“The idea of a public space is at risk of disappearing,” said Boris Razon, Arte France’s Editorial Director, speaking to international non-fiction marketplace Sunny Side of the Doc earlier this week. Another guest speaker at the same event knows this all too well from bitter personal experience; in May of last year, the White House announced the end of “taxpayer subsidization of biased media”, a crackdown specifically and calamitously directed at National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).
The axe came down swiftly and brutally, but, speaking candidly, Geoff Daniels, PBS’ Vice President, Programming & Development, was gracious about it, thanking the audience of mostly media industry people for their camaraderie. “The outpouring of support that we’ve experienced has been so inspiring,” he said. “It’s been the wind behind our sails to help us navigate a really uncertain and challenging time that I know many of you have experienced, too.”
That said, the Trump administration’s actions clearly still rankle. “I think what happened at PBS is very well documented, in the fact that we effectively lost our government funding overnight,” he said. “The rescission defunding that happened basically about a year ago, it really hard hit. You don’t replace millions and millions of dollars easily overnight. The way I would describe it for PBS is that, initially we went through what I would describe colloquially as the five stages of grief, where you’re trying to really figure things out: What does this really mean for the system, for our stations, for our strands, for the national organization that is there to serve our members and support the programs that we all do?
“And what’s happened since, which has been absolutely incredible, is the [outpouring of] viewer support from the individual viewers that have been supporting PBS member stations and us, that grassroots love and affinity. We knew that there would be a moment where we were in the news, and that an existential threat to the system was present. But what we’ve seen over the last year is that the sustained giving from individuals. I mean we’re talking about families, mothers, children that were holding birthday parties that were fundraisers for PBS. And then also with our foundation efforts, there was an uptick in what I would describe as larger gift donations specifically for our programming.”
The combination of moral support and hard cash proved vital as Daniels struggled to course-correct the ship. “The first six months of that was really just triage,” he recalled, “and figuring out what the shape of things. Now, we have what I would describe as a more stable base, one that is giving us the ability to move forward in ways that will allow us to make a transition and ultimately begin to transform what PBS can be.”
Money-wise, Daniels was cautiously optimistic. “We might have a little bit less than we did,” he said, “but we have more than you think, and we have different ways now. We’re becoming much more nimble, much more entrepreneurial, in the way in which we work with producers upfront to proactively look at the needs of a project… from early-stage R&D development through late-stage gap funding and completion money. Obviously, there’s nothing new under the sun there. It’s just more complicated.”
Ironically enough, one of the more interesting side-effects of the US government’s decision is that PBS has been forced to become even more rigorously ethical than it was before: “Any dollar that comes in is going to have to pass our standards and practices. We’re a public broadcaster. We have a very strong mission in terms of our independence so we have to be careful about the strings that are attached to money. So, when we talk about NGOs, and when we talk about any large gift donation, it’s going to have to pass a very rigorous standards and practices approach that sometimes can be a little bit daunting.”
“We try to make it as quick and as painless as possible, but we’re vetting every single dollar. We’re not an advocacy organization, we are independent media, and what we want to do is deliver culturally impactful programming that is going to move and inspire and inform audiences. That’s what we do, that’s what we’ve been doing forever. So, we have to make sure that when we’re talking about the financial plan, there isn’t that one dollar that potentially could be seen either directly or — and this is always the tricky one — perceptually as a conflict of interest or [a problem] that could compromise our editorial integrity.”
Despite the company’s inclement fortune, Daniels maintained a dry sense of humor throughout: “What I will say, having worked in some organizations where budgets were being cut, is that when you lose a certain percentage of your programming budget, it has a curious way of sharpening the mind…”
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