Public Interest?

When I talk to people from the UK, they're sometimes surprised that public television isn't publicly funded the way it is there. At the risk of over-simplifying things, broadcasting in Britain was seen as something to benefit the public interest from the early days of BBC Radio, while in America it was a commercial enterprise more or less from the beginning with the notion that broadcasters should serve the public interest largely an afterthought. Consequently, in Britain everyone who owns a TV and/or radio pays a "license fee" which funds the BBC, while in America public funding for PBS is partial (and grudging) at best and getting scarcer.

This is understandable In the current economic climate, and I don't envy the hard choices that governments have to make to balance their budgets. Still, there are some elected officials whose apparent eagerness to cut funding for public broadcasting suggests that, not only do they not appreciate the value of public television, they fail to understand democracy itself.

One such individual is New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. Back in December, Christie signed legislation that cut state funding for the state's PBS service New Jersey Network, the net effect of which several months later is that NJN is effectively shutting down, with Manhattan-based WNET taking control of their operations. In the process, dozens of NJN employees are losing their jobs.

Admittedly, I don't know enough about New Jersey's fiscal situation to say how this decision stacks up against other items that were or weren't cut from the state budget. As with many things life, though, how you do things is sometimes more important than what you do and this is the measure where Governor Christie's failure is especially pronounced.

Rather than acknowledging the hardship this is causing for dozens of state employees, Christie instead chose to compare NJN to Soviet Union's state-run media. While touting his success in getting the government out of the broadcasting business the governor commented, “In my view, that should have ended with the Soviet Union. It's ending here in New Jersey a little later than the fall of the wall in Berlin. But we're getting there.” It's been about 15 years since I've lived in NJN's broadcast area, but I'm inclined to think their news people would find that attempt at high-minded justification as laughable as I do.

In addition to being ridiculous and callous, his comments also betray a remarkable ignorance about how media outlets can and should function in a free society. Whether a media outlet's financial support comes from the government or a corporation (or some combination of both), there's always the potential for conflicts of interest. Good news organizations, as many considered NJN to be, are the ones that can navigate those pitfalls while still serving the best interests of the public. What Governor Christie is trying to sell the public, though, is the idea that government support equates to government control.

Depending on whether or not he actually believes that, he should be ashamed either of his ignorance or his dishonesty. Outlets like PBS and the BBC have been proving for decades that government support facilitates superior news coverage. As the issues facing us get increasingly complex, that kind of substantive information is all the more important. Unfortunately, as NJN's current predicament shows, that kind of support is increasingly rare.