I suspect I’m not alone in dating my passion for politics and public service, law and journalism to watching the Senate Watergate Committee hearings as a teenager. While glued to New York’s public Channel 13 during the spring and summer of 1973, I certainly didn’t realize how remarkable it was that such “gavel to gavel” coverage was even on public TV. A half dozen years later, that passion led me to a summer internship at WNET, working for what was then known as The MacNeil/Lehrer Report, with the same two anchors as those historic Watergate hearings. One floor away was Bill Moyers, whose insightful commentary on that unfolding Nixon scandal had also inspired me as a teenager.
It was a career-defining experience that also led me to a novel senior history thesis topic. I learned from Robin MacNeil (who became a valued and enduring mentor) about the recent release under the Freedom of Information Act of a tranche of Nixon White House documents detailing the administration’s fierce, but failed effort to cut off federal funds for the newly founded public broadcasting system. The resulting thesis was later published as an academic book (as well as earning me a proud place as the sole footnoted source in MacNeil’s 1982 memoir).
The topic has remained relevant through many subsequent GOP efforts to end federal funding for public media, including by President Trump in his first term. But with the recently passed $9 billion congressional rescission bill, the MAGA-fied Republican Party finally pulled the plug after nearly 60 years of trying. From its very outset as one of the last “Great Society” programs enacted under President Lyndon Johnson, federal funding for a new national public broadcasting system was controversial. Some liberals at the time worried about creating a government-funded propaganda arm, or at least overly “safe,” bland programming. Many conservatives objected to tax dollars going to independent journalism and so-called “liberal advocacy documentaries.”
Ironically, because of those concerns, Congress refused to create the kind of dedicated funding source that in the UK has long supported the BBC, in favor of exactly the kind of annual appropriations that would be forever vulnerable to changing political winds. Now the Trump wind has finally blown federal funding away.
But today’s news organizations should not forget one important lesson from Nixon’s failure that could hardly be more relevant right now: courage.
Public media to serve all of America
Federal funding for PBS and NPR has always flowed through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), created in 1967 in theory to provide a “heat shield” protecting stations and producers from political pressures. Then, as now, most of the funds through CPB went directly to local stations around the country to support their operations and local programming.
MacNeil, Lehrer and now Moyers are no longer with us, though one can imagine what they’d say about this moment: Do your jobs. Report the news fairly. And don’t give in to bullies.
That emphasis on support for smaller local stations outside major cities helped the bipartisan political case for federal funding by attempting to shift some editorial control away from the perceived “liberal” cultural tastes and editorial biases of New York’s National Educational Television and its Ford Foundation funders. So it’s especially ironic that the recent defunding primarily threatens the small, mostly rural stations that rely most on federal dollars.
When Richard Nixon took office in 1969, the national system linking together hundreds of existing “educational stations” was still brand new. He later became infamous for his “enemies list” that included many members of the “liberal media,” who often reported critically on him and the continuing war in Vietnam. Then, as now, major networks ABC, NBC, and CBS certainly had to be concerned with their stations’ federal broadcast licenses. But neither they nor other major news organizations depended so directly on federal funding as the brand-new public broadcasting system did. Many recall that Pittsburgh’s Fred Rogers famously became the hero of the first effort to fight Nixon’s proposed cuts to federal funding with his compelling testimony before Congress in 1969. But the battle hardly ended there.
For Nixon, this was personal
Despite the relatively small audiences involved, Nixon got angry when public television hired one-time LBJ press secretary Bill Moyers and former NBC News correspondent Sander Vanocur (with whom Nixon had an especially antagonistic relationship). In the early 1970s, a series of controversies over political bias and journalism standards in several high profile programs had those on the Left crying censorship and those on the right complaining about anti-government hit pieces. Trump hadn’t invented the term “fake news” back then, but questions abounded about how public broadcasting should manage such tricky political and journalistic terrain.
Some in the Nixon White House Office of Telecommunications Policy felt public television could provide nonpartisan “town meetings on the air,” but objected to using taxpayer dollars to fund journalism. But Nixon’s political team went further and publicly warned of the dangers of government involvement in public programming while themselves illustrating that very danger.
In response to repeated programming controversies, the newly created Public Broadcasting Service representing the hundreds of local stations, developed program standards and an editorial approach to journalism they hoped could not be predictably pigeonholed with liberal bias. They created NPACT — the National Public Affairs Center for Television — in Washington, with a sober Canadian broadcaster named Robert “Robin” MacNeil, later joined by NBC’s Vanocur in coverage of the 1972 presidential campaign. Their goal was to provide deeper reporting than the commercial network news, but also more professionalism and political neutrality in their coverage.
