A Little History Lesson: Commercials Aren’t Solution

The argument over bringing advertising to public broadcasting is not a new one--quite the contrary, it is an argument almost as old as broadcasting itself (“Would Ads Hurt Focus of PBS?,” Calendar, April 10). Those who say that just a teensy bit more commercialization wouldn’t hurt could benefit from a little history lesson.

These arguments might have been made 70 years ago, before any advertising had yet appeared on radio. In 1925 there were 128 stations licensed to colleges and universities, with a like number licensed to other nonprofits. The growing minority of commercial owners didn’t use their stations to make money but for “image advertising,” creating visibility and goodwill in the community.

Still, the early signs of commercialization were viewed with distrust by a wide range of public opinion, including Herbert Hoover, then secretary of commerce, whose department oversaw the fledgling field. He decried the growing trend of cheap amusements displacing public affairs and educational programming, he praised the college stations as “a step toward the realization of the true mission of radio,” and he argued against the rise of advertising because the radio listener, unlike the reader, could not “ignore advertising in which he is not interested.”

In 1924, Hoover solicited major foundations to subsidize educational programming and proposed a 2% tax on radio sets to “pay for daily programs of the best talent and skill.” This latter idea was also promoted by RCA’s David Sarnoff, who called for broadcasting to be conducted by a national nonprofit corporation, funded by those who profited from the manufacture and sale of radio sets.

This same system of dedicated taxes, proposed in America by an industry leader and a conservative President-to-be, was later adopted by other countries, most notably Britain, which built the legendary BBC on this foundation of enlightened American conservatism--a now-forgotten political philosophy.

Four decades later, distressed by the “vast wasteland” of commercial television, America once again thought seriously about the public needs that private, profit-making broadcasters neglect. In 1967, the Carnegie Commission offered a visionary proposal for public TV, funded by a dedicated tax on the commercial industry, using satellite technology more than a decade before CNN, and premised on a mandate to “help us see America whole, in all its diversity,” to serve “as a forum for controversy and debate” and to “provide a voice for groups in the community that may otherwise be unheard.” It is a mandate for public discourse that no authoritarian government could possible abide and without which no democratic society can long endure.

*

For all its self-congratulatory posturing, we know that PBS has never fulfilled that mandate. There is--and always has been--far more controversy off-screen, surrounding PBS than has ever been allowed to air. And America’s public discourse is all the poorer for it.

On PBS we don’t hear from those whose voices would “otherwise go unheard,” such as the battered women jailed for murdering their batterers in last year’s Oscar-winning documentary “Defending Our Lives.” PBS routinely finds that such films violate its guidelines for underwriters. But there are no such problems when Archer Daniels Midland underwrites “MacNeil/Lehrer,” or more recently when TCI bought controlling interest in “MacNeil/Lehrer’s” production company.

Without the independent funding base envisioned by Herbert Hoover and David Sarnoff 70 years ago, it is simply impossible to run a system that serves the broader public interest. More commercials will simply make the problems of the system worse--and perpetuate the illusion that there is no alternative.