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| Wednesday, October 22, 2003 |
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Out on a libertarian limb 
| | Here in Britain, of course, the BBC has one great advantage over PBS in America -- the freedom from such political pressure that is afforded by the annual license fee that TV owners pay to fund BBC programming. This ensures that the Beeb is far less vulnerable to political pressures than PBS, which must get its appropriations approved every year from Congress. |
| | The BBC is supported instead by an annual tax of £116 (US$195) paid by every British household that owns one or more televisions. The tax raises as much as $4.2 billion for the BBC every year and nobody in government can reapportion it or redistribute it. Thus the BBC, unlike every other public-broadcasting system in the world, is not only well funded but also well protected from politicians. |
| | Every ten years, though, there's a charter review in which the budget and performance of the BBC is re-assessed. The next one is in 2006 and as the BBC is one of the most influential institutions in British life, the upcoming review will be one of the nation's most profound political battles. As media maven Michael Wolff puts it, it's all "about getting a piece of the pie. Or at least it's a fight about Murdoch's piece of the pie." |
| | Not surprisingly, then, Rupert Murdoch and his political cronies have begun to lay the groundwork for an all-out assault on the BBC and the annual fee. While they will probably not be able to eliminate it, their endless attacks, slanted polls, and political pressuring may well result in a lessening of the amount the BBC gets annually, thus weakening the BEEB as a 'public' competitor to all private interests, but especially to the multi-channel Murdochian news and entertainment network BSkyB. |
| | All this must be viewed through the prism of what otherwise appears the oddest of couplings: Rupert and Tony Blair. Blair first became Prime Minister owing in large measure to the endorsements of the traditionally right wing Murdoch press. It now seems apparent that Blair made a devilish pact years ago to garner Murdoch's support, despite their obvious political differences, and Murdoch is now collecting his payback on the instalment plan. |
| | (No links, which is a bummer.) |
| | The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (search ), which funds NPR, gets a billion dollars a year in taxpayer money. Why is the government allowing a far-left outfit like NPR, which is obviously biased, to operate on taxpayer money? |
| | So I'm wondering now. What billion dollars are we talking about here? And how much is NPR being funded by CPB, or by taxpayer money at all? |
| | Bill O'Reilly busted Terry Gross's chops for not doing her homework. Now I've gotta wonder: did he do his? |
| | According to the CPB's own spreadsheet on the matter, the corporation received $362.8 million in fiscal 2003, and will receive $380 million for 2004 and $390 for 2005. While these appropriations apparently account for 100% of CPB's income, its handouts to public broadcasting as a whole ($300 million in 2000, mostly for television) account for only 12% of the $2.2 billion whole. The largest percentage contributor is "membership," at 25.6%. In fact, CPB is fourth after membership, business and state governments. |
| | As for NPR, income from the CPB and similar outfits (National Science Foundation, National Endowments for the Arts & Humanities...) "typically represent only 2% of revenues." |
| | Meanwhile, the NPR annual report (an annoyingly huge .pdf I won't bother linking to) boasts about huge increases in listenership. |
| | Here's another fact that doesn't often get noticed. Though nonprofit in nature, Public TV and radio stations are still in the business of selling their programming to viewers and listeners. They buy that programming from PBS, NPR, PRI and other sources. In other words, PBS and NPR are producers and first tier wholesalers. They own no stations, though they sell programming to thousands of them. |
| | In fact public radio stations are hugely advantaged in the new media market (the one fortified by the Internet). They no longer have to depend on boring and pathetic fundraising marathons to raise money. They can make it easy on the Net, with PayPal or any one of a number of direct-payment options. |
| | Most of the stations have improved in this respect, but most sites remain woefully complicated affairs. |
| | Anyway, I'm in favor of public broadcasting -- especially public radio -- doing exactly what O'Reilly suggests. Get off the public dole completely. If you're down to just 2%, finish off the job. Turn to listeners and viewers. Operate in the real marketplace. You already have a huge advantage over commercial broadcasters, thanks to the fact that your listeners and viewers are customers and not just "consumers." |
| | And let your listeners and viewers get involved in production. Embrace audio blogging. Embrace local video production. Wake up and smell the content, dudes. There's a huge pile of it out there. You don't have to get all of it from NPR and PRI. And I'll bet you can get a lot of it cheaper than from those bigtime sources, too. |
Blogging for office
Listen and learn
| | Yesterday O'Reilly gloated over NPR Ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin's rebuke of Gross and Fresh Air, issued both for the late hit and for legitimizing constant (and, frankly, correct) accusations by many on the Right that NPR is essentially a Lefty outfit: |
| | ... I agree with the listeners who complained about the tone of the interview: Her questions were pointed from the beginning. She went after O'Reilly using critical quotes from the Franken book and a New York Times book review. That put O'Reilly at his most prickly and defensive mode, and Gross was never able to get him back into the interview in an effective way. This was surprising because Terry Gross is, in my opinion, one of the best interviewers anywhere in American journalism. |
| | Although O'Reilly frequently resorts to bluster and bullying on his own show, he seemed unable to take her tough questions. He became angrier as the interview went along. But by coming across as a pro-Franken partisan rather than a neutral and curious journalist, Gross did almost nothing that might have allowed the interview to develop. |
| | By the time the interview was about halfway through, it felt as though Terry Gross was indeed "carrying Al Franken's water," as some listeners say. It was not about O'Reilly's ideas, or his attitudes or even about his book. It was about O'Reilly as political media phenomenon. That's a legitimate subject for discussion, but in this case, it was an interview that was, in the end, unfair to O'Reilly. |
