Mitchell Tells Critics Tomlinson ‘Misinterpreted Responsibilities’
PASADENA, Cal. -- In her last news conference with TV writers, Pat Mitchell denied that -- despite the need to ask Congress for appropriations -- PBS is a political minefield. Mitchell said pointedly: “The political minefield that arose last year came about because somebody named Mr. Ken Tomlinson misinterpreted his responsibilities, in my opinion, because his role as chair of the CPB board was to protect PBS from being a political minefield, was to protect content from the source of government money or influence. He didn’t do that. He went public with criticisms rather than working constructively inside. And that’s regrettable. And you know, the good news is that CPB has new leadership, a new board, and I think has reaffirmed its belief in its own charter, which is it’s very important to have an institution, like CPB, whose role is to keep PBS and stations out of political minefields.”
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
If your job depends on informed compliance, you need International Trade Today. Delivered every business day and available any time online, only International Trade Today helps you stay current on the increasingly complex international trade regulatory environment.
Mitchell also admitted Tomlinson’s appointment of an ombudsmen caught her off guard. At the time, she had been in discussion with the PBS board and staff about whether installing an ombudsman was needed and would work. Mitchell noted: “PBS is different than any other broadcaster because we don’t produce actually, there. And we were taking our time investigating the way it was working in other places around the world, talking to our colleagues at NPR. I was in conversations with the head of CPB at the time about our timetable, so we certainly thought we were the only ones thinking about it and thought that PBS was the proper place for an ombudsman to be, so the announcement from CPB was certainly a surprise.”
The ombudsman has been on the job a month and Mitchell said that’s good: “I'm really glad the board and the team made the decision, along with me, that we needed to have a public editor at this country’s only public broadcasting service, and I think it is going to be a service that he’s there.”
Asked whether there was a danger in an ombudsman overstepping the role, Mitchell acknowledged: “You have to hire the right person, that’s for sure, because it’s a very important position. They become the public’s voice, and they operate with complete independence so you can’t tell them what their parameters are. I have not seen Mike Getler since he walked in the PBS building except last Monday when I asked him to come up to my office so I could tell him that I was going to make an announcement this week about my plans. But he has complete independence about what issues he takes up, what programs he chooses to review, and that’s the way it has to be. I think you just have to take the chances that occasionally it may feel a little tough or rough and hard for producers -- or any of us -- to be criticized in any way… I think Mike Getler, from having done it for so many years at The Washington Post, is just highly qualified to be doing it at PBS.”
Mitchell said PBS had accomplished a lot since she took over as CEO in March 2000, but acknowledged the biggest obstacle facing public broadcastings remains the same: “Public broadcasting has got to have more resources. That was what I said on day one. I'm saying it on the exit, and I'll continue to say it… And then, with all these changes going on in the media landscape that are impacting every media institution, changing their business models over here on the commercial side, we've got to do some fundamental rethinking about the value of public broadcasting and how we support it.”
To questions about whether PBS was going commercial in pursuit of funding, Mitchell was adamant: “There is a complete firewall between corporate money and the content. And people who fund content… do not see the content.”
But Mitchell admitted there are no easy answers: “The dependency on pledge and membership drives is something that all of us in public broadcasting know we have to look at… Because even though it is still the single largest source of revenue for most PBS stations -- sometimes 60% of the revenue… We do worry about it in terms of the consistency of scheduling and programming. But we didn’t find a solution… but you will see, I think, over the next several years, an evolution of this.”
When it was suggested that cable companies such as Discovery, A&E and History Channel made PBS expendable, Mitchell disagreed. “If you look at their schedules, you do not see the same mission behind their content. That’s not to say they don’t do terrific things… It’s great to see History Channel do in-depth documentary series, see Discovery do Ted Koppel -- all that’s good news for all of us. Our mission really is to use content to serve, to do something the others are not doing.”
More to the point, Mitchell said: “Every democratic country in the world supports a very strong public broadcasting service… Now, I don’t know about you, but I would not want to be the largest, strongest democracy in the world and not support one media enterprise that belongs to the public and not to Rupert Murdoch or Sumner Redstone… I just think that’s a value that is not going to be duplicated by any other media company.”
Mitchell said she expected a new PBS president to be announced this month: “I have not been involved in the search process for pretty obvious reason in that I would know a lot of the candidates and just didn’t want to be in the position of even appearing to have impact or influence on a decision that belongs to the PBS board to make.”
Mitchell said she was optimistic that the digital world would only benefit PBS: “We really do need to be sure that on your iPod, on your cell phone, on your pager, or whatever mobile device you're going to use to get your entertainment news or information, that PBS is among your choices… though, in a way that’s consistent with our mission… to make it universally accessible. We have to make sure that if there are revenues made from anything like an iPod download that it comes directly back to the program service in some way that is shared with producers, because in our case producers often raise 30, 40, 50% of the money to produce their series.”