Putting the "BS" in PBS

I happened by PBS the other day when they took a break to blandish us thusly:

Check, Please! Bay Area is looking for an underwriter!
If you are seeking a unique sponsorship opportunity for your business and want to reach a prime demographic group through multiple platforms email us today...

"Reach a prime demographic group through multiple platforms"?  C'mon, guys, we're sitting right here.  Can't you at least do us the courtesy of being subtle about the fact that as far as you're concerned, we're nothing but pairs of eyes for corporate sponsors?  Just little nodes of potential consumption?

FAIR was warning about this trend years ago:

In a 1986 public notice, the FCC explained that "enhanced underwriting" would offer "significant potential benefits to public broadcasting in terms of attracting additional business support."

The "benefits" of making a public broadcasting system increasingly dependent on the same corporate sponsors that fund commercial TV seem dubious. Critics charge that corporate underwriting has led PBS stations to avoid controversial issues and focus too much on programming aimed at upscale audiences, to the neglect of the public they were originally intended to serve.

(For reference, "upscale audiences" = "prime demographic group".)

There was a day not that long ago when PBS's purpose was to provide, you know, broadcasting services for the public.  Now that they're just selling audiences to advertisers like the rest of the corporate media, they really should change the name—though I suppose "Supplier of Prime Demographic Groups to Underwriters through Multiple Platforms" doesn't quite have the same ring (and SPDGUMP doesn't exactly roll off the tongue either).

While they're at it, maybe they should change their standard sponsorship message as well.  Allow me to suggest an alternative:

This program was made possible by contributions to your PBS station from Upwardly Mobile Middle Class Consumers Like You.  Thank You!  But seriously, we're just as happy getting our money from ExxonMobil.

Comments

[SteveB]

Now that they're just selling audiences to advertisers like the rest of the corporate media...

It's funny, when you think about it, how many institutions in our society (maybe all of them?) have an actual purpose that's completely different from their stated purpose. So the purpose of newspapers is not to deliver news to the public, but to deliver the public to their advertisers. The purpose of health care is not to make sick people well, but to make insurance companies money. The purpose of the military-industrial complex is not to defend the nation, but to make "defense" contractors money.

It goes a long way towards explaining why so many of these institutions are so very bad at at what they do - it's because they're actually doing an entirely different thing.

I'm having a hard time finding examples of institutions where this isn't the case. I think the public schools are still about educating children, but I'm prepared to be disillusioned by you or one of your readers (warehousing potential juvenile delinquents? Making a buck for McGraw-Hill?). Anyway, once we finish up the plan to privatize all of them, I'll no longer be confused.

[john]

SteveB:

I too 'think' public schools are still about educating children, but only to provide these kids with just enough education so they understand they're third-class in the first world and obliged to stay there. After all, they're only Public Schools, right?

Oh, and there's also the whole "extinguish any improvisatory impulse" thing which may be seen as a sanguine by-product...

[John Caruso]

That's a good observation, Steve; I'd never thought of it in terms of the number of systems for which it's true. As for public education, Noam Chomsky said:

...I pretend no originality in observing that mass education was motivated in part by the perceived need to "educate them to keep them from our throats," to borrow Ralph Waldo Emerson's parody of elite fears that inspired early advocates of public mass education. More generally, independent farmers had to be trained to become docile workers in the expanding industrial system. It was necessary to drive from their heads evil ideas, such as the belief that wage labor was not much different from chattel slavery. That continues to the present, now sometimes taking the form of an attack on public education.

It's true that privatization will make the motivations more obvious.

And of course one major purpose of public schools is indoctrination; kids here are asked to pledge allegiance each day to the flag of the country whose history they learn mainly in the form of deeply validating fairy tales, they're taught to believe in the inherent superiority of the corporate-capitalist system, and so on.

[Catherine]

Oh, I don't know, I think SPuDGUMP is a perfectly lovely word.

It's nauseating what's become of PBS over the years. Not that it was ever anything except monied entertainment, but at least the programs were varied and well done, many of them.

And do people really watch those pain-inducing fundraisers that PBS runs about every third week, interrupting the series that really are worth watching?

[Jenny]

Ironically, I found that one documentary on Monsanto's sins was sponsored by Shell. John with your chomsky quote, I'm curious:are you in favor of homeschool or private schooling?

[John Caruso]

Jenny: I don't have a fundamental problem with either—it's up to the parent. I'm against public financing of private schooling, though.

Catherine: You know, I actually tried to make the acronym as word-able as possible (I was thinking of it as SPeeDGUMP, but I like your version better). There's a story behind why that doesn't quite match what I wrote, but I'll spare you the gory details. But I was wondering if anyone would notice. Congratulations!

[Doom]

Speaking as someone who spent 10 years in a far-right religious private school, I would've rather gone to the worst public school in the country than have gone through what I did in the "glorious" private school.

[Bill]

On another note. Your local PBS donations also support their Spanish-only broadcasts and operations of V-me. I tried to get clarification from member services on where exactly the money goes and never received a reply. My donations are stopped unless I can be assured they will be program specific.