An untold number of people received anonymous letters in recent days that arrived in official-looking Arkansas PBS stationary, but that carried a message far different from the company line about why Arkansas PBS is rebranding to Arkansas TV.
The new iteration of public television in Arkansas will be a homegrown effort. Starting soon, the lineup will include mostly locally produced content, a vast departure from the “Nova”-“Antiques Road Show”-“Masterpiece Theatre” menu many of us know and love.
Carlton Wing, a Republican legislator who took the helm of Arkansas PBS last fall, said in December that the wholesale revamp is unavoidable. Without the roughly $2.5 million in annual federal funding recently cut off by the Donald Trump administration, the budget numbers no longer work out to be able to purchase the national PBS programming package, he told the Arkansas PBS commission in December. The commission voted 6-2 to take Wing’s word for it and sever ties with PBS, becoming the first — and so far only — state to do so.
That’s a load of bull, according to Publius here. The anonymous letter writer, whose access to PBS-branded envelopes suggests he or she might be sounding the alarm from inside the house, says the loss of federal funding is just pretext. The shift to a locally produced lineup of mostly cooking and outdoor shows comes under ongoing pressure from conservative state lawmakers’ longstanding campaign to hide away any content more sophisticated in thought and viewpoint than “VeggieTales” and “The 700 Club.”
The anonymous Publius of Arkansas PBS makes a number of worthy points in the mysterious letter, which was shared over the weekend with the Arkansas Times. The abrupt resignation of former Arkansas PBS CEO Courtney Pledger, which came amid a particularly frenetic onslaught from state Sen. “Book Ban Dan” Sullivan (R-Jonesboro) to defund PBS access in the state, has never been explained, according to the letter writer.
Reporting by Julian Wyllie in Current, a trade publication for public media, lends some credence to the skulduggery hypothesis. Wyllie shared part of a letter 14-year Arkansas public television commission veteran Annette Herrington sent to Wing in the week after the surprise vote to sever ties with PBS. Herrington was a “No” vote on the switch.
Herrington noted that 78% of Arkansans polled in June supported the national programming lineup. “Viewers and donors definitely deserve our best efforts to find a solution for the people we serve,” Herrington wrote. “With all of that, I cannot understand how the only option presented after your first 70 days was to deny PBS content to all Arkansans.”
If you’re interested in accusations of dishonesty and shady quid pro quos among the people shaping public television in Arkansas, here’s some titillating reading for you:
