A Novel Attack on PBS: Death by Memo : A senator demands documents on 235 subjects; is this a kinder cut than the fiscal axe?

Two features of the fight over public broadcasting have caught the eye, one of them the extraordinary letter written by South Dakota’s Sen. Larry Pressler, chairman of the Commerce Committee, to Richard Carlson, president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting; the second, a point raised by Ervin Duggan, president of PBS.

I pause to aver that I am an “interested” party to this debate, though not in the commercial sense: My program, “Firing Line,” does not receive a nickel of public money. On the other hand, I am clearly interested in the survival of my program and others like it.

What raised the hair on my head was the letter by Pressler to Carlson. It was sent on Jan. 27 and requested a reply to its questionnaire by Feb. 10.

The enclosure is 16 pages long. It requests answers to and information on evaluative findings, hypothetical and actual, regarding 235 people, systems, arrangements and enterprises. The first sentence of the questionnaire reads, “All answers to questions should be substantiated with written materials, documents, memos, meeting notes, contracts, etc.”

Question No. 5 (“Please detail all efforts by recipients of CPB funds to generate congressional support for continued federal funding”) has 14 subordinate requests, such as, “Is it not the case that Henry Becton, president of WGBH, Boston, admitted on a recent radio interview show hosted by Chris Lydon, while debating Rep. Joseph Kennedy, that his public station would survive without any federal funding?”

That has the virtue of being specific. Not so such questions as, “Please provide an accounting for all lobbying money used by any public television entity, including APTS, NPR and CTW.”

The 16 pages clogged with such questions would take a serious scholar armed with subpoena powers not two weeks to answer, but two decades. If some of the questions, freighted as they are with insinuation, were investigated as exhaustively as the question, “Where was O.J. between 10 and 10:15 on the night of June 12, 1994, and what was he doing?” the questionnaire might be filed back to Pressler’s grandson. If Gibbon had been given such a questionnaire on the decline and fall

of the Roman Empire, he’d have said the hell with it.

Pressler, whatever the soundness of his objectives, is engaged in Orwellian persecution, pure and simple.

Ervin Duggan writes in response to a recent column, which was followed by a meeting. My position for several years has been that Adam Smith’s acknowledgment of the responsibility of the state to nurture public monuments is not properly treated as authorizing only such things as the Lincoln Memorial.

“I am disappointed,” he writes, “that you do not accept what seems obvious to me: that public televison constitutes one of Adam Smith’s intangible cultural monuments . . . one that Smith would accept as much as he would accept the Bodleian or the British Museum.”

He goes on eloquently to challenge a conservative assumption. “You and I have a further polite disagreement, which only time will settle. I fear that when public television has one of its supporting legs cut out from under it, such support will not be easily replaced from non-commercial sources. The enterprise will veer sharply toward commercial means of support, and thus will come under the hard imperatives of commerce. It is telling that the threat of a federal cutoff has not brought forward would-be saviors from the nonprofit world; the talk, rather, is of takeovers and buyouts by commercial broadcasters, cable companies and telephone companies who want to sell video programming.

“The imperatives of commercial television are ratings, action, bizarre and lurid novelty, shallow celebrity and noise; they will tempt us more and more toward Elmer Gantry’s tent and away from Mont St. Michel or Chartres. In that coming thralldom to commercial imperatives, the televised lyceum will, I fear, be among the first casualties.”

That is a serious question. Fifteen years ago I was chairman of the board of a corporation that took an FM station in New York from classical music to rock. I was able to persuade the board of directors to agree to give the station and its library, together with pledges to meet its current deficit in the years to come, to any nonprofit organization willing to commit itself to non-commercial, round-the-clock classical music. No one stepped forward. After a gallant hiatus under different management, WNCN turned to rock.

Why doesn’t a foundation, or 10 foundations, step forward and say: Count on us?