PROPOSED ANALYSIS OF PUBLIC TV SPARKS DEBATE

A plan to spend $180,000 of public money to study the ideological slant of documentaries on public television has renewed a bitter political conflict within the non-commercial broadcasting community.

Pushed by a conservative magazine editor who is one of five people appointed by President Reagan to distribute federal public broadcasting funds, the proposed two-year “content analysis” of nonfiction programming has sparked a firestorm of criticism about the appropriate role of the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in selecting and evaluating programs on public TV.

Congress is applying heat as well.

Some conservatives see the proposed study as a way to quantify the supposed left-wing bias of public TV, while liberals claim the plan is an effort to force public TV into serving the political goals of a right-wing Administration.

Regardless of which view is correct, the debate surrounding the proposed study has highlighted, yet again, the often acrimonious relationship among the various power centers of public broadcasting--the corporation, local stations and the Public Broadcasting Service.

CPB board member Richard Brookhiser is pressing for the content analysis because, he says, the corporation board “would be derelict” if it didn’t try to assure the “objectivity and balance” of public TV programs.

Meeting in St. Paul, Minn., two weeks ago, the corporation board voted to delay a decision on the study until September. The board instructed the corporation staff to review the plan and to solicit further proposals.

“All I want to do is to try to get some objective handle on this,” Brookhiser, a senior editor at the conservative National Review magazine, said.

“Much of the criticism of public broadcasting comes from the right,” and most of it is subjective, Brookhiser said.

Brookhiser said he hopes to evaluate that criticism with a more accurate gauge of content, but opponents of the proposed study say the corporation should not get involved with questions about the political slant of public TV programs.

“It is inappropriate for a presidentially appointed group to be conducting a content analysis of programming,” said Barry Chase, vice president for news and public affairs at Washington-based PBS. “It indicates that some people on the CPB board don’t fully understand the appropriate constraints on them.”

Likewise, few members of the public understand the bureaucratic structure of public TV, a structure that some critics say continually leaves the system open to political pressures.

CPB is a private, nonprofit corporation that receives federal money and distributes it to program makers and local stations. The corporation was set up, in part, by the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 to serve as a buffer between the government and non-commercial broadcasters.

Members of the CPB board, such as Brookhiser, are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate.

Theoretically, that is the extent of their involvement with the government. Practically, however, members of the corporation board have rarely divorced themselves from their political affiliations.

Henry Loomis, who served as president of the corporation from 1972 through 1978, said many CPB board members often look on their jobs as a “stepping stone” to further political offices.

“I felt all along that the real Achilles’ heel of CPB was the mechanics of picking the board,” Loomis said. “It has become a low-level patronage job or one that ideologues strive to get for ideological reasons.”

Precipitating the current controversy are married Washington social scientists Robert and Linda Lichter, who say they only want to scientifically analyze the contents of documentaries the way they and others have examined entertainment programs for attitudes toward minorities, women, sex or violence. The parameters of the study have not yet been defined, according to Robert Lichter, but he added that the study would include an index of liberal and conservative sources cited as well as issues addressed.

The couple did not anticipate the opposition to their plan and Robert Lichter said the proposed study is being criticized for all the wrong reasons.

“There’s a big split,” Lichter said. “Presumably, the conservatives hope we’ll find the programming too liberal, and the liberals are afraid (that) we will. . . . It would be very ironic if a study designed to take the partisanship out is destroyed by the partisanship of the debate.” Those parameters have not yet been defined.

The Lichters approached Brookhiser with the idea for their study in May. Lichter said they hoped to examine the “themes, perspectives and information sources” of public TV documentaries in order “to provide systematic and objective information” for CPB to assess programs and to respond to external criticism.

Lichter said he didn’t learn of Brookhiser’s politics until after he and his wife submitted their proposal.

“Unfortunately for me, he’s (Brookhiser) from the National Review,” Lichter said. “I wish he was at the Encyclopedia Britannica or something like that.”

Brookhiser insists that the proposed study has little to do with politics and everything to do with various CPB board members’ understanding of their mandate to oversee public broadcasting.

“There are some people who want the board to do nothing but endorse checks handed over from Congress,” Brookhiser said. “And there are people who want to be more serious about what we do.” He says he puts himself in the latter group.

Retired corporation president Loomis says the proposed study would be “almost impossible to do.”

“Brookhiser says he’s looking for something that can be objective,” Loomis said. “That’s a perfectly legitimate aspiration. I just don’t think you can get it.”

Furthermore, Loomis said, if CPB is to fulfill its role as benefactor and protector of public broadcasting, board members should not involve themselves with programming decisions or evaluations.

It is a difficult position to take, Loomis said.

“You’re right on the edge of the First Amendment all the time.”

