Critic Cites Need For Funding Public TV

The battle over Big Bird is being joined by a Big Aussie.

As Congress moves to slice funding for public broadcasting, the Feb. 16 New York Review of Books offers a persuasive call for increased funding from Robert Hughes, the Time magazine critic and major figure in the art world.

Hughes’ urging is based far less on a claim of public television’s ringing success than on the impressive legacy of other government-funded broadcasters, including the British Broadcasting Corp. and his belief that commercial TV has ill served us.

“Commercial TV teaches people to scorn complexity and to feel, not think. It has come to present society as a pagan circus of freaks, pseudoheroes and wild morons. It helps immeasurably to worsen the defects of American public education and of tabloid news in print.”

The Australian native argues that the history of commercial TV “proves beyond doubt that mass communications should not be left entirely to market forces.” We need television, he concludes, “that addresses Americans as citizens, not just as consumers; as students, not as spectators.”

Quickly

“Why We Dropped the Bomb,” in January-February Civilization, a good new entry from the Library of Congress, is timely, given the Smithsonian Institution’s decision Monday to cancel a planned exhibit on the end of the war against Japan.

The article underscores that, the dogmatic views of many veterans groups aside, scholarly debate over the need to drop the bomb is inconclusive, with the number of American lives saved surely far less than what President Harry Truman contended.

Yes, there are card-carrying liberals who don’t feel sold out by Bill Clinton, as the winter issue of the American Prospect quarterly underscores in Richard Rothstein’s somewhat strained “Friends of Bill? Why Liberals Should Let Up on Clinton.” Rothstein, an analyst with the Economic Policy Institute, chides his philosophical allies for not sharing with Clinton “the burden of morally ambiguous compromise” and cites 55 “good deeds” by Clinton ($7.95, P.O. Box 383080, Cambridge, Mass., 02238).

Base closings need not be devastating, suggests the Feb. 6 Business Week, as it chronicles the resiliency of tiny Rantoul, Ill., which suffered the closing of a huge Air Force technical training center in 1988, losing 6,000 military and civilian jobs, but which has lured 20 companies and added 1,000 new jobs “in a more diversified market.”

The Feb. 13 Forbes is a bit screechy on the “National Extortion Association,” its name for the nation’s largest union, the National Education Association, calling it a “creature of the dark Democratic night - the shadow that labor union special interests have cast over state and federal governments.”