If new Public Broadcasting President Paula Kerger performs half as well as she gives speeches, public television, a political football and favorite punching bag of former Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) Chairman Ken Tomlinson, may be in for a renaissance.
In one of her first major speeches, after serving just ten weeks as PBS president, Herger said all the right things at the National Press Club on May 23.
Kerger noted that "at a time of unprecedented media consolidation," the local public broadcasting station often was the only locally owned and operated station in a community. "Localism is our calling card," she told reporters at the Press Club luncheon.
She stressed that local stations should be doing local programming that helps empower and educate viewers and that involves local communities.
She added that new technology, which means that broadcasters can air several streams of programming at one time, means that public broadcasting has even more capability to reach diverse audiences.
Kerger also was strong on PBS's mission to provide news and information. "Our standouts [in programming] are public affairs and the arts," she said. "Public television is calm, thoughtful, analytical," she observed, nothing that public broadcasting's moderate, tone was especially needed "as the news media become ever more frantic and sensational."
Kerger certainly has the right background for her new job. She was a vice president and station manger of WNET in New York City, one of the engines of PBS programming. And she's a prodigious fundraiser, something that resource-strapped PBS could use. She led a campaign that raised $79 million for WNET.
Kerger spiced her talk with quotes from journalist Edward R. Murrow, in her words the "great" Bill Moyers, and former Czech president Vaclav Havel, who wrote that "hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good."
We can all hope that Herger's tenure marks a new day for public broadcasting. But whether it does depends on more than hope, it depends on whether the partisanship that has so roiled CPB is at last on the way out. It depends on continued federal support for public media, even for hard-hitting journalism that speaks truth to power.
It also depends on whether the promise of localism is fulfilled when local public television stations respond to the needs of their communities by committing themselves to substantive local news and public affairs programming, something that local stations have reduced in many parts of the country. It also depends on whether public broadcasters can find creative ways to deal with community media activists who run public education and governmental channels (PEG) throughout the country. PEG programmers could help public broadcasting speak to new and diverse audiences.
Public broadcasting's Herger seems eager to use new technology - video on demand, video transmitted over cell phones, digital television - in the service of the public. Let's hope she can bring the CPB board and local station managers with her in that quest.
