Pam, a PBS viewer from Cleveland, has long been an avid supporter of the Public Broadcasting Service’s array of entertainment, educational and public affairs programs. She has supported public television, she says, via regular contributions to station WVIZ.
For more than a decade, Pam was one of millions of individuals who each year combine to provide PBS with around 30% of its total operating funding.
But now she’s among dozens of viewers who’ve written to me, insisting that they’re reconsidering their support – financial and otherwise – because of PBS’ recent decision to eliminate its Diversity, Equity and Inclusion unit and its activities, following a controversial order signed by Donald Trump to do away with activity that goes under that moniker.
All federal agencies and services, and recipients of federal grants, fall under the order.
Via the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, PBS receives federal funding that amounts to about 15% of its overall budget. So PBS executives consulted lawyers and determined that they, too, needed to heed Trump’s mandate.
The decision touched off a flood of negative commentary on social media platforms, with pointed criticism that PBS had “caved” to pressure from Trump. Angry notes overwhelmed what had been a growing stream of sympathetic emails and messages to PBS as it, and National Public Radio, became focal points in the new administration’s plan to gut public media deemed biased in favor of liberal viewpoints. (Conservative politicians across the country have long said they would axe publicly funded news organizations. Such efforts in the past have not succeeded because politicians from every party have seen that PBS and NPR reach tens of millions of viewers and listeners who lend them a strong measure of trust.)
Today, the push to defund public media is refreshed with support from Trump and his administration. They’re targeting what a new bill, by Senator Mike Lee of Utah calls “taxpayer-funded propaganda.”
That threat prompted viewers and readers of PBS to write to me, describing their support for programs like PBS News and Frontline, widely considered non-partisan fonts of accountability and public-interest journalism.
Nancy Basinger, a member of our Public Editor’s volunteer focus group (it’s comprised of several dozen viewers from around the country who are critical and fiercely independent thinkers) queried social media followers who said they’ve recently abandoned commercial TV news in favor of PBS shows like The NewsHour and Frontline. New viewers have cited factors like: “Accuracy,” “Balanced coverage,” and coverage that’s not melodramatic or hyperbolic.
But after PBS’ announcement that it would drop its designated DEI unit, the tide turned and another wave hit our inbox. Among them, Pam from Cleveland was angry enough to write:
My family has depended upon the news, history and fascinating programs that offer a variety and diverse perspectives to viewers. If the cowardly decision to implement the Executive Order was/is driven by funding support from the government, this is a slap in the face to those donors and members who stand behind PBS for its integrity in providing programs that serve the public, as a whole.
Pam’s note is a provocative accusation that PBS chose federal dollars over donations like hers.
Her complaint adds a sharp point to viewer opinions that have ranged from mild rebukes to vows to withhold donations.
A quick social remedy
DEI units rapidly emerged in private workplaces and public institutions nationwide after the death of George Floyd at the hands, and knee, of a Minneapolis police officer who later was convicted of murder. DEI departments quickly demonstrated solidarity with the movement to speed up social and professional equality.
The acronym itself is a product of an academic lexicon – shorthand for remedies to longstanding problems of unequal opportunity and access. Executives were brought in to run new DEI offices.
But the DEI rush led to backlash, especially among people who claimed the focus on diversity had caused reverse discrimination against white people. Complaints rose that less-qualified people were being hired and promoted simply to satisfy progressives.
Like “affirmative action” and “welfare” before it, DEI was made into a political wedge by anti-woke politicians and social commentators. The perceived preferential hiring of women and people of color, has been blamed, ludicrously, for everything from the deadly air collision over Washington, D.C., to the disastrous wildfires in Los Angeles.
Trump campaigned last year on a promise to do away with a “woke” infrastructure in the federal sphere. In the runup to his return to the Oval Office, company after company began to trim away DEI operations. That was before he signed the executive order specifying the end of “DEI” programs, including ones that might be going by a different name. Readers and pundits have derided the anticipatory compliance by business leaders.
More than an acronym
Understandably, PBS executives have limited their public commentary about DEI. But amid the controversy, PBS’ decision has appeared to some as a strategic capitulation.
But here’s the reality I’ve come to know from numerous conversations with PBS employees and executives: The work by PBS to more accurately reflect demographics of the United States has not ended. PBS President Paula Kerger said in her note announcing the DEI decision (and then in a company-wide conference call) that the broadcaster remains “a welcoming place” for people from all ethnic and demographic threads that make up our national quilt.
Eliminating the DEI unit, I believe, was a necessary step to comply with an arguably legitimate presidential order.
Is Trump’s order politically driven? Yes. He says the order is about restoring a meritocracy in government service. And courts of late have given presidents greater latitude to impose their will on federal governance. (Trump’s order appears legal, even if proclaiming a need for merit-based government staffing seems hypocritical, given the installation of a television show host and a professional wrestling executive as chiefs of the massive and crucial departments of defense and education, respectively.)
