The Wrongologist

What’s
Wrong Today:

WNET is the NYC affiliate of PBS. It broadcasts on Channel 13 in the greater
New York area. WNET has a storied history, but it needs to adjust its moral compass, which is starting to point towards money, not
towards true north. WNET has (again) been caught doing the bidding of
plutocrats. From last Friday’s New York Times:

WNET said
production on the planned series, dubbed “Pension
Peril,” would be suspended indefinitely after journalist David Sirota of PandoDaily revealed the money
was coming from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation (LJAF). Arnold was an oil
trader at the disgraced Enron, who became one of the youngest billionaires in
the US. He is also a member of the WNET Board of Trustees.

Mr. Sirota
reported:

PandoDaily went on to report
that PBS and WNET had originally approached the foundation: (emphasis by the
Wrongologist)

Apparently,
Pension Peril will still be aired on public
television outlets, but the Arnold money will be returned. Pension Peril includes an episode on California public pensions. That segment discusses a ballot
initiative being pushed in the state to roll back public employee pensions − a campaign
being partially funded by, wait for it, John D. Arnold. The initiative
is run by San Jose Mayor, Chuck Reed (D), and Reed has thanked
“people from the Arnold Foundation” for putting him in touch with other
funders.

That’s not
a clear conflict of interest?

After the Arnold/pensions
relationship became public, PBS and WNET rethought having the Arnold Foundation
provide the funding for the Pension Peril
project. The Times reports that Stephen
Segaller, WNET’s VP for programming, said: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

He added
that the grant had been solicited with “absolute conviction” that the
foundation was an acceptable funder. In other words, WNET still doesn’t believe
that there was any actual
conflict here — it just believes that there’s “a perception problem”. WNET is
returning the money because of “the optics” — which is to say, because Sirota’s
article came out, and it made both WNET and PBS look bad.

PBS’s
Ombudsman, Michael Getler wrote about the Arnold’s funding:

Apparently,
WNET’s management issue with the Arnold Foundation deal was not that the
content of the Pension Peril series
was too aligned with corporate interests, rather, it was the “optics” for WNET
and PBS!

This
shows us once again, the cynicism on the right. They have steadily campaigned
for the withdrawal of public funding from PBS since the Reagan administration. But, now that they have gotten the government off the horse, the right is busy saddling up.

This is not the first time that WNET
has had a problem with politically active plutocrats. In May, 2013, Jane
Mayer of the New Yorker wrote that two PBS-affiliated
documentaries featuring the Koch
Family came under pressure to be censored and edited due to fear that Charles
and David Koch, who, in addition to being the primary funders of conservative political
causes, are major donors to public media, would withdraw support.

David Koch has contributed to cultural and medical institutions including
Lincoln Center. In the 1980s, he expanded his charitable contributions to media,
donating $23 million to public television over the years. In 1997, he began serving as a trustee
of Boston’s public-broadcaster, WGBH, and he subsequently also became a trustee of WNET.

One film,
by Academy Award winning director Alex Gibney, Park Avenue: Money, Power &
The American Dream, received close scrutiny and was almost pulled, before
some edits and a compromise
format that included a rebuttal conversation at the program’s conclusion by Koch
and Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) were agreed by the producers and WNET.

Another
project, Citizen
Koch,
a documentary about the Citizens
United Supreme Court decision, was subject to editorial arm-twisting by
WNET representatives. Subsequently, WNET prevailed on ITVS, an independent
film production company based in San Francisco to withdraw funding of Citizen
Koch.

The film production
ultimately collapsed, and the producers’ statement said:

David
Koch was not mollified, and he resigned from the WNET Board of Trustees in May,
2013. Now, you could say that WNET is standing up to the plutocrats, since
David Koch was lost as a funding source, but consider the overriding issues:

First,
that public television is just another commercial mass media venture, one where
its advertisers are rich individuals and their foundations, instead of corporations
serving the mass market. As such, they have become very adept at creating programming
which represents the interests of their funding sources.

Second,
the management of WNET has lost focus on what independent journalism requires, tilting
toward the effort to fund its programming, instead the work of informing the
public.

He who pays the piper
will always call the tune. Soon, PBS could stand for the Plutocrat’s
Broadcasting Service.