Stocks, bonds and Barney: how public television went private.

• Author: Konigsberg, Eric
• Position: Corporate sponsorship of PBS programming

In the spring of 1992, as Congress reconsidered the funding of public broadcasting, Bob Dole shared a few choice words. "The liberals love it," he snapped on the floor of the Senate. "They have their own network. . . I have never been more turned off and more fed up with the increasing lack of balance and the unrelenting liberal cheerleading I see and hear on the public airwaves."

Hard to tell which PBS Dole has been watching. The network's handful of headline-grabbing episodes in the past few years has indeed been about documentaries deemed by conservatives too liberal to run. But as with "Tongues Untied," a treatment of black homosexuals, the result in dozens of cases was a speedy retreat in the face of right-wing pressure. (Over 200 of PBS's 351 stations declined to run "Tongues Untied.") Meanwhile, gradually and with less fanfare, a decidedly un-liberal trend has developed: Corporations are underwriting more and more public programming. The results are a proliferation of the kinds of shows that a Republican Minority Leader, and, more frequently, anyone playing the stock market, might just stay home to watch.

PBS has been using its sizable viewer-ship - a 2 to 5 percent share of the Nielsen ratings - to lure companies into sponsoring programs. The network is too poor to fund any shows in toto, but corporate underwriting - up 22 percent in the past year - comes with a variety of built-in catches. Last year, for instance, Texaco pulled its funding from the "Great Performances" series the week before it was to air "The Lost Language of Cranes," a drama about gays. IBM had a near-valiant go at corporate conscientiousness a few years ago and agreed to put up $2 million for a series the Audubon Society had developed on environmental hazards, but Big Blue backed away before any episodes could be filmed. Why? Although IBM had a clean enough pollution record, the same could not be said of dozens of its clients. "The Machine That Changed the World," on the other hand, a series about computers, was paid for in part with $1.9 million from Unisys. Turns out Unisys evolved from the company profiled in the series' first episode.

By underwriting public TV, corporate entities can go beyond hawking products to espousing the economic models a corporation, by nature, favors. Corporate interests are more likely to promote management over labor, free manufacturing over regulatory laws, and certain tax policies like investment tax credits and a capital gains...