PBS has been getting a lot of attention for a snarky new 50th anniversary fundraising campaign based from WNET, its New York affiliate, around parody billboards for reality television ads that basically make the argument that it’s horrible and disgusting that a lot of Americans watch stupid reality television programming, and so why don’t you give us all the money instead?

It strikes me that there are two problems with this approach. In order to fulfill its two missions, PBS has to do two things: raise money to put programming on the airwaves, and attract people to watch that programming to demonstrate that their efforts are useful and worthwhile. This campaign is entirely aimed at the first goal, potentially at the expense of the latter. The campaign is perfectly aimed at stoking the contempt of the kind of people who despise reality television, and who perhaps don’t watch much TV, even and including PBS, at all. But if you do watch reality television, either in a way that’s serious or half-amused, these PBS ads tell you that you should be ashamed of your viewing habits, while giving you precisely zero information about what kinds of alternatives they have to offer you, and why they’re great. Watching Storage Wars does not legally preclude someone from liking Sherlock.

In terms of establishing its independent brand, PBS should absolutely adore the state of television right now. The reality glut may be irritating to donors who would like to see American tastes turn towards something more high-minded. But the fact that not everyone is going into the business of prestige family soaps and British imports actually makes it vastly easier for PBS to distinguish itself, find large audiences for programming like Downton Abbey, and prove to private donors, foundations, and the U.S. government that it’s meeting needs that no other channel has bothered to try to fulfill, along with providing access to things like high-quality children’s programming in areas where it might not otherwise be financially viable. If I were PBS president and CEO Paula Kerger, in fact, I would be slipping unmarked bills in plain envelopes under the table to Animal Planet to keep producing things like Mermaids: The New Evidence, trust that people who are disgusted by such things will arrive at a state of high dudgeon all by their own selves, and then use my advertising budget to put a lot of .GIFs of the Dowager Countess being awesome or clips of Ken Burns being eloquent on video advertising slots all over the place. PBS’s core product is frequently fantastic, and it would do both the organization and viewers a lot of good to advertise it that way, rather than treating it like spinach that should be supported out of the goodness of our hearts because the rest of America is so darn stupid.

In this week’s New Yorker, Jane Mayer, who has covered the industrialists Charles and David Koch extensively, chronicles the fate of two documentaries produced for PBS, Alex Gibney’s Park Avenue, which explored the lives of both wealthy residents of a single building on one end of the street and poorer New Yorkers at the other, and Citizen Koch, which examined the consequences of the Citizens United decision. Both movies ran into trouble for the same reason: fear of offending David Koch, who has been a major public television donor, and was until recently on the board of New York public television affiliate WNET. While Park Avenue eventually made it to air on PBS, albeit with a recut introduction and a discussion afterwards that excluded Gibney, Citizen Koch, which was initially supposed to be part of the Independent Lens series, ended up off the lineup. Whether or not David Koch was involved, Mayer’s story would still be interesting as an illustration of what happens when two different philanthropic models bump up against each other.

On one side are the foundations. Gibney’s documentary, Mayer reported, “had been produced independently, in part with support from the Gates Foundation.” And both Park Avenue and Citizen Koch were projects of the Independent Television Service, “the small arm of public television that funds and distributes independent films…ITVS, which is based in San Francisco and was founded some twenty years ago by independent filmmakers, prides itself on its resistance to outside pressure. Its mandate is to showcase opinionated filmmakers who ‘take creative risks, advance issues and represent points of view not usually seen on public or commercial television.’” These foundations represent a mission rather than a personal interest, and that mission is to create space and provide support for a range of ideas, rather than to advance particular arguments or worldviews. It’s a critically important role to fill, but it also means that those organizations have some disadvantages when they come up against the other funding model at stake here, in this case, the support of private donors.

