A nice argument by Bill Moyers in favour of public broadcasters, acknowledging complexity, public dialogue, measuring ourselves against high standards.
[quote=“Moyers - What Democracy Means”]We are often asked whether our kind of journalism matters. People are curious about why we give so much time to novelists, playwrights, artists, historians, philosophers, composers, scholars, teachers-all of whom we consider public thinkers. The answer is simple: They are worth listening to.
Some years ago I was invited to testify before a House of Representatives committee on funding of the arts and humanities. Opponents were making their skepticism felt toward PBS, the National Endowment of the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. I had been present at the creation of all three during my time in the White House with Lyndon Johnson, and now all three were once again in the crosshairs of conservatives like Ronald Reagan who were asking: "Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?" Reading Shakespeare, it was said, does not erase the budget deficit. Plunging into the history of the 15th century does not ease traffic jams. Listening to Mozart or reading the ancient Greeks does not repair the ozone layer.
[…]
Critics said these programs taught no one how to bake bread or build bridges. And they were right. Despite public television - not to mention symphony orchestras, municipal libraries, art museums, and public theaters - crime was still rampant, the divorce rate was soaring, corruption flourished, legislatures remained stubbornly profligate, corporations cooked their books, liberals were loose in the world doing the work of the devil, and you still couldn’t get a good meal on the Metro to Washington. Why persist, some members of Congress wanted to know, when there are so many more urgent needs to be met and so many practical problems to be solved?
I did not have a tried-and-true answer for members of the committee. I could not hand them a ledger showing that ideas have consequences. I chose instead to tell them what they could have learned if they had been listening to the people who appeared in our broadcasts.
[…]
They would have heard Peter Sellars, the iconoclastic director of Shakespeare in a swimming pool and Mozart in the Bronx, explain that he wants “to put our society up next to these great masterpieces. Are we thinking big enough? Are we generous of spirit? What does our society look like, next to the greatest things a human being ever uttered?”
[…]
They would have heard the philosopher Martha Nussbaum confess that in one sense there is no message or moral in the ancient Greek dramatists - “simply the revelation of life as seen through the sufferer.” But there is a value, she went on, in seeing “the complexity that’s there, and seeing it honestly, without flinching, and without reducing it to some excessively simple theory.” You begin then, she said, to realize that trying to wrest a good life from the world may lead to tragedy, but you still must try.
[…]
Some members of Congress got it. They realized that we were talking not only about how to improve our lives as individuals but how to nurture a flourishing democracy. Wouldn’t we have been likely to deal more effectively and quickly with pollution if we had thought about where we fit in the long sweep of the Earth’s story? Could we better tackle our spending priorities as a society if we were prepared to acknowledge and confront the pain of conflicting choices, which the ancient poets knew to be the incubus of agony and the crucible of wisdom? Might we better decide how to use our wealth and power if we have measured and tested ourselves against the greatest things a human being ever uttered? Are we not likely to be more wisely led by officials who have learned from history and literature that great nations die of too many lies?
[…]
We know who the enemies of democracy are. In his Jefferson Lecture the late Cleanth Brooks of Yale identified them as the “bastard muses” propaganda, which pleads, sometimes unscrupulously, for a special cause or issue at the expense of the total truth; sentimentality, which works up emotional responses unwarranted by, and in excess of, the occasion; and pornography, which focuses upon one powerful human drive at the expense of the total human personality. To counter the “bastard muses,” Brooks proposed cultivating the “true muses” of the moral imagination. Not only do these arm us to resist the little lies and fantasies of advertising, the official lies of power, and the ghoulish products of nightmarish minds, they open us to the lived experience of others - to the affirmations of a heightened consciousness - to empathy. So it is that when Lear cried out to Gloucester on the heath: “You see how this world goes…” Gloucester, who was blind, answered: “I see it feelingly.”
[…]
As I watch and listen to our public discourse today, it seems to me we are all “institutionalized” in one form or another, locked away in our separate realities, our parochial loyalties, our fixed ways of seeing ourselves and others. For democracy to prosper it requires us to escape those bonds and join what John Dewey called “a life of free and enriching communion” - to become “We, the People.” The late James W. Carey, one of our noted scholars of communication, wrote that the very concept of “public” could once be defined as “a group of strangers who gather to discuss the news.” In early America the printing press generated a body of popular knowledge. Towns were small, and taverns, inns, coffeehouses, street corners, and the public greens - the commons - were places where people gathered to discuss what they were reading. These places of public communication “provided the underlying social fabric of the town and, when the Revolution began, made it possible to quickly gather militia companies, to form effective committees of correspondence and of inspection, and to organize and to manage mass town meetings.”
The public was no fiction, Carey said. The public had no life, no social relationships, without news. The news was what activated conversation between strangers, and strangers were assumed to be capable of conversing about the news. In fact, the whole point of the press was not so much to disseminate fact as to assemble people. The press furnished materials for argument - "information," in the narrow sense - "but the value of the press was predicated on the existence of the public, not the reverse." The media's role was humble but serious, and that role was to take the public seriously.
[…][/quote]