| | The "Empty Chair" Interview |
| | Finally, an aspect of the interview that I found particularly disturbing: It happened when Terry Gross was about to read a criticism of Bill O'Reilly's book from People magazine. Before Gross could read it to him for his reaction, O'Reilly ended the interview and walked out of the studio. She read the quote anyway. |
| | That was wrong. O'Reilly was not there to respond. It's known in broadcasting as the "empty chair" interview, and it is considered an unethical technique and should not be used on NPR. |
| | I believe the listeners were not well served by this interview. It may have illustrated the "cultural wars" that seem to be flaring in the country. Unfortunately, the interview only served to confirm the belief, held by some, in NPR's liberal media bias. |
| | I¹d start with a weird fact: an interview that winds up ³illustrating the cultural wars² through struggle, tension and walk-out (which you can hear in the tape) is thought by NPR to be a bad thing, worthy of self-censure. The same result is thought by Bill O¹Reilly to be a good thing, worthy of self-celebration. |
| | O¹Reilly and his public profile do not fit any known category in network journalism — the journalism of the Dupont Awards , let us say. He¹s a confusing figure to confront in an interview setting like Fresh Air, but not because his methods are obscure. It¹s the opposite. He brings forcefully to the surface and makes explicit what had been buried for so long in the journalist¹s presentation of self: a political identity in the one who brings us the news — proudly so. |
| | Proudly political, you say? Yeah, and it¹s no insult. Whatever else may be said about him, O'Reilly is someone who speaks his mind, and takes positions. A guy who, as a commentator himself and questioner of others, stands up for certain values in American life that (he thinks) don¹t get defended enough. O'Reilly is the anti-anchorman because he dispenses with the broadcast professional's cool demeaner, something Jennings, Brokaw, Rather, Bernard Shaw, Jim Lehrer, Judy Woodruff and countless others have never done... |
| | Network journalism had long ago decided it didn¹t need that kind of tension‹anchormen who join the national argument‹and so it promoted to the top spot only masters of the ³cooler² style, which became the standard. O¹Reilly (who can do cool when called for) does not anchor the evening newscast on Fox, but he is its leading figure. The face of the brand is a talker with a booming public voice, a thinking person who has convictions, and whose convictions are part of his news persona. O'Reilly is both a news person doing a commentary program on Fox, and an protagonist in the public arena in constant struggle with Fox¹s political enemies. |
| | There¹s never been a face-of-the-brand in network news who is deliberately styled hot (in McLuhan¹s terms.) O'Reilly blows up a lot. He is wired for argument and controversy because he is willing to fight the spin of others with righteous spin of his own. And he has another advantage, for which he does not get enough notice. He's willing to make fans by having active enemies. Indeed, making enemies is basic to his appeal, and that's where Terry Gross and the rest of the establishment press factor themselves in. They supply what O'Reilly's genre — resentment news — demands... |
| | Those in big league journalism trying to get "tough" with O'Reilly are going to lose the encounter until they realize that his press think outdoes theirs. His has a political imaginary built into it and theirs is: we don¹t do politics. So he has many more ways to win. O'Reilly blew up Fresh Air, got an exciting show out of it that night, and then he won the ombudsman¹s verdict at his rival's shop. Game, set, match (culture, politics, ratings) to the Factor. |
| | Terry Gross went into battle with some outdated press thinking. She assumed that the interview, for all its obvious tensions, took place in the general domain of information gathering, and that good information flows to us from holding a public figure¹s feet to the fire, asking the tough questions. You can almost hear the Fresh Air producers discussing it, "Yeah, but no one¹s ever pinned him down onŠ." Or something like that. It probably never crossed Terry Gross's mind that the interview would be about making enemies more obvious — and the enemies are the information. O'Reilly thought so going in. |
| | Jay goes on to cite The Paranoid Style in American Politics, by Richard Hofstadter, from the November 1964 issue of Harper's Magazine. It's an astonishing piece, explaining the appeal of right-wing talk broadcasting two decades in advance of its appearance. |
| | Sourcing Hofstadter, Jay suggests that O'Reilly has (along with Rush Limbaugh and others like him), in a paranoid fashion, cast as enemies groups with whom he has grievances — as did McCarthy with Communists, Populists with "gold gamblers" and Puritans with Catholics. In the process O'Reilly has used the natural box office appeal of Us vs. Them to great advantage. |
| | O'Reilly frames his paranoia, as do all of Hofstadter's examples, in terms of war. In O'Reilly's case it's a cultural one. (And he said so, right on Fresh Air.) That's why it was an extreme tactical mistake on Terry Gross' part to come out swinging against him. She fit his frame perfectly, and he punched her — and the rest of public broadcasting — right through the canvas. Now Terry Gross is on O'Reilly's trophy wall as a poster lefty for public broadcasting. If I were NPR's ombudsman, I'd be pissed too. |
| | Looking back on the event, I find myself thinking there are three approaches to journalism represented here. One is the "cool" approach of traditional journalism, including network broadcasting (in which NPR is no exception). One is the "hot" approach of talk radio, which has since expanded to TV sports networks and now Fox TV. The third is the engaged approach of weblogging. What we're doing here may be partisan in many cases, but it is also inconclusive. Blogging is about making and changing minds. It's less about scoring points against perceived enemies (with certain exceptions, of course) than about scaffolding new and better understandings of one subject or another. |
| | Which is why I changed my mind today about what went down between Terry & Bill a week ago. |
| | Here's an unrelated request to Jay and others who draft their blogs in Word or something like it. Please, please, please turn off the curly quotes and apostophes. Use straight-up ones. When some of us copy and paste what you write, we need to go back and hand-correct all those things, or they'll show up as weird characters in our own quoted sections. |
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