Jim Shella: A radical idea to improve public broadcasting

A month ago in this space, I expressed my unhappiness with the efforts of U.S. Sen. Jim Banks regarding his plan to defund public broadcasting. It’s my position that he and others in the MAGA movement are misguided in the belief that public broadcasting serves only liberals.

However, I’m back to suggest that changes in public broadcasting might well be warranted, maybe even desirable. The reasons are
far from political but rather are practical.

First, understand that public broadcasting was created by Congress in 1967 to bring programming to underserved communities. We called it “educational TV” back then, and it was just the third channel to become available in my rural community in Minnesota.

Because the FCC reserves channels for public broadcasting, and the government provides funding, it is operated as a nonprofit.

Yet government funding is just a small fraction of the support now required by public broadcasting stations. Corporate and philanthropic grants and viewer donations mean more.

What if public broadcasting stations operated on a for-profit basis. Crazy? Maybe. It would possibly break up public TV and radio networks and force huge changes in the way the stations are managed. But you can point to recent layoffs at WFYI to make a case that the current plan is not working.

For 25 years, I produced and moderated “Indiana Week in Review,” a political roundtable discussion on WFYI-TV Channel 20 and WFYI-FM 90.1. When I took over the show, we increased the ratings by multiples in a short time, but that did not translate into more money for the station because it cannot sell advertising based on the ratings. In fact, station executives told me they didn’t even subscribe to the ratings.

One day, the guy in charge of finding corporate underwriters came to me seeking ideas for prospects. It was the mid-’90s, and I pointed out to him that Indiana’s new riverboat gambling law prohibited casino investors from making political contributions.

“Go to the Gaming Commission and get a list of investors,” I said. “They are interested in politics and have money to spend.” Sometime later, I asked if he had success. “No,” he said. “That sounds like too much work.”

It’s just one of the reasons why, when I would leave the public television station after a taping, I would think to myself, “The profit motive is a wonderful thing.”

Everyone in public broadcasting is underpaid from my understanding, and that hurts motivation. A friend of mine who worked at the Washington, D.C., PBS station in the ’90s, when people still smoked in the workplace, told me the status symbol at that station was the one free-standing ashtray. If it was in your office, you were winning.

When a law firm sought to underwrite “Indiana Week in Review,” I was invited to the meeting. The law firm wanted to do email and text alerts about topics to be discussed on the show, as well as a viewer poll as part of the package it was proposing. The underwriting guy said he didn’t think it was possible. I was flabbergasted. Absolutely, it was possible, and we made it happen.

During my tenure, every underwriter for the show walked in the door unsolicited. One was rejected because of fear that its business competed with that of an existing underwriter. On a show that points up political differences, we can’t have competing underwriters?

So, is public broadcasting evil, biased, left-leaning? I say no.

Could it be better? Yeah. The profit motive is a wonderful thing.•

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Shella hosted WFYI’s “Indiana Week in Review” for 25 years and covered Indiana politics for WISH-TV for more than three decades. Send comments to [email protected].

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