Guest Column

PBS — the Public Broadcasting Service — is an easy mark. Especially during the holiday season when Washington Beltway columnists face deadlines and come up short of ideas. The threat of war in the Persian Gulf, the savings-and-loan crisis, economic indicators predicting recession all must have seemed like shouting “Bah, Humbug” in the Christmas Eve issue of the popular weekly magazine Newsweek.

So, Mark Lewyn, who “writes on media and technology from Washington,” chose to take aim at a target closer to home — his own and homes throughout Maine and the nation as well. He chose to attack PBS and the federal funding which supplies approximately 17 percent of PTS’ budget. Predictably, Lewyn even worked in that wonderfully familiar Washington journalist’s cliche, “bloated bureaucracy.” (Having used it, he offers no proof that it does, indeed, exist in PBS offices.)

After reading the article, “My Turn: Is PBS Really Worth It?” (Newsweek, Dec. 24, 1990), my New Year’s wish for Mr. Lewyn is a single session with the professor of religion from whom I took several courses in college. The one with the red pen who reminded his students, in large letters scrawled across our research papers and exams, “Assertion is not proof!”

Among the several PBS-bashing assertions made by Mark Lewyn, there are two related ones that leap off the page when one lives in Maine, when one is in frequent contact with Maine people who watch public broadcasting.

The first one is this: “To most Americans, PBS means a comfortable world of Yuppies sipping Chardonnay and nibbling Brie while watching actors speak in plummy British tones.” And second: “… the fact of the matter is that PBS’ audience tends to be decidedly upscale.”

Like most such assertions, neither is entirely without basis. A great many people who fit that all-purpose code word “Yuppie” (one wonders if they aren’t weary of being so singularly and unattractively categorized — not to mention being limited in their choices of wine and cheese) do watch public television. And, yes, demographic studies do show that some contributors to public television belong to the “upscale” (another code word!) side of the economy

On the other hand, one wishes that those Washington folks who do the surveys and make the statements would, once in a while, visit the front lines. Spend a few days at a local public television station. A station not located in such centers of wisdom and culture as Washington D.C., New York City, Boston, Los Angeles. A public television station watched by people beyond the Beltways — people who pay taxes but live in small towns, small cities, rural countrysides and farms, coastal villages.

Visit a local public television network like Maine Public Broadcasting Network, which serves viewers throughout Maine and enjoys the company of contributing neighbors from the Maritime Provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.

MPBN would like to introduce its Washington visitors to the real PBS service. Mr. Lewyn and friends, meet:

The man behind the cash register at the Maine Mall who told me how much he loves British comedies and quoted favorite lines as I was paying my bill.

The waitress who served a delicious New Year’s Eve dinner of duck and Chinese vegetables at a Bangor-Orono area restaurant and talked to me about the PBS programs she enjoys — while skilfully handling hot platters and pots of tea.

The “twentysomething” woman behind the meat counter at a Bangor supermarket who asked, last September, what new programs were coming, as she packaged the special order of hamburger I’d asked for. When I described the new series on the Civil War series she wrote down the dates so she could be sure to tell her older brother who loved PBS programs, too.

My driver, a young man in his late teens in charge of chauffering customers who’d dropped off their cars for service at a Bangor car dealership. He’d watched “Great Performances” the night before and wanted to talk about it.

The woman who patiently waited her turn at a public reception in Halifax and then, speaking slowly and with careful enunciation, told me that after suffering from aphasia, she had taught herself to talk again by watching the children’s programs on MPBN.

But travel can be chancy during the winter up here in the Northeast. Perhaps we’d best have one big party for our Washington friends. Open the studio doors and send out invitations to:

The students at the Searsport Elementary School who for more than five years have been raising money for MPBN in a variety of ways — including shoveling snow, chopping wood, and singing Christmas concerts.

The Eastern Maine High School basketball tournament participants, their families and the townspeople who support them so vigorously — as they support MPBN when there’s a Feburary blizzard and the fans can’t get to the game in person but can cheer anyway as they wait in front of the television.

The audiences who not only can’t fly in and out of the nerest metropolitan city for opera, theater, music, they can’t always get to Bangor or Portland for live performances of the Bangor Symphony Orchestra, the Portland Symphony Orchestra or guest artists at the Maine Center for the Arts — so they turn on their television as MPBN broadcasts the event.

The more than 500 children who flocked to see Mr. McFeeley and the puppets from Fred Rogers’ “Neighborhood of Make Believe” a few years ago at MPBN’s open house.

All the viewers who enjoy uninterrupted news reporting, a crime solved by a clever detective, big band concerts, documentaries about the environment that frighten us even as they enlighten us, opera interrupted only at the discretion of the composer, state legislative hearings on gun control, how-to series on home repair or landscape painting.

Full house, you say? Of course. Mr. Lewyn could be shaking hands for hours. Perhaps days. PBS audiences are always friendly and talkative. They like to share programming ideas, make suggestions — even criticize. They may not all be able to become members but they do understrand that public broadcasting belongs to them. Not to commercial sponsors.

It’s easier for those of us on the front lines — and in front of the camera asking for membership support — to meet the public television audience. We’re recognized when we go to the supermarket. Which makes us the fortunate ones — the ones who get to talk with real television viewers who care about the programs they watch. It’s one of the greatest job benefits imaginable. So, I sympathize with Mark Lewyn and all those like him who simply don’t understand what public broadcasting and public broadcasting audiences are all about.

But the invitation to visit MPBN stands. Come, not in summer when sun and sea sparkle, but in winter when the days are dark and cold. Visit a day-care center where the kids are watching “Sesame Street.” Watch the Jonesport-Beals basketball team in the Class D finals with the snowbound grandparents of one of the players. Answer the telephone the day after an ice storm has downed power lines just as the murderer is unmasked on “Mystery!”

If you haven’t, by that time, found the answer to “Is PBS Really Worth it?” then I wish you a long winter of nothing but Arts and Entertainment where the commercial interruptions come faster, more frequently and of longer duration as the movie approaches its climax. (A lot of us here in Maine can’t get cable, actually, but we’ll find you a spot that does.) The rest of us will do what we like best. Watch PBS. Happy New Year!

Mary Lou Colbath is public information manager with the Maine Public Broadcasting Network.