PBS: Behind the Screen.

• Author: Freund, Charles Paul

When the debate over continued federal funding of public broadcasting was at its height a year or so ago, some public TV stations started offering an unusual "premium" during their seemingly incessant funding drives. Along with the inevitable logo-embossed umbrellas and tote bags, these stations offered to send you, in exchange for your pledge of financial support, a tin cup. The cup was of course intended to evoke the image of a street beggar, which is what high-minded PBS would have you think it had been reduced to by appalling congressional Babbittry.

But that tin cup just as easily - and more accurately - evoked quite a different image: that of the restive prisoners featured in a whole series of 1930s Warner Brothers prison movies, the jailbirds who signaled their common displeasure at Big House injustice by rattling their tin cups against their bars and trying to drive their guards crazy.

The street beggar pretense is wearing pretty thin anyway. For one thing, PBS stations have more money than they let on in their public posturing, one of the central arguments offered by Laurence Jarvik in his critical history, PBS: Behind the Screen. Jarvik, a longtime PBS critic in the pages of the journal Comint, published by the conservative Center for the Study of Popular Culture, believes that PBS is so flush it could, by selling shares or making other adjustments, probably forego subsidies entirely.

PBS, writes Jarvik, "has grown into a multi-billion dollar worldwide multimedia empire....In addition to their on-air activities, public broadcasters publish magazines and newsletters, classroom study guides and textbooks, and provide computer programs, online services, and sites on the World Wide Web. They host conferences; license toys, games and clothing; stage live shows; run mail-order catalogs and retail stores; and distribute videocassettes and compact discs. From these activities, a large industry has grown that parallels commercial broadcasting."

And that's not all. PBS is making all sorts of lucrative business deals for itself, as well it should. Jarvik cites a $75 million dollar arrangement with Reader's Digest to produce shows, a distribution deal with Turner Broadcasting, and the announcement of a Children's Television Workshop cable channel. That's why the jailbird image seems so natural a connection to that brandished tin cup: PBS really seems to have become a prisoner of its own cultural pretensions. Despite its continuing claims of providing generalized media uplift for us all, what PBS has generated is a viewer culture of its own; that's what all successful media do over time, and there's nothing necessarily wrong with it. In PBS's case it has precious little to do with general uplift, and much more to do with the middle-brow aspirations of the 2 percent of the public that tunes in, but never mind that for now.

Because PBS is in part federally funded, it has been mired for 30 years in a debate with conservative critics like Jarvik over whether its programming is sufficiently "balanced," whether every point of...