FAIR - A recent essay in Harper's roiled the waters at PBS by arguing that public television is too often geared towards serving the "aging upper class: their tastes, their pet agendas, their centrist politics."
Perhaps that's no surprise. A new FAIR study finds that the trustees of major public television stations are overwhelmingly drawn from the corporate sector.
Out of 182 trustees surveyed on five station boards, 152--or 84 percent--have corporate backgrounds. Among these corporate-affiliated members, 138 are executives at elite businesses, while another 14 appear to be trustees because of their families' corporate-derived wealth. Seventy-five of the corporate-affiliated trustees are executives from the financial industry; 24 are corporate lawyers.
The five public television stations in the study serve some of the largest metropolitan areas in the United States. WNET (New York City/Newark) and WTTW (Chicago) have the most trustees with corporate backgrounds, each at 92 percent. KCET (Los Angeles) has 80 percent corporate representation, while WETA (Washington, DC) has 73 percent. Two-thirds of WGBH's board is corporate-affiliated.
Other notable findings:
--Academics, the second-most common occupation represented on boards, constituted only nine trustees. Journalists, educators, artists and leaders of nonprofit groups (excluding family grant-making foundations) were virtually absent from boards.
--The current board chairs of the five public stations all come from the corporate sector.
--David Koch, the billionaire oil executive and prominent right-wing donor, currently serves as a trustee at Boston's WGBH.
--A majority of the trustees--116, or 64 percent--are male.
1 comment:
How ironic that FAIR is late to the fair! I've known that "public" broadcasting was wholly owned by corporations since the mid-'80s. I quit listening to it on my commute because of how much the takeover irritated me.
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