Worthwhile ‘Desk’ Leans to the Right

It wasn’t long ago that congressional right-wingers were wringing their hands and wailing about what they claimed was a political tilt on PBS, threatening to further tighten their squeeze on funding. As it turns out, time has proved them correct about imbalance on public TV.

On the screen, at least, the place is now crawling with conservatives.

So where were these Ideology Police and self-proclaimed guardians of balance when William J. Bennett and Hugh Hewitt joined fellow rightists John McLaughlin, William F. Buckley Jr. and Ben Wattenberg in sharing national prominence on PBS over the past two years? For Hewitt, it was being host and reporter for the documentary series “Searching for God in America,” and for Bennett, it was getting an animated version of his book, “The Book of Virtues,” on the air as a kids’ series.

And where are they now regarding tonight’s PBS premiere of “National Desk,” a trio of documentaries separately hosted and reported by right-leaning Larry Elder of KABC-AM (790) radio, Fred Barnes and Morton Kondracke, the latter pair ranking among TV’s best-known celebrity journalists operating from the right? Moreover, the writer and co-executive producer of “National Desk” is Lionel Chetwynd, a prominent screenwriter with a conservative political bent.

What is this, affirmative action for conservatives?

“National Desk” is precisely the kind of advocacy TV that PBS critics from the political right would condemn as one-sided were it created and shaped by liberals, radical left-wingers or those even with one toe left of center. Their silence now exposes their partisanship and the hollowness of their criticism.

This is also a series that may draw criticism of PBS from the left.

But here’s the kicker:

In some respects, “National Desk” is exactly the brand of distinctive, challenging programming that PBS should be airing as part of its mandate to inform and stimulate. It also affirms to a degree just how misleading these political labels can be when it comes to what actually appears on the screen. Just as there are no political theologians in the children’s series drawn from Bennett’s book, for example, the philosophies expressed in “National Desk” are not necessarily ideological. Many are controversial, however.

There are far too many lecturing heads in this series, but some of the lectures are magnetic.

Tonight’s “Redefining Racism: Fresh Voices From Black America” is easily the boldest and most provocative of the three programs, resonating stereophonically with African American opinions that Elder correctly says are “usually ignored by the mainstream media.” Most of them also happen to be his opinions.

Next Friday’s program with Barnes, “Children of Divorce,” is by far the most ponderous and dishonest, a virtual anti-divorce infomercial, packaging worry about marital breakups and kids from broken homes--both valid concerns--in a deceptive, manipulative monolith of opinion and broad generalization from one side.

Locating no gray areas, it would have you believe, in effect, that divorce is nearly always totally hedonistic on the part of parents, that kids of divorced parents are always emotional messes and that being raised by two miserably paired parents always provides a better environment for children than that of a single parent.

The key word is “always,” for no happy, well-adjusted children of divorced parents are interviewed for this program, as if none existed.

The third program, “The Politics of Medicine,” is flat-out the soundest and fairest journalistically, with Kondracke candidly stating his bias upfront in an hour that projects a strong point of view about the distribution of public funds for high-profile diseases while still accommodating dissenting opinions.

Kondracke wants to increase the research budget of the National Institutes of Health--in other words, increase federal government involvement, hardly a conservative position.

His wife, Millie, has Parkinson’s disease, and as a board member of the Parkinson’s Action Network, Kondracke admits to actively advocating more money for Parkinson’s research. Yet theories espoused here on the politicizing of National Institutes of Health allocations for research, and Kondracke’s apparent belief that AIDS gets attention and federal money out of proportion to its actual threat, in no way makes this program or its host homophobic. In fact, the program allows for opposing opinions.

You hear a few such dissenters in Elder’s program, too, but they and their views are set up mostly as obligatory targets and picked off like clay ducks in a shooting gallery.

As he does so often on radio, Elder dissects and condemns what he defines as black “victimhood . . . a monster that needs to be fed daily.” And among those doing the feeding, he and others maintain, are prominent black leaders from the Rev. Jesse Jackson on down.

This mantra--that blacks are self-defeating and hurt themselves when seeing only white racism as causing their problems--has earned Elder the wrath of many of his fellow African Americans. But it’s supported here by a brigade of other blacks, from University of Massachusetts professor Julius Lester to Joe Hicks, former head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Southern California, who says:

“If I’m a 13-year-old kid and I continually hear that racism is endemic, that the nation is in fact as racist today as it has ever been, then I’m thinking, ‘So what should I do? Why should I try hard? Why should I stay in school? Why should I try to get ahead and succeed and believe in this country, believe I have a stake in anything, when everything I hear is negative about race?’ ”

It’s put another way by Washington community activist Robert Woodson: “As long as you can point the finger at white people, then you don’t have to take any responsibilities for changing or improving the conditions of our people.”

The specter of black racism is also evoked here, and one black after another (with Lester dissenting on this occasion) savages today’s affirmative action as undermining the causes of minorities.

When it comes to the dangerously loopy concept of “jury nullification,” meanwhile, George Washington University law professor Paul Butler does not quite affirm what Elder says about him, that Butler believes “black jurors have a moral obligation to acquit some black criminal defendants even when they think they are guilty.” But Butler does charge here that enforcement of drug possession laws discriminates against blacks, so African American jurors should be “thoughtful about which drug offenders they send to prison.”

However it’s labeled, obviously, this is television worth watching.

* “National Desk” airs tonight and the following two Fridays at 9 p.m. on KCET-TV Channel 28.