Conflict of interest.

• Author: Knoll, Erwin
• Position: Public Broadcasting System refuses to air controversial TV documentaries - Editorial

The television audience for last year's Academy Awards presentation must have been startled when Debra Chasnoff stepped up to the microphone to accept the Oscar for best short documentary film. Amidst the glitz and glitter of Hollywood's annual orgy of self-congratulation, amidst the award-recipients' ritual recitations of thanks to colleagues and cousins and preschool piano teachers, Chasnoff chose to issue a terse and serious message: Boycott GE!

That's what her film is all about. It's called Deadly Deception: General Electric, Nuclear Weapons, and Our Environment, and its target is GE, the multinational colossus, military contractor, producer of nuclear power plants, and proprietor of RCA and NBC. Given the clout wielded by GE, given the political thrust of Chasnoff's documentary, you can imagine that Deadly Deception must be a remarkable piece of work to be singled out for a top award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

And you'll have to imagine it, unless you're lucky enough to have caught Deadly Deception at one of its limited engagements. Though the film would seem to be a natural for showing on public television, it has been turned down by PBS, which is becoming more and more timid as it comes under concentrated fire from the Right.

The public-broadcasting network promotes itself as the place "where all our voices can be heard, all our stories can be told." That claim would have been something of an exaggeration even in the early days of PBS, after Congress established it to provide an alternative to commercial broadcasting by airing diverse and innovative programming. Today, traumatized by attacks (and threatened funding cuts) from the likes of Republican Senators Bob Dole of Kansas and Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, PBS tends to run for cover at the slightest hint of potential controversy.

The drumbeat of criticism directed at PBS comes from right-wing organizations and individuals, as well as members of Congress. Reed Irvine's bullying Accuracy in Media charges that PBS often airs "blatantly pro-communist propaganda." The Heritage Foundation calls for privatization of the "unnecessary and wasteful" PBS. And David Horowitz, who has moved across the entire political spectrum since his days as an editor of Ramparts in the 1960s and who now lodges with the ultra-conservative Committee for Media Integrity, accuses PBS of running fifty or a hundred times as many documentaries...