The content analysis controversy has also attracted the attention of Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and of its subcommittee on oversight and investigations. Dingell’s committee oversees CPB activities.

In a letter to CPB, Dingell ordered the corporation to hand over all its materials relating to the proposal and to justify the planned research.

Dingell asked for a detailed explanation of why the corporation wants the study and how the study is “consistent with CPB’s statutory role as a ‘heat shield’ from outside interference in programming matters.”

CPB answered Dingell’s letter on June 25, but both sides have refused to discuss the corporation’s response or to describe the materials handed over to the subcommittee.

Capitol Hill staffers also refuse to discuss the matter for attribution. The committee aide overseeing the matter said it is committee policy not to attach staff members’ names to comments made in the press.

The aide said, however, that Dingell is concerned about the “politicizing” of public TV and is watching closely for any signs of political pressures. The staff member said the proposed study “didn’t appear (to be) a non-controversial research project” but that the first issue before the committee would be to determine “whether or not it is appropriate for CPB to do this kind of study at all.”

“We don’t have a firm view on that one way or another,” the Dingell aide said. “It’s certainly a controversial thing for them to be engaging in.”

The proposed study is especially unusual in that the corporation funds relatively few of the more than 300 hours a year of documentaries and public affairs programs on public television, said PBS’ Chase.

He estimated that half of the 30 to 50 independently produced documentaries aired annually by PBS are made with any federal money. The only other significant CPB contribution is $3 million a year to the makers of the “Frontline” series.

“Frontline” is produced at WGBH in Boston, the public system’s principal center for documentaries. The station is also the home of the popular “Nova” science series and produced 1983’s controversial “Vietnam: A Television History” series.

Peter McGhee, WGBH program manager for national productions, said the station does not know enough about the proposed study “to become hysterical” but has a lot of questions as to what is intended and for what purpose.

McGhee also said he believes that CPB board members are “clearly acting beyond their authority.”

But to some observers, the content-analysis matter is right in line with the political problems that have existed throughout the 19 years of CPB’s existence.

Former corporation executive John Wicklein says the United States has never been able to insulate public broadcasting from government policy in the way that, say, Great Britain has with the fiercely independent British Broadcasting Corp.

Partisan politics in public TV, Wicklein said, are not likely to end so long as Congress and the White House have ultimate control over the system.

“I don’t think they want anything that would do good journalism,” said Wicklein, director of the Kiplinger mid-career program for journalists at Ohio State University in Columbus. “They want no digging into public affairs programming or documentaries.”

Conservatives have long viewed public broadcasting as a liberal institution, despite its history of providing ample air time to leading conservatives such as National Review editor William F. Buckley Jr. or social scientist Ben Wattenberg.

Buckley has had his own public TV program, “Firing Line,” since 1971. It appears regularly on 216 stations. No similarly hard-line liberal commentator has ever enjoyed that kind of forum on public TV.

Nonetheless, the public TV system has been the target of conservatives since it was centralized in the fall of 1970.

That’s when the corporation, then 3 years old, formed PBS to operate a national public TV network. In a matter of months, President Richard Nixon was complaining about public TV’s coverage of national affairs.

Direct pressure from the White House in 1972 temporarily halted news, public affairs and commentary programs on public TV and permanently closed public TV’s central news and public affairs operation in Washington.

“The Nixon Administration was more blatant about it, but maybe the Reagan Administration will be more successful at cutting public broadcasting off at the knees,” Ohio State’s Wicklein said.

Republicans have not been alone in pressuring public TV. In 1980, officials of the Carter Administration helped Mobil Corp. (a major corporate sponsor of PBS programming) in an effort to block the broadcast of “Death of a Princess,” a dramatic story purporting to re-create the life and execution of a Saudi Arabian princess who had a love affair with a commoner. PBS rebuffed the political pressure and aired the show.

“I saw much more attempted pressure and direct pressure in the early days of the Carter Administration than in the Nixon Administration,” said former CPB president Loomis.

But political pressures have mounted in the years since Ronald Reagan took office. In May, 1985, they boiled over when the then-chairman of CPB wound up in a public shouting match with the then-president of the corporation.

At issue was a plan for American public broadcasting executives to make a State Department-approved trip to the Soviet Union to discuss a possible exchange of TV programming. Conservative CPB board members voted to cancel the trip on the grounds that, in the words of Brookhiser, the board was “concerned that an institution that operates on federal money is dealing with the Soviet government.”

CPB President Edward Pfister immediately resigned, charging that the board’s action was politically motivated. CPB Chairwoman Sonia Landau openly chastised Pfister, calling him, according to reporters present, a “schmuck.” Landau later insisted that the reporters got it wrong, that she actually called Pfister a “schnook.”

Six months later, President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev met in Geneva and agreed to a cultural and scientific exchange between the two superpowers.