That’s not how Nixon saw it. A “confidential, eyes only” memorandum from White House staff secretary Jon Huntsman said that news of Vanocur’s hiring “greatly disturbed the President who considered this the last straw. It was requested that all funds for public broadcasting be cut immediately.” It went on with a directive to ,“work this out so that the House Appropriations Committee gets the word.” Among the tactics were anonymous leaks of Vanocur’s salary of $85,000, presented as an outrageous use of taxpayer funds, even if it was far less than a typical network correspondent.
Frustrated to find that the behind-the-scenes White House-led attacks had failed to derail Congress from passing a new two-year funding for public broadcasting, Nixon went public by simply vetoing the CPB appropriation in June 1972 as he cruised toward a landslide re-election.
PBS’s Watergate coup
For its part, PBS tried to manage the controversies and build journalistic credibility by recruiting Dallas newspaper editor and local public television host Jim Lehrer to Washington to manage national public affairs programming. In the spring of 1973, Lehrer had agreed to take on a new role in front of the camera, teaming up with MacNeil for the first time in a then-novel idea from NPACT that seems all the more courageous in retrospect. they convinced PBS to be the first network to agree to broadcast “gavel to gavel” coverage of the Ervin Senate Watergate Committee and, more importantly, the only national network to replay the dramatic hearings in prime time when most Americans could actually watch them in that pre-streaming, pre-DVR era.
The hearings quickly became both a ratings and fundraising hit for PBS member stations across the country. There were Watergate watch parties, memorialized in a cheeky New Yorker cartoon of a woman on the phone with a friend inviting them to “Just drinks, buffet, and then, at eight o’clock, we’ll gavel-to-gavel.” As the late CBS newsman and Ford Foundation executive Fred Friendly told me, it was “a poetic symmetry” that the news organization that was most vulnerable to White House pressure found its greatest success by bravely, yet soberly, elevating national understanding of the unfolding Watergate scandal that ultimately brought Nixon down.
Today’s commercial media owners might want to reflect on what the journalists and executives of a fledgling public television system were willing to risk more than a half century ago in order to provide the nation with calm, insightful coverage about our basic institutions of self-government.
Until now, the many subsequent GOP efforts to defund public media have failed as Americans and their representatives consistently voted for Big Bird, Ken Burns and rural radio in otherwise underserved communities. But while there’s never been a greater need for high quality journalism, the media world is fundamentally different now than it was in 1967 when there was a scarcity of broadcast options. Today we’re overwhelmed by choices — streaming, social media — a global digital marketplace that was unimaginable back in the day of rabbit ears.
But we’ve seen that, among our biggest media companies that once viewed their network news divisions as their “crown jewels,” business needs have dictated a retreat from fearless reporting and commentary about President Trump, who far outpaces Nixon in his willingness to use the power of the office, his political grip on Congressional Republicans, the bully pulpit of his social media feed to deride and threaten not only the free press, but every other institution of knowledge and culture, from colleges and universities to museums and libraries. ABC Disney and CBS Paramount make huge financial settlements with Trump instead of contesting clearly winnable libel and defamation suits under the First Amendment, refusing to defend their leading journalistic voices and admired programs like 60 Minutes.
The same has been true of some long-respected legacy newspapers like the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post, whose wealthy owners have chosen to pull their editorial punches rather than anger this President. As the late Washington Post owner Katherine Graham understood in joining the The New York Times in publishing the Pentagon Papers over White House threats in 1971, and then allowing a young Woodward and Bernstein to pursue the Watergate story where it led, the essential First Amendment role of free speech and press in a democracy calls for something more.
Perhaps you believe the federal financial cord to independent journalism on PBS and NPR should have been cut years ago. And perhaps you have your own critique of how public media outlets cover the news. That’s part of the robust debate of a free society. But today’s commercial media owners might want to reflect on what the journalists and executives of a fledgling public television system were willing to risk more than a half century ago in order to provide the nation with calm, insightful coverage about our basic institutions of self-government.
No one could have imagined in that earlier moment of “fear in the air” that Nixon’s post-landslide downfall would soon come, at least in large part, at the hands of the one media organization over which he held the most leverage. To be sure, in Trump we have empowered a President with his own deep sense of grievance against the press, and far more willing to publicly exercise that leverage against enemies at a scale Nixon ultimately didn’t. Sadly, MacNeil, Lehrer and now Moyers are no longer with us, though one can imagine what they’d say about this moment: Do your jobs. Report the news fairly. And don’t give in to bullies. They didn’t.
David M. Stone, a former Executive Vice President for Communications at Columbia University, was a public affairs television producer and First Amendment lawyer before serving as communications director for U.S. Senator Harris Wofford and deputy chief of staff for Governor Bob Casey.
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