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I thought you might be interested in the article from the FAIR web site. The following article will be appended to your message: Public TV More Corporate, Less Public Than Ever A new study of news and public affairs programming on PBS stations has found that the voice of business is much louder than all others -- a troubling finding for a broadcast system established to "provide a voice for groups that may otherwise be unheard." Four years after Congressional leaders failed to "zero out" public TV, the study suggests that the cost of survival has been increasing commercialism, a persistent elite bias and the marginalization of many of the groups in society that the system was intended to serve. The independent academic study, "The Cost of Survival: Political Discourse and the 'New PBS,'" was conducted by Prof. William Hoynes of Vassar College. It examined all of the regular public affairs programming -- news, talk/interview, business and documentary -- during a two-week period between November 30 and December 13, 1998. The study analyzed a total of 75 separate programs, including 276 stories and 651 on-camera sources. It will be published this summer in Extra!, FAIR's magazine. Hoynes concludes: "Instead of wide-ranging discussions and debates, the kinds that might engage viewers as citizens, not simply as audiences, public television provides programs that are populated by the standard set of elite news sources. This insider orientation makes it hard to define what, outside of the one-hour length of the evening news and the documentary format, defines public television as innovative, independent or alternative." "The Cost of Survival" updates Hoynes' 1992 study, also released by FAIR (Aug. '93), which found that public TV relied on a narrow spectrum of sources and experts. This bias has become even more pronounced in recent years. Some key findings: To read the rest of the article, please click on the link below. http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1905 This article was published on Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting's Website (http://www.fair.org).

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