Has politics collided with art at CPB?

“American Family,” the sprawling dramatic series about a Mexican American family from East L.A., won’t be returning to PBS for a third season, despite a best miniseries Emmy nomination and a stack of admiring reviews. As a casual viewer, I had assumed the show, perhaps the most costly drama in PBS history at roughly $1 million per episode, was canceled for the most obvious of reasons -- lousy ratings, which it had in spades.

But it now appears that “American Family” was finished before its second season even started. The show’s creators say that in a meeting in April, a week before the new season began, Michael Pack, programming chief at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the major financial backer of the series, said there would be no more CPB funding for the show. The producers say that Pack’s vote of no confidence came after he questioned the show’s story line involving the family’s eldest son, who as an Army doctor in Iraq is portrayed as a hero for defying orders and treating Iraqi civilians in war-torn Baghdad.

As it turns out, Pack had decided to stop funding the show nearly a year before the meeting. No one told the producers that, however, and they left the meeting with a distinct chill.

Pack “seemed very disturbed that we were dealing with the war, and he questioned whether it was a fair representation of the Army, in the sense of -- what does it say to have someone who disobeys orders portrayed as a hero,” said Barbara Martinez Jitner, a writer, director and executive producer of the show, who was at the meeting. “It was obvious to me what was going on, because right after we had a conversation about our Iraqi war story line, he said, ‘We can’t fund your show anymore.’ ”

Pack denied that CPB, which provides PBS with roughly 10% of its overall budget, made any political interference with the show. “As a filmmaker who has produced documentaries for public broadcasting, I would never tell creative people what to do,” he told me last Thursday. “It’s true that we discussed the Iraq war story line, but I don’t remember saying anything that could’ve been interpreted as criticism. I want public television to be more controversial and encourage strong views on all sorts of issues. The meeting was about getting to know our filmmakers, not about content.”

Pack said CPB had been an enthusiastic backer of the show, providing upwards of $15 million in budgetary support, one of its largest grants to any PBS show. He also provided me with a letter he wrote to PBS on May 15, 2003, nearly a year before the meeting, where he made clear that CPB would not fund the series past a second season. “All along, the plan had been that we would not fund a third season,” he says. “It’s a long-standing CPB policy to provide funding for the first one or two seasons, but then shows have to support themselves through other funding.”

KCET production executive Joyce Campbell, who was also at the meeting, supports Pack’s version of the events, saying, “Michael never suggested any changes or said to take anything out of the show.”

It seems clear that Pack didn’t pull the plug for blatantly political reasons. But what makes this story especially fascinating to dissect is that it surfaces at a time when PBS, having been under fire for years by conservative politicians who wanted to wipe out its funding altogether, is now taking flak from liberal critics angered by what they view as a growing conservative emphasis in programming. It’s not hard to make a case for the conservative tilt scenario, as the New Yorker’s Ken Auletta did recently in a piece titled “Big Bird Flies Right.” The current CPB chairman, Kenneth Tomlinson, a former editor of Reader’s Digest, is a Republican with close ties to Bush strategist Karl Rove and the Bush White House. Gay Hart Gaines, a Bush appointee to the CPB board, is a longtime Republican fundraiser, as is Cheryl Halpern, another recent Bush CPB board appointee.

PBS’s newest talk show is hosted by conservative commentator Tucker Carlson. A second new show, “Journal Editorial Report,” hosted by Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Paul Gigot, debuted this month. Pack has also been a backer of a new cultural-issues show hosted by conservative radio host Michael Medved, who made a 1995 documentary with Pack called “Hollywood Against Religion.” CPB funded a pilot for the new show, which would team Medved with a liberal co-host, but has yet to move ahead with the program.

Until now, Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” has grabbed all the headlines, but the country’s partisan divide was roiling the filmmaking community long before voters focused on this fall’s bitterly contested presidential election.

Despite Pack’s solid credentials as a producer of historical documentaries, he is viewed with suspicion in the arts world because of his support from the Bush administration. Before he became programming chief at CPB, he was nominated by Bush to serve on the National Council on the Humanities. As a film producer he made a number of documentaries that were popular with conservatives, including “Inside the Republican Revolution: The First Hundred Days.” He also was involved with a failed attempt, described in great detail in the New Yorker, to produce a series of PBS shows, aimed at middle-school children, that would’ve been hosted by Lynne Cheney, the vice president’s wife.

The level of distrust in the creative community was best captured this spring when Pack and a panel of distinguished foreign affairs experts unveiled “America at a Crossroads,” a $20-million initiative to fund documentaries delving into post-9/11 issues. Pack and his panelists, a respectable if overly wonky group, were greeted with open hostility by the very filmmakers they’d invited to make proposals for the projects. One questioner taunted the panel: “I want to give props to the Anglo-American world order for sending their delegation of five white guys here. It’s so disingenuous what’s going on with PBS ... [with] the conservative Bush administration appointees for the CPB board, who have vocalized that it’s OK for them to interfere with programming.... “

When a filmmaker asked why the panel consisted of what he called “right-wing Republicans,” panelist Walter Russell Meade sarcastically responded: “Because we’re evilly trying to destroy public debate and crush dissent.” Fellow panelist Max Boot added: “And don’t forget we’re doing the bidding of the Pentagon as well.” It went downhill from there.

Although he didn’t attend the meeting, Hector Galan, a noted documentary filmmaker whose series “Visiones” airs on PBS, best sums up the sentiments of the filmmaker community: “People see Pack as leaning very much to the right. They also look at CPB and see a place that was a lot more exciting a decade ago. Its diversity initiative, that funded my show, is gone. It’s just a lot less open than it used to be.”

Pack says the diversity initiative, like the new “America at a Crossroads” initiative, was always planned as a short-term project, not a permanent institution. “If you look at the broad range of shows, public broadcasting is not going in any one ideological direction,” he says. “But when you try to do something new and different, people who’ve been in the system will have a fear of change.”

New and different is exactly what public broadcasting needs. As with most institutions funded by government and corporate grants, PBS churns out programming that is all too often soporific and drearily conventional -- who needs a sedative on Friday night when you can doze off watching “Washington Week in Review”?

But if new and different means giving shows to an all-too-familiar moralistic scold like Medved or the Wall Street Journal editorialists, who could hardly hold a more powerful megaphone, then Pack is going to look more like an ideologue than a reformer. To me, new and different describes “Now With Bill Moyers,” which boldly digs up stories that even media junkies haven’t seen anywhere else. Yet when Moyers leaves the show after the November elections, “Now” is being cut back to a half-hour.

It’s a messy business whenever politics and art collide. Hollywood liberals always scoff at preposterous right-wing charges that politics influence their creative decisions, so perhaps they should extend Pack a similar benefit of the doubt. I worry that Pack has been unfairly tarred by liberals, who normally would have applauded CPB for putting a filmmaker in a position of influence customarily held by bureaucrats.

Public television desperately needs an influx of new energy and vitality. If Pack is going to succeed, he’ll have to find a way to unsettle both the Bush supporters and his liberal detractors. As someone who’s made films himself, surely he must remember that the unruly bravado of artistry trumps ideology every time.