. Deregulation of the financial sector receives little of such attention, and any alternative towards the free market is ignored as being a "biased" outsider viewpoint versus the non-controversial consensus. By framing events as having two opposing sides, the point of their reconciliation is established as an objective truth insofar as it becomes the "balanced" opinion, the "truth in the middle" that has become central to American political "common sense", a point that helps to explain the widespread popularity of programs like South Park and Jon Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity (which was, ultimately, a call to come down and place all of our collective energy into a "sane" moderate perspective, unlike the various populist expressions of outrage by the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street). This leaves us, of course, with Levin's allegedly technocratic free market, but one which guards against fraud while leaving the system itself as untouched as possible.
ReplyDeleteFinally, the notion that both sides are equally (in)valid appears commonly throughout both NPR and PBS, but an especially atrocious example appears in NPR's "Greek Bailout Fuels Rise Of Extremist Parties". In this segment, SYRIZA is compared to Golden Dawn, and the former's demand to renegotiate the terms of Greece's bailout to exclude the severe austerity measures is equated in its extremity to the neo-fascist politics of the former. This comparison effectively dismisses both as having "bias", while the remaining centrist factions are preserved as acting out a pragmatic agenda that both sides would consent to if only they left the political extremes and looked at the situation objectively.
ReplyDeleteThe result of these strategies is not only an agenda that serves the old observation that we can no longer even imagine an alternative to capitalism, but one that overlays liberal democratic ideals on the concept of objectivity in itself, wherein it becomes the basic premise that both the political left and right consent to, and where those who fail to embrace it are stubbornly allowing "bias", the final enemy to human progress, to color their vision. The ideological character of the free market (among other principles and policy positions) disappears entirely; they become a central, unobserved component in the act of interpreting events in themselves. It is didacticism at its purest; what is being taught is not only information, but a manner of schematizing it.
ReplyDelete(Sorry for publishing this as multiple replies; I kept getting a message about exceeding the character limit, and decided the best way to post it would be by breaking it up by paragraph. I'm sorry that if it makes it more difficult to read!)
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