Shortly after Trump took the oath of office, he promoted a commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission to chair the agency and its regulation of broadcast licenses. The new FCC chair wasted no time in announcing an investigation into whether PBS member stations have violated standards of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 by airing “commercial” advertising. And Congress has called executives of PBS and NPR to appear at committee hearings next month. So it’s hard not to see the DEI decision as a move to deny any more ammunition to politicians and federal administrators bent on eliminating publicly funded media.
Does losing a DEI office hurt? Yes. We lost talented people with keen eyes who monitored how PBS was building a more diverse workplace.
Does it mean PBS no longer cares about diverse hiring or being an inclusive workplace? Not at all. PBS follows a long-held core philosophy of inclusion and recognition of diversity. Just look at the wildly popular children’s shows, and programs like America Outdoors and Finding Your Roots that underscore the undeniable diversity and the PBS raison d'être. Think of the diverse cast of characters of Sesame Street, that seminal children’s show that helped launch the era of public television in the United States in 1968.
So, can we trust PBS to hold this line? Yes. PBS must continue to strive to become a more diverse, inclusive organization. Beyond its very reason for being, don’t forget, PBS has a legal and social responsibility to do so.
It has never been a secret that the public broadcasting that we know today began 60 years ago as the notion of journalists, progressive activists, and Democratic Party lawmakers. Conservative politicians – but not all – have opposed public broadcasting from the start. (There are, and have been, political conservatives and moderates on the PBS and CPB boards of directors.)
What is quantifiable, what is a provable measure, is that PBS has held diversity and non-partisanship as pillars since the beginning, even beyond the children’s shows that almost everyone knows about. Unlike many commercial broadcasters today, its public affairs shows have resisted taking political stands, focusing instead on accountability and holding truth to power. And, importantly, it has never wavered from its original mission of educating the public – especially children, whom, it hardly needs pointing out, very quickly become adults who will go on to manage our businesses and governments.
A well-versed viewer
As for Pam from Cleveland, she re-affirmed that she’s an uber fan of public broadcasting. Her professional career centered on human resources work, so she knows well what it takes to build effective, equitable workplaces. This is why she was so upset when she heard about PBS’ DEI decision.
"I wrote to my local PBS station because I believe members and donors are the core of a public broadcast station, not those in administrative offices at the White House,” Pam said when I reached out to dig deeper into what had set her off. “ … Given what is at stake, I believe donors and members will rise to the challenge. Financial self-sufficiency will ensure freedom of choice in offering diversity in content and programs. It will support PBS's prerogative to continue offering quality programming," she said.
I don’t know if Pam will soften her stance against supporting WVIZ in Ohio. That’s her business, for sure. But she did offer a strategy for how PBS can make it through the current political firestorm.
“The President and his administration are taking measures to control the press and media. This influence needs to be mitigated,” she told me, suggesting that PBS can protect itself and win back disheartened supporters like herself by “creating alternative creative fundraising events with speakers, authors, and musicians to help offset federal funding.”
A truth in diversity
Through all of my 44 years as a journalist, I’ve worked to diversify a media industry long dominated by white men. I know journalism and public media. I can tell you that the deterioration of essential local news coverage of government and business, and the relative dearth of women and people of color in newsrooms and production studios, would be far worse today were it not for the CPB, PBS and NPR. CPB is now the juice powering newsroom collaboratives in rural news deserts where local news has disappeared, and in urban communities where commercial newsgathering has lost advertising revenue to superficial, click-baiting online sites.
As important as local news is, so is the attention needed to recruit talented journalists and creatives from all social and economic points of origin – from financially strapped communities, from the small towns of Texas and West Virginia to ethnically diverse neighborhoods in Southern California and New York. There is overlooked talent in every community and we need transparent ways for them to come to the attention of PBS executives and programming decisionmakers.
That work can be done without a DEI office. We need only follow the marketplace gospel of meeting our audiences where they are – as they are – in society.
I saw that, unfortunately, many DEI efforts since George Floyd’s death were not well planned. DEI executives often lacked corporate authority to effect real change, or their work duplicated or complicated long-established diversity programs.
At PBS, the DEI work was real. It aspired to ensure every employee had a voice and surveyed the service’s many units to verify they tossed wide nets in hiring employees and contracting producers and journalists.
I know this work will continue. It has to. In order to build new audiences and retain the trust of viewers and readers, PBS must become even more like the diverse United States.
Without purposeful diversity on our creative teams and in the stories we tell, how can we truly call ourselves “public” media?
Daniel Macy, Senior Associate in the PBS Office of the Public Editor, contributed to this article.