POST Posts: The War on Children's Educational Television, 2022

Starting today, I'm putting up a few of my older articles I wrote for my Post account. 

For those who wonder what Post was, think Twitter, but for journalists and writers who talked a lot about anything. Considering I liked to do that, this was a draw for me. Sadly, Post didn't last and ended earlier in 2024. I'm not going to repost everything I made there (a few were a little too personal), just a small selection of Post articles that still resonate and seem like a good read. Enjoy - jh.

 I was thinking about how cable television was once used as a tool against public television by Congress only to become irrelevant in educational programming by the turn of the century. 

It all began where a lot of weird modern media trends began - the 1990s. 

Back in the 1990s, politicians threatened to cut public broadcasting funding and pushed broadcast networks to provide three hours of weekly E/I programming because they said that cable provided similar programming without taxpayers footing the bill.

A lot of it had to do with political ideologies and prejudices as well as anti-intellectualism.

Conservatives, especially those from the American South, have always been against funding and supporting public broadcasting media because public television brought racial diversity and cultural inclusion to the country’s airwaves. Jim Crow policies were slowly being eradicated in the country when public television started gaining momentum in the United States in the 1960s. However, those who gained power because of it were angered that a television network paid for by taxpayer dollars would DARE to show a Black kid and a White kid act nice towards each other, Latinos openly speaking Spanish, and people of many cultures would get along and work together rather than demonize each other.

That’s why a revolutionary show like Sesame Street continues to be attacked by conservatives to this day. It is the most empathetic, progressive, culturally and ethnically diverse series ever created for American television, and it gets unwarranted hate from generations of conservative politicians across the country to this day. It’s because of shows like Sesame Street (a show, I may add, has left first-run public television because of annual cuts from the government) that public broadcast media still gets attacked by conservative politicians and pundits.

Never mind that public broadcasting provides an educational outlet to low-income viewers who may not have access to cable television or the internet at home. 

Never mind that public broadcasting is one of the few outlets that still provides cultural programming dedicated to science, history, and the visual and performing arts. 

Never mind that public broadcasting is the only broadcaster still providing and producing quality children’s programming over-the-air daily and not just cheaply-produced E/I fare produced and programmed by one company across four of the five major broadcast networks.

Never mind cable has largely abandoned educational fare in favor of cheaply-produced “reality” shows. 

Back in the 1990s when they were rewriting the rules for children's programming on broadcast television, conservative politicians pointed to several networks as suitable replacements for PBS. A&E Network, Bravo, The Discovery Channel, The History Channel, Animal Planet, and The Learning Channel were seen as outlets that fit the PBS mode but didn't need to be supported by taxpayer dollars the way PBS was. Unfortunately, by the turn of the century, those outlets would abandon those roles and embrace more reality fare. 

A&E: The Arts and Entertainment Network and Bravo no longer airs programs dedicated to the performing and visual arts. Animal Planet drifted more towards shows about domestic animals like dogs and cats as well as "survivor reality" shows over nature documentaries.  Discovery Channel pushed most of their science and technology-based shows over to their Science Channel spinoff, which wasn't in as many households.

The biggest disappointment of all is TLC, the network formerly known as The Learning Channel. They abandoned their Ready Set Learn children’s block. They stopped airing science and technology documentaries a long time ago. But if you want to see wall-to-wall cheaply-produced reality shows guided by a madman obsessed with vests who believes shows about extremely obese people, mail-order relationships, and child pageants are worth watching, then TLC has you covered.

Man, cable television dropped the bag on bringing the country premium PBS-level programming, didn’t they?

To conservatives, giving the military nearly $1 trillion a year seems reasonable and rational. Giving nearly US$470 million annually to support the Corporation for Public Broadcasting? To conservatives, that’s a step too far and a gross misuse of public funds. Just 0.0014% of the annual federal budget, and they still want to get rid of that funding to this day. 

Why? 

Because public broadcasting shows programming that completely demolishes their worldview.

Do you know how much of that $470 million goes to PBS?

Nearly $80 million of that goes to programming grants. A low-tier fraction of the cost of programming

$233 million of that goes directly to over 160 PBS member stations and station groups. They have to split that evenly, so, it’s just a touch over a million per station and station group. 

If you want to know why you see membership drives throughout the year, this is why.

And that’s shameful.

The need to support public broadcasting is still strong in the United States. The digital divide is growing in urban and rural communities. A lot of low-income households don't have access to broadband and cable television. As commercial broadcast television continues to become irrelevant to younger audiences, public television remains a viable and important asset providing great entertainment to that audience daily. 

Cable television and streaming media aren't in any hurry to bring more of those kinds of shows to their outlets.  If anything, they're ceding that market to places like YouTube Kids, which is proliferated with thousands of cheaply-produced videos of suspect quality churned out by global content farms that often overshadow the few quality shows on the platform.

Now more than ever, we need to get back to the point of supporting and teaching our youngest citizens how to be empathetic, culturally aware, honest, resourceful, and intelligent members of our nation. 

I still believe television can be awesome.