Skip the Ads, Find the Money

Americans are exposed to a wide variety of commercial TV and radio stations, cable and satellite TV channels, signs, billboards, magazines, newspapers, adpapers, catalogs, junk mail, junk faxes, “spam” e-mail, Internet sponsors, telemarketing, promotional T-shirts and coffee mugs, sky-writing, blimps, balloons and clothing with manufacturers’ logos prominently displayed. The last thing we need is another medium for advertising.

And yet, like it or not, we seem to be getting two more. Ever since an act of Congress changed “educational” TV and radio into public broadcasting in 1967, public stations have been gradually getting more and more commercial. From strict sponsorship rules that prohibited moving logos and the mention of anything besides a company’s name, we have gone to enhanced underwriting guidelines that allow public broadcasters to describe a company’s products or services and give addresses and phone numbers.

Now there is a debate over permitting full-fledged 30-second commercials on public TV and on whether public broadcasting licenses should be changed from “noncommercial” to “nonprofit.” Former PBS and NBC News president Larry Grossman has even proposed that PBS go commercial on the weekends to support its noncommercial programming the rest of the week.

Who wants this to happen?

* Not viewers and listeners. I have been an executive for public TV and radio stations for a quarter of a century, and in all that time I don’t recall a single request from a viewer or listener for extended underwriting announcements or outright commercials. Just the opposite. Every letter I ever read on the subject was a complaint about the creeping commercialization of public broadcasting.

* Not advertisers. It is very difficult to find companies to underwrite the costs of producing important, high quality specials and series for PBS. “Enhanced underwriting credits” haven’t helped very much, and I doubt that 30-second spots would do the trick either, unless public broadcasting could attract as large an audience as its commercial counterparts.

The commercialization of public broadcasting would give the real say on what is produced and aired to corporate sponsors rather than to public broadcasters and their audiences. Under commercial systems, if you can’t find a sponsor, a program can’t be made. Public broadcasting was supposed to offer different criteria for program decisions, such as quality, educational value and social usefulness.

* Not public broadcasters. Most don’t want commercialism, either. They have been forced in that direction by Congress, which has never approved a noncommercial system of funding public TV and radio as envisioned in the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act.

Many excellent proposals for funding public broadcasting have surfaced over the years since then. And nothing has been done, except that Congress has lowered the already meager funds the federal budget grants to public broadcasting, threatened to cut off those entirely and given public stations more leeway in raising money through related commercial enterprises.

This has pushed public broadcasters into opening retail stores, renting their studios, becoming local Internet service providers and doing anything else they can think of to try to make a buck without adversely affecting their broadcast services.

Congressional budget slashing has also compelled public broadcasters to go after more underwriters, to give these underwriters more and longer commercial-sounding announcements and to obtain more money from their audiences. This, in turn, has resulted in more and longer on-air begathons, selection of programs on the basis of their wallet-emptying appeal and increasing use of commercial techniques for attracting and holding audiences.

* Not commercial broadcasters. Surely they have enough competition for limited advertising dollars already. They are not asking for any more.

There are much better, noncommercial ways of funding public TV and radio. One would charge commercial users an annual rental fee for spectrum space, which would go to support the noncommercial users. Or congressional funding of an endowment for public broadcasting. Or giving a satellite or two to public broadcasting, the profits from which would support the noncommercial system.

No, we don’t need more advertising media in this country. What we do need is more education, more information and more culture, free and available to all who want to benefit from it. We need electronic media equivalents of the public library. And we need a Congress that is finally willing to do the job--30 years late--of establishing a noncommercial funding mechanism for public broadcasting.