The Second Battle of PBS Leads to the Same Conclusion

By Kurt Holden

The first and second battles of Manassas were fought by the same forces over the same fields a year apart. The Confederates won both battles, and the Yankees eventually won the war. Thus it was with the first and second battles of PBS and the Palestinians.

Of all the national television networks, PBS has been most timid about the Palestinian-Israeli dispute. Conventional wisdom on its board of directors had it that its funding—individual, corporate and institutional—would dry up instantly if the network were perceived by the American Jewish community as earnestly striving to be even-handed.

When former McNeil-Lehrer News Hour producer Jo Franklin-Trout obtained a PBS commitment to show her one-and-a-half hour film "Days of Rage: The Young Palestinians," a storm predictably broke over WNYC, the PBS station that had made the commitment. PBS had earlier carried a three-hour Franklin-Trout film on Saudi Arabia which received a rave reception and was repeated, and a similar but more hastily produced film on the Arab states of the Gulf, called "The Oil Kingdoms." A film on the Palestinians was something else, however. It was on and it was off, twice, with loss of the original sponsoring station, and subsequent infighting within both PBS national network headquarters in Northern Virginia and WNET, the New York PBS station that stepped in and kept the commitment to show it alive.

When the film finally was shown, last Sept. 6. almost two years after it was filmed and more than a year after it was finished, there was a one-hour "wraparound" discussion almost as long as the film itself to "provide balance." PBS stations were besieged with phone calls. According to some of the national Jewish press, they were from viewers vowing never again to donate to PBS. According to the stations themselves, they were from the general public. Most callers loved the film, but hated the wraparound. Some made first-time donations.

There was another PBS resignation and charges, orchestrated in some US Jewish weeklies, that Franklin-Trout's film, shot on a total budget of $180,000, was partially "Arab-funded." The "evidence" was that the Arab American Cultural Foundation in Georgetown wanted to market to individual viewers videotapes of the completed film after its showing on PBS.

No one mentioned that, as the wife of a wealthy Georgetown surgeon and a veteran producer with many television credits who is now working on a film about America's space program, Franklin-Trout has probably never had to skip lunches in order to raise funds for one-and-a-half hour films she can bring in at less than $200,000. That's about what commercial networks spend on sending an anchorman and crew to cover a two-day meeting in the Kremlin.

One person who vowed not to get mad, but instead to get even, was the Israeli Consul General in New York, Uriel Savir. He allegedly found five wealthy American Jewish businessmen to finance an American producer to go document the Israeli point of view on the intifada. "A Search for Solid Ground: The Intifada Through Israeli Eyes," was conceived, commissioned, filmed, scheduled and shown on the PBS network in early January, just four months after "Days of Rage."

It had such smooth sailing because there was no Arab-American community hand wringing over whether or not the film commissioned by the Israeli Consul General was really funded by Americans or the Israeli government. Though no one insisted on it, the sponsoring PBS station commissioned Hodding Carter Jr., who did the first "wraparound," to moderate another. This one, only 30 minutes long, provided a smooth and focussed discussion with Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said, former Beirut correspondent Helena Cobban, and pro-Israel man-about-the-networks Daniel Pipes, Jr.

With both films about the same in production quality, and each a fair statement of how the intifada looks to mainstream opinion on the side portrayed, there wasn't much media reaction at all. This time, the many fewer callers to PBS stations were at least as favorably impressed by the wraparound as by the film. Like callers about the earlier film, however, many viewers felt demeaned by the network's insistence on preparing "wrap-arounds" at all. Americans, they maintained, can make up their own minds without help from "experts" in New York and Washington.

To indulge in some of the same sweeping generalities that characterized media discussion of the Franklin-Trout film, the contrast between the attitudes of the organized Jewish-American and Arab-American communities was jarring. Only the Arab Americans seemed to understand that the First Amendment to the US Constitution gives even the humblest of their fellow citizens the right to hear both sides and make up their own minds.

Ironically, like the two battles of Manassas, the two films started with two different versions of history and two different views of who was right and who was wrong. Open minded viewers who followed the films on their two separate journeys through the same harsh and bloody physical terrain, however, would be forced to the same conclusions:

Israeli troops will never regain control of the 1,800,000 inhabitants of the Israeli occupied West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinians will, sooner or later, have their state. And only when they do will Israelis have any security on their own side of the green line.

Thanks, PBS. America needed that.

Everything's Not Up-to-Date in Kansas City

The sharp pen of Pat Oliphant, whose cartoons are distributed to 430 newspapers in the United States, regularly skewers hypocrisy.

The Kansas City Star printed on Jan. 23 the cartoon we've run on page 11, and the same day its telephones started to ring. Callers charged the newspaper with perpetuating an unfavorable Jewish stereotype and misrepresenting the attitude of Israel. "People are upset," executive director David Goldstein of the Jewish Community Relations Bureau of Greater Kansas City told the Star, and the rest of the local media.

A stunned Star editorial page editor, James Scott, said he was "in a hurry" when he put the page together and the stereotype "didn't register" on him.

"It looks like the Nazi stereotype of Jews," he said. "I regret running it." He added that the Star would publish reader letters commenting on the cartoon, but not an apology. He declined to comment on whether or not the cartoon misrepresented Israel's attitude.

One of Scott's comments may have pleased the local Jewish community council, but must have puzzled his journalist colleagues and many of his readers.

"It's the most vicious, insidious thing I've ever seen in a newspaper of general circulation in the United States," Scott told the Kansas City Jewish Chronicle.

Apparently, however, he hasn't been paying much attention to coverage of Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian independence movement, and the Arabs in general in many newspapers "of general circulation in the United States."

Kurt Holden is an author and film maker from California who divides his time between the US and the Middle East.