"The Epoch of Nicolae Ceausescu", a sample of regular Romanian public
television programming under communism.
The past decade brought the shrill cries of commentators and shock-jocks, who filled inboxes and airwaves with grave warnings about public television and how it spreads a secret socialist message. Overwhelmed by patriotism, Congressional Republicans put NPR and PBS on the budget chopping block. Mitch Romney even made the de-funding of PBS part of his platform during the 2012 presidential campaign. Obviously, the assumption that de-funding NPR and PBS would reduce the temptations of statism or socialism among voting members of the American public is hogwash.
NPR and PBS don't promote socialism or statism. The only exception might be that Republican-favored form of statism known as "corporate welfare" (which recently flew under the auspices of a military campaign known as the war in Iraq). Over the years, ever since the pageantry of Reagan's rule, public broadcasting institutions have relied more and more on corporate and billionaire cash to operate. Major corporate funders prefer to forgoe programming that draws attention to the way in which corporations manhandle the policy process. Every red-blooded American knows the money talks- that's why most middle-class Americans don't feel like anyone on the Hill speaks for them.
Public broadcasting has a liberal agenda
If public programming leans in any directon, it is the direction of liberalism (as opposed to Democratism). Liberalism, as described by hardcore liberals including Hannah Arendt, involves a society in which intellectual and social diversity is both desired and protected. The law exists to protect individuality, rather than to shepherd censorship and demand conformism under the auspices of so-called Americanism.
In fact, the "liberal agenda" of public broadcasting serves an important purpose in keeping minds open and free from the fossilized thinking that informs political ideologies. All that talk you hear on NPR about human rights and tolerance and diversity and reconciliation works against the agenda of anyone who thrives on conflict and ignorance. And anyone who thrives on conflict, demagoguery, and ignorance is likely to be an enemy of the very country he or she claims to worship (and, frequently, eulogize).
This is just another way of saying that all that anger and resentment you feel after listening to Bill O'Reilly or Rush Limbaugh or Fox News doesn't make you a better citizen of these United States. It only makes you a more devout follower of a particular (and particularly nasty) political ideology.
As someone who was born under a totalitarian dictatorship, one might expect me to rage about the role of public broadcasting in destroying America. Let me suggest something else. Let me suggest that it is precisely because I was born in Ceausecu's Romania that I support the liberalism and open-mindedness of American public broadcasting.
For those unfamiliar with actual totalitarianism, it has a lot more to do with "extraordinary renditions" than it does with NPR.
Ceausescu's totalitarian television programming did not espouse a liberal philosophy. Any dictator aims to preserve the system that grants him such extraordinary and god-like powers. As a result, dictators- whether communist, socialist, Maoist, or Wahhabist- can be understood as revolutionaries prior to gaining power and conservatives from then until the day they die.
No dictator has ever been a liberal. No liberal can ever stay a liberal and become a dictator. The two are mutually exclusive. Ceausescu used public programming to acclimatize Romanians to party purges, loss of civil liberties, and various propaganda associated with support for his regime. He needed control over the content of the media so that he could make sure, like Rush Limbaugh, that everyone knew exactly what it meant to toe the Party line.
Make no mistake- for Ceausescu (and some Republicans), the Party line was that which should not be questioned. "My Party, right or wrong"- those aren't the words of freedom-loving folks. Given the money-making success of illiberal television and radio programming, I find myself worrying for all the devout flag-wavers who may just be asking us to worship the symbol of a country whose substance no longer includes any of that messy freedom stuff. It's time to start praising any "liberal agendas" wherever we can find them.
