Fairness in the Balance

For example, about 27 percent of PBS viewers graduated from college, compared with 27.6 percent for the U.S. population. Among households that watch PBS, 32 percent earn more than $60,000 a year, compared with 37 percent across the nation. (PBS likes to tell potential sponsors, however, that "public TV members" -- people who gave money to their local station during pledge drives -- are a far more upscale group than PBS viewers as a whole.)

By contrast, NPR's listeners are the relatively more elite kind. The Washington-based service brags in a fact sheet that the 26 million listeners in its combined weekly audience "are distinguished by their high levels of education, professional success and commitment to their communities. They are decision makers, choice consumers and influential leaders." NPR says the mean household income of its listeners is $83,989, or 30 percent above the national average, and that 58 percent of its audience hold a college or graduate degree, which is more than twice the national average.

Indeed, education, not political orientation, "is the variable that defines whether you listen to public radio," says Michael McCauley, an associate professor at the University of Maine who wrote the just-published "NPR: The Trials and Triumphs of National Public Radio."

"There is an elite socioeconomic aspect" to NPR listeners, he says, "but it's not that simple. NPR listeners are more concerned about the world and about policy than the average person. . . . The dirty little secret is that country club Republicans also love NPR."

Nevertheless, the relative affluence of NPR listeners prompts David Boaz, vice president of the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, to call federal appropriations for public broadcasters "a giant income transfer upward [with] the middle class taxed to pay for news and entertainment for the upper middle class."

None of this gets to the heart of conservatives' ever-present suspicion that public broadcasters favor a liberal worldview. Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, the CPB's chairman, has waged a mini-crusade on this issue in recent months, attacking in particular PBS icon Moyers, a liberal commentator and newsman who until December hosted the newsmagazine program "Now With Bill Moyers" (Moyers is now host of another PBS show called "Wide Angle").

Tomlinson was so unhappy with PBS's perceived left-wing slant that he pushed CPB to fund, and PBS to distribute, two conservative-oriented programs, "The Journal Editorial Report," starring Gigot, and "Tucker Carlson: Unfiltered." (Carlson has since defected to the cable news channel MSNBC.)

To be sure, much of the programming on PBS is of a non-ideological variety. From its headquarters in Alexandria, PBS commissions, finances and distributes about 3,000 hours of programming a year. About a third of this is children's programming; another third is historical, dramatic or cultural in nature, with the balance news and current affairs. Mitchell noted last week that no more than about 30 hours of this programming, or about 1 percent, rose to any level of controversy last season.

PBS's most popular show during the 2004-05 season was the collectibles-appraisal series "Antiques Roadshow," which averaged 5.27 million viewers a week (a level that would probably invite a quick cancellation on a commercial broadcast network). The rest of the top five: documentaries on the boxer Jack Johnson (4.2 million viewers), the Krakatoa volcano (3.85 million), and Broadway musicals (3.7 million); and "Christmas With the Mormon Tabernacle Choir" (3.56 million).

While politics has gotten more attention, PBS's biggest problem may be its demographic trends. While its overall audience has gradually shrunk, as have other networks' in the ever-expanding TV universe, PBS has tended to appeal to really young viewers (ages 1 to 7) and older (those over 50), with a dwindling number of viewers in the middle.

Yet no discussion in Washington of public broadcasting's programs strays far from political perceptions. Boaz, who describes himself as an avid NPR listener, can cite a variety of anecdotes suggesting public broadcasting's liberal agenda. NPR and PBS reporters are more likely to focus on such topics as gay marriage, the politics of the religious right and environmental destruction, he says, and are less likely to explore issues embraced by conservatives or libertarians, such as the burdens of taxes, the social and economic costs of government regulation, or the number of people who used guns to prevent crimes.

When he was driving home recently, Boaz toggled between WAMU-FM and WETA-FM, the leading public stations in Washington. On one, he heard a commentary by former Clinton administration official Robert Reich. On the other, it was commentary from NPR senior news analyst Daniel Schorr, who often expresses liberal views.

