TV Worth Blogging
by David Thiel, Program Director for WILL-TV
An insider's view of public television programming and the issues that help determine what and how you watch
WILL-TV Leads, Not Follows, In Airing “Torturing” Documentary
Torturing Democracy, a video documentary examining detention and interrogation under the current White House administration, recently became a cause célèbre when a New York Times article revealed that PBS had been offered the show, but could not clear a prime-time slot for it until the day after the new President takes office in January.
The program was subsequently offered to individual stations by independent distributor Executive Program Services. Ken Bode, the ombudsman for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, reported that WETA-TV in Washington, D.C. hastily dropped Torturing into their schedule—with minimal promotion—after the fallout from the NYT piece. Yet you’ll find it right here on WILL-TV next Tuesday, October 28 at 9:00 pm. (And it was even scheduled in time to make our printed program guide, Patterns!) The 90-minute film will be expanded by a half-hour follow-up discussion.
Bias, Balance and Blue Skies
In the final, frantic days of the 2008 election season, charges of media bias have been flying left, right and center. It's to be expected, I suppose. "Shooting the messenger" is by no means a recent practice, and if one can also claim that the messenger allowed his or her own prejudices to dictate the message before it was delivered, so much the better. While I'm not aware of any current ire being directed toward WILL-TV or PBS, I've responded to my share of accusations of bias over the years. Here are a few things I've found to be true.
No matter what the accuser's own views may be, ours are always assumed to be the ideological opposite.
We've responded to charges from both the right and the left, yet no one has ever claimed that we're biased in favor of their own side.
While rare, it is possible for the same program to be found biased by both sides. At the same time. (Typically, it's The Newshour, depending upon whom the guests were that evening.)
My conclusion is that most of the time bias is in the eye of the beholder. And "you're biased" very often translates to "I heard this one thing that disagreed with my world view."
When I receive such a complaint, I usually reply by pointing out that we air more than 8,700 hours of programming each year on WILL-TV. (With our digital channels, you can multiply that number by three.) As a variety service which prides itself on providing a diversity of viewpoints, I can guarantee that any given viewer will occasionally encounter one with which they will strongly disagree. My belief is that if that wasn't the case--that if anyone can watch WILL day after day and agree with everything they see--I'm not doing my job.
Do I have political views? Of course. I'm not about to share them here, but rest assured that I know for whom I will vote next month. Yet, it's my responsibility to both WILL and our viewers not to allow those views to influence programming decisions. I've rejected proposed programs for being little more than paid political propaganda, even when I've personally agreed with their advocacy. And back when Tucker Carlson had a Friday evening show on PBS, I defended our airing of it every bit as strongly as I did the work of Bill Moyers.
James Poniewozik, Time's TV critic, has a good piece on how the news industry has traditionally attempted to avoid charges of bias by creating false equivalencies, turning every argument into a case of "he said, she said." I know that as a viewer I sometimes find it frustrating when a news program feels the need to "balance" every viewpoint with its opposite without regard to their respective validity. I've joked that if someone was to come onto a news program and claim the sky is blue, there'd have to be another person sitting next to him to declare that the sky is actually green. At such a time, I think we're all best served if a journalist can confidently step in and say, "Well, we stuck our heads out the window and looked at the sky, and we can confirm that it is indeed blue."
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