Letters to the Editor
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PBS - and pseudo science (and pseudo social science
I lost faith with PBS (and ceased to contribute) when they broadcast Susi Orman's "The Courage to be Rich." The current infomercial is not really any different.
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Commercialization of Public Television
I'd also like to ask why I keep seeing financial seminars on public TV , by people with a product to push. Why are these infomercials funded by taxpayer dollars? WLIW in New York seems an egregious example. Is this pushback against claims that public television is "too liberal"?
So they balance it with infomercials for shoddy fantasies? Sounds pretty Bush-era to me.
It seems a loosening of standards, to put it lightly, that public television is being used to push snake-oil to viewers. Its inherently a betrayal of what public television's (noble) mission is.
There's a thousand other channels for the hucksters to sell their wares.
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I agree with the above posters' concerns....
...and just wanted to add that I hope to see more articles in Salon about science and medicine, and their intersection with culture and society. It's a interesting topic, with lots to cover.
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Counter insurgency
In that conservatives have been meddling with PBS in the last few years, I wouldn't be surprised if this "programming" (infomercials) aren't a plot to undermine the funding of the stations. When PBS starts looking more and more like network TV with infomercials and car ads, the people will feel less inclined to support it or view it as a public trust.
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You just discovered this?
Gary Null, Wayne Dyer etc, etc, for reasons I cannot fathom public television has taken to fund raising by running shows by the most lame fads and fakes for the last few years. Their own fund raising appears to be the strongest possible argument against their continued existence.
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Not just alzheimer's
I believe this Amen guy is also a big ADHD quack as well.
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I gave up on the local PBS affiliate...
...when they started airing car commercials, corporate promos and other advertisements instead of the old "brought to you by" credits in between the incessant repeats of 30 year-old British sit-coms.
I watch Bill Moyers on the web now.
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I feel betrayed
I watched that show, and if I had seen it on any channel other than PBS I would have probably dismissed many of the claims, but since it was on PBS I actually went and bought the book. I trusted that they wouldn't put on something that was questionable without some kind of disclaimer. The bit about not being able to vet 60,000 hours of material is nonsense. The vast majority of their programming is material that is either produced in-house or acquired from sources that do not need vetting (such as the BBC). If they don't have the staff to check out the rest of the material, perhaps they shouldn't be putting it on the air. I pay for their material, and I feel very let down that I sat and watched an infomercial on their channel, and didn't even know it.
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Thank you Dr. Burton
This was a thorough article on a very popular snake-oil salesman. I have heard about Amen and his SPECT clinics for years now and assumed he must have some credibility (I also find the title of your book rather intriguing.)
I tend to think of the infomercial stuff on PBS as being a separate channel from the quality documentaries like Frontline that they show. It would be a shame if this stuff hurt the credibility of their other programming.
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It's PBS and CPB.
The Public Broadcasting System and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting produce and distribute these shows to be used during local stations' fundraising shows.
Since the local stations often do not have the resources to produce their own fundraising programs they must accept what is available to them.
It seems that they are scraping the bottom of the barrel by airing Amen's infomercial. This is too bad because it gives a bad name to a wonderful public television organization.
PBS should be held to account for this.
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The PBS fund-raising quandary
There's no doubt about it— it's a damned shame that PBS, that former beacon of responsible television broadcasting, has succumbed to airing the likes of Daniel Amen and Suze Orman, particularly during pledge drives.
That PBS does this is not necessarily an indication of falling standards on the part of its management, however. Successive "conservative" (read GOP) Administrations and Congresses have been trying to castrate PBS, NPR and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) ever since the Reagan administration. The tightening of the funding screws on CPB over the ensuing years has brought about previously unthinkable things such as "enhanced underwriting", which is merely a polite term for selling airtime in the commercial media market.
Another nasty little result of the GOP's meddling with the original intent of the CPB charter has been the redefinition of public support. By increasing the level of public support required to fund CPB (as measured by local affiliate pledge dollars), Congress (over the last eight years faithfully hewing to the Bush administration) has decreed that public broadcasting must abandon its heritage of fine programming presented in the public interest and instead compete with commercial broadcasting for viewers and dollars. This is antithetical to Congress's original intent for public broadcasting.
So, as commercial broadcasting panders during Sweeps Week, so must PBS pander during its pledge drives. Local affiliates choose their regular program lineup based both on what they can afford to buy from the network, and by what they believe will interest their viewership. During pledge week, however, all bets are off; local program directors must choose whatever "spectacular" programming they believe will pull in the most pledge dollars. It is the same concept that drives commercial broadcasters to use Sweeps Week to manipulate their Nielsen ratings, the golden numbers which are used to determine their advertising rates.
Vast right-wing conspiracy it may or may not be, but the net effect of changes to the CPB funding formula is that all of public broadcasting is now just as dependent upon audience numbers for survival as is the for-profit broadcasting industry. The crucial difference here is that in the commercial vein, the measure of audience acceptance and support requires only that a survey say that x number of viewers were tuned in, whether or not they were really watching. Conversely, Congress has determined that public support of public broadcasting be measured solely by the percentage of viewers and listeners who actually pony up cash (or credit card) to support their local PBS station.
So, if it seems that public broadcasting is no longer like Caesar's wife—beyond reproach—it is because the ground rules which enabled it to be beyond reproach in the first place have been fundamentally changed. It is Congress and the Bush administration who have forced Portia to become a whore in order to support herself.
(Incidentally, the CPB's "dole" from Congress amounts to just over $1—that's one dollar—per American citizen per year.)
Greater insight may be found at http://mediamatters.org/columns/200803180001