Opinion: Disaffiliating Arkansas’ public TV network from PBS is an ideological move

This article was first published by Arkansas Advocate and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Imagine for a moment if Sinclair Broadcast Group, the company that owns KATV in Little Rock, decided on a whim to drop ABC and discontinue its network programming.

No more World News Tonight. No Dancing With the Stars. The 9-1-1 drama franchises gone, all of them. And no — clutch the pearls — SEC football on Saturday afternoons.

Then imagine if folks at Sinclair told unhappy viewers that if they wanted to keep watching ABC, they could just stream it. And that they should be satisfied with a grab bag of less expensive programming filling the gaping holes in its schedule.

Ridiculous, you say. But that’s exactly what might happen at Arkansas PBS, where the installation of former Republican state legislator Carlton Wing as executive director has resulted in the inexplicable decision to drop its PBS affiliation and rebrand as something called Arkansas TV, which few people will watch and even fewer people will support financially.

The state of Arkansas has spent 60 years and tens of millions of dollars building a public television network with statewide reach, one of the gems of our media landscape. But starting in July, programs from PBS — which make up the bulk of the content now available on the network’s four channels — will no longer be broadcast in the state. Arkansas is the first state in the union to make that move.

No more PBS News Hour. No Sesame Street. No Antiques Roadshow. No American Experience, or Ken Burns documentaries. The PBS Kids channel — which provides vital educational programming serving lower-income households that lack high-speed internet access needed to stream content — will go dark at the whim of Wing, who has no background in public broadcasting.

The disaffiliation, easily ratified by the Arkansas Educational Television Commission now packed with Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ appointees, was one of the first moves Wing took after leaving the Legislature to take the helm of Arkansas PBS in September.

His reasoning? At $2.3 million a year, PBS programming is just too expensive because a different pack of Republican ideologues in Congress dismembered the Corporation for Public Broadcasting that underwrote the cost — an excuse that quickly dissolves when subjected to even slight scrutiny.

The notion that we can’t possibly find $2.3 million for a resource that serves 3 million Arkansans, at a cost of just 77 cents per resident per year, is rather laughable in a state now frittering away $300 million a year on voucher subsidies for private and homeschool students, a program that serves fewer than 47,000 families.

Rather than reaching out to wealthy donors to fill the gap, or seeking funding from charitable foundations, or finding more corporate underwriting, or lobbying for additional state funding, or even pushing Arkansas’ congressional delegation to reverse the decision to whack federal funding, Wing simply threw in the towel. It’s a move that was both lazy and unimaginative.

Disaffiliating from PBS should have been an absolute last resort when all other options had failed.

Contrast this with the approach of Arkansas’ three public radio stations, all of which also lost CPB support and none of which decided to drop NPR content. Indeed, they are working hard to find additional long-term, sustainable financial support to make up the gap.

Wing has said the disaffiliation decision had to be made now to avoid paying additional fees to PBS for not meeting a Jan. 1 deadline. PBS officials deny that claim, and it also ignores the fact that there would be no rationale at all for disaffiliation if other options had been successfully pursued.

Indeed, Arkansas PBS viewers showed their passion and commitment by coughing up $500,000 in the months after Congress cut CPB funding — an outpouring of support Wing has extinguished with his short-sighted decision to disaffiliate.

Wing ignores the effect this decision will have on the $3 million raised each year from viewers like you (more than the amount that he’s saving by eliminating PBS) that’s going to vanish like an Arkansas snowstorm.

Marge Betley, CEO of the Arkansas PBS Foundation, which manages donations to the network, made this point in June when she said that donations would “nosedive” without PBS because 80% of those who donate online cite its programming as their reason for giving money. The telethons that generate many of these donations are also, literally, built around PBS programming because these are the shows viewers care about and watch.

And here is where we truly go through the looking glass: Arkansas TV is telling current donors who get access to expanded content through the PBS Passport app that if they want to keep it, they will need to donate to PBS stations in surrounding states.

Thus, we are now actively encouraging money to flow out of Arkansas to support out-of-state stations. And if Wing thinks these people are also going to donate to Arkansas TV, he’s lost touch with reality.

The other aspect of this scheme is Wing’s pledge to raise the amount of locally produced programming on the network from its current level — about 5.5% of the schedule — to 70%.

Arkansas TV insists that it can replace hours and hours of PBS programming with local content for just $500,000 a year. But a budget that meager won’t come anywhere close to producing the quantity or quality of content that PBS viewers and donors have come to expect.

This decision is the culmination of a long-term Republican project, dating back to the Reagan years, to dismantle public broadcasting. This dismantling is pushed by politicians who oppose the very idea of having even one tiny, government-supported, noncommercial voice, or who believe PBS programming is too “liberal” or “woke.”

Republicans in Congress, including Arkansas’ entire delegation, voted to put Arkansas PBS’ head on the block. Wing has now wielded the axe. Viewers will flee, fundraising will dry up, and Arkansas TV will become an irrelevant white elephant. Arkansas will be poorer for it.

Wing’s folly was perhaps best summed up in a letter sent to him by Annette Herrington, who has served on the Arkansas PBS board for 14 years and voted against disaffiliation:

“There are multiple options for how to proceed because that is what public television systems are doing all over America. And with 78% of Arkansans supporting PBS content, viewers and donors definitely deserve our best efforts to find a solution for the people we serve,” she wrote. “I cannot understand how the only option presented after your first 70 days was to deny PBS content to all Arkansans.”

Can we get an amen?

Arkansas Advocate is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arkansas Advocate maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Andrew DeMillo for questions: info@arkansasadvocate.com.