Executives Say Public Media Have Deep Strengths in Battling Threats From All Sides
STANFORD, Calif. -- U.S. public media have powerful weapons to fend off onslaughts from all directions -- political, financial and technological -- executives said. From 30,000 feet, public media look “diffuse, decentralized, not very powerful,” because stations were the original institutions, said Dan Werner, McNeil/Lehrer Productions’ executive producer, at a Stanford University forum Tuesday. The structure is poorly understood, said Tim Olson, vice president-media and education at KQED TV and radio in San Francisco: The national organizations are “more like buying clubs” than they are like integrated commercial broadcast operators like Disney.
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But new media provide great opportunities, not just threats, Olson said. Public broadcasting has long pushed for public participation, and with interactive technologies, “now we have the tools to do it,” he said. The huge communications trends, toward “social, local, mobile,” are all “very well-suited to public media,” Olson said.
The “content scarcity” justification for public media faded with the arrival of competing programming from cable networks such as Discovery and the History Channel, Werner said. But it has re-emerged strongly as those channels have turned to chasing the mass market with reality shows and other downscale programming in widely available genres, the executives said.
Efforts were made in 23 states to cut funding for public broadcasting in 2010, and “most of them succeeded,” Werner said. But successful fightbacks that were mounted in Iowa, South Carolina and Norfolk-Newport News, Va., show “there are possibilities” for mobilizing public support against cuts, he said. In South Carolina, Republican Gov. Nikki Haley pressed for reductions, but “her party voted the budget cuts down” because of popular opposition, Werner said.
Still, CPB sees a $500 million decline in total annual funding for public media over the five years to 2013, to $1.2 billion, Werner said. And the dream of a federal endowment financed with spectrum-sale proceeds “is never going to happen,” he predicted.
Cuts hit operations in sparsely settled markets much harder than those in metropolitan outlets, Olson said. Public media in Alaska, for instance, are far more dependent on government money than those in San Francisco, which can call on a much larger base of private donors, he said.