On two other days, Boaz says, NPR's "Morning Edition" featured reports on two left-leaning plays, one written by Reich, the other an anti-Iraq war diatribe by David Hare. "I sincerely doubt that if a conservative writes a play denouncing liberals, which is the opposite of Reich's play, NPR will be rushing to celebrate it," says Boaz.

Further, he says, you can tell something about public broadcasting by who its friends are. When the House was considering draconian cuts in CPB's budget last month, he notes, "left-wing pressure groups" such as MoveOn.org and Common Cause orchestrated a grass-roots campaign that helped generate hundreds of thousands of supportive e-mails and phone calls to Congress.

But that's not to say conservatives have been shut out of public broadcasting. PBS (and educational TV before it) has a long history of conservative-hosted or -oriented shows, starting with William F. Buckley Jr.'s "Firing Line" in 1966. Others include "The McLaughlin Group," "Think Tank With Ben Wattenberg," "Adam Smith's Money World," "Wall Street Week," "Nightly Business Report" and a news discussion program called "National Desk" that featured such conservatives as Fred Barnes and Laura Ingraham. PBS also has distributed miniseries based on the work of William Bennett ("Adventures From the Book of Values"), and one starring former Reagan and Bush I speechwriter Peggy Noonan ("On Values: Talking With Peggy Noonan").

Even so, Gigot, the "Journal Editorial Report" host, charges that public television stacks the deck against conservatives in other ways. He says that PBS-affiliated stations have been reluctant to add his program to their schedules (PBS distributes the show but stations are free to set their own lineups), or broadcast it in pre-dawn time periods. "There's been a conscious decision by stations to run 'Now' [Moyers's former show] but not to run us," he says. "The motivation for that -- well, you can make up your own mind."

NPR and PBS officials say perceptions of bias run in both directions. Many liberals rap PBS for being too "pro-business," says John Wilson, PBS's senior vice president of programming, and for not reporting adequately on labor and small farmers. NPR Vice President Ken Stern says liberal listeners complain to NPR's ombudsman at twice the rate of conservatives. "If I had a nickel for every time I heard us called National Pentagon Radio, I'd be wealthy," he says.

It's hard to make sweeping generalizations; there hasn't been an independent and systematic study of the political content of NPR or PBS programs in years. An informal survey of a handful of PBS and NPR news shows, spearheaded by Tomlinson last year, did find that liberal and anti-Bush administration views dominated a few programs. But Tomlinson declined to release the methodology of the survey, or even the survey itself. When Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) forced his hand, Democrats and others inside public broadcasting criticized it as amateurish and flawed.

Public broadcasters instead point to two national surveys of TV viewers commissioned by Tomlinson's CPB in 2002 and 2003 that gave high marks to both PBS and NPR for their news and public-affairs reporting. Conservative suspicions about public broadcasting also haven't been corroborated, so far, by the two veteran journalists hired by CPB in April to serve as ombudsmen and in-house critics; their reports have been filled with praise.

"I'm still waiting for the evidence" of systematic bias, concludes PBS's Wilson. "We can always do better about the diversity of viewpoints and voices, but I don't know anyone who does it better than us."

Viewers and listeners of public broadcasting might be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss is about. Lehrer's news program almost never attracts complaints about fairness, and it's hard to locate the potential for outrage in such programs as "Smokestack Lightning: A Day in the Life of Barbecue." But as long as tax money helps sustain them, the institutions of public broadcasting leave themselves open to attack on any grounds, from any quarter.

"By accepting the government's money, public broadcasters will never be free of government efforts to control or even censor programming," says Adam Thierer, a senior fellow at the conservative Progress and Freedom Foundation in Washington. "I happen to be one of those people who enjoy what's on NPR and PBS. But when public money is involved, it does mean that strings are going to be pulled in one direction or another."

"I'm beginning to think public broadcasting would be better off without public money," says McCauley, author of the book about NPR. Referring to the late San Diego

philanthropist who bequeathed $200 million to NPR in 2003, he has an idea for its future: "It needs more Joan Krocs."