As Mayer explains, in addition to his donations to Lincoln Center—where the David H. Koch Theater, home of the New York City Ballet, bears his name—” In the nineteen-eighties, he began expanding his charitable contributions to the media, donating twenty-three million dollars to public television over the years. In 1997, he began serving as a trustee of Boston’s public-broadcasting operation, WGBH, and in 2006 he joined the board of New York’s public-television outlet, WNET.” Unlike ITVS, for example, which is designed specifically to produce content for public television, there are a lot of places David Koch can spend his money. And unlike ITVS, which has an ongoing mission of making sure that new points of view make it onto public television, a setup that means it’s going to have to expend political capital on behalf of its filmmakers on a regular basis, private donors like Koch are more likely to concentrate their leverage on a few issues, or a few pieces of content. If Koch can make a “seven-figure donation,” which Mayer reported he had planned to give to WNET before he resigned from the board, contingent on two hours of programming, while ITVS has to fight for many films—PBS has already aired 15 movies through ITVS’ Independent Lens program in 2013—ITVS is understandably going to be at a disadvantage, as is the Gates Foundation, which may be all too happy to fund a single film, but doesn’t necessarily want to be in the postion to cover a multi-million dollar hole.
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At 9PM tonight, PBS will air Central Park Five, co-directed by Ken Burns and his daughter Sarah Burns. An adaptation of Sarah Burns’ book The Central Park Five: The Untold Story Behind One of New York City’s Most Infamous Crimes, Central Park Five is a searing examination of the 1989 sexual assault on Trisha Meili, a crime for which five young men, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Kharey Wise and Yusef Salaam were convicted after coercive interrogations and wrongfully imprisoned. Though their convictions were vacated in 2002 after Matias Reyes confessed to the attack on Meili, a civil suit filed by a number of the men in 2003 is still pending, the district attorney in the case, Elizabeth Lederer, still works for the city of New York, and the city attempted to subpoena outtakes and additional footage from the Burns’ film, an effort that was just recently blocked by a judge.

I spoke at length with Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and Raymond Santana, one of the Central Park Five, in Pasadena in January. We discussed the role of the media in the case, the impact of courtroom sketches, and why Lederer, who the Burns’ believe had grave doubts about the prosecution, has never spoken about her involvement in the case. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I think the movie is tremendous, and it’s wonderful to have all of you here. I wanted to start out by asking, one of the things that really struck me about the documentary that I’m not sure is completely explicit, but that really came across to me, was that New York in this time was a place that was not really safe for women or for young men of color, and this was a case that ended up pitting these two populations that were being poorly served against each other. I wasn’t sure if that was something you wanted to pull out explicitly or that was more interesting to have as an implicit thread.

Ken Burns: We took a lot, we made a lot of narrative decisions that were at least superficially different than other movies that we’d made, so in fact we were trusting that a lot of things would have to remain implicit and not explicit. Explicit could be explicated by narrative. And in this case what we felt would just contain as much of the story as possible, filled with all of its excruciating paradoxes and contradictions. Not the least of it is that. I think that’s a really good point, that the most vulnerable are in some ways the symbolic antagonists in this invented drama.

Sarah Burns: I think Craig Steven Wilder does a good job of giving you at least some sense of that, of the vulnerability of minority teenaged boys especially, as the people who were most likely to be victims of the crime that people were seeing and were concerned about. And that was something that was forgotten. That’s sort of an important thing to understand, both that that was happening, and the way the media was covering not only this case but the time in general was such that we were seeing those people who were most likely to be victims as the source of our problems and not the victims of them.
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Last night, PBS aired Makers, a documentary about the history of the feminist movement, exploring everything from the relationship between women’s liberation and the struggles for black and gay civil rights to the rise of the eighties power tie as women entered previously male-dominated professional fields. While some of the subjects may be familiar to those of us who ended up in women’s studies classes at some point, Makers is a reminder of how much feminist history has been forgotten or obscured over the years, starting with the rumors of bra-burning at the Miss America protests. Because part of the goal of Makers was to spark discussions about the state of feminism today, I spoke with one of the subjects whose work is of particular interest to anyone who cares about the portrayal and employment of women in popular culture: Marlo Thomas.

As the star of the groundbreaking sitcom That Girl, Thomas fought to preserve the integrity of the show’s portrayal of a single woman’s life—and to hire more female writers. And as the creator of Free To Be You And Me, the book, album, and television special for children that challenged pre-existing notions of gender norms, Thomas fought to give children entertainment that would change the way they saw their possible futures. We spoke during the Television Critics Association press tour in January about the evolution of sitcom roles for women, Brave and princess myths, and the struggles women—and men—face to have it all. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I’m excited to talk to you in part because my first job as a critic was when I was eight years old for my local paper—I wrote children’s books.

You were a critic at eight years old? How cute!

I was, my author photo has me in little pink glasses and the world’s largest lace collar. I was proof that women, even at eight years old, aren’t paid enough. I was paid in five-dollar gift certificates to the local bookstore. So I was really curious to talk to you because Free To Be You And Me was inspired by the lack of good books for boys and girls alike. What do you think about the rise of young adult fiction? It seems to me that there are many more options for young female readers today. Have we made enough progress if what young girls get offered is Twilight?

Well, you know, far be it for me to tell people what to write. I must say that after we did Free To Be You And Me, and its phenomenal success, and its continued success, I’m surprised that more and more people aren’t writing about that. I saw the movie Brave, which is taken right from Atalanta [a princess story from Free To Be You And Me], which is exciting to me. And I just wish more people would follow, not just follow the path, but find the path to children’s imaginations that is going to open up their horizons and their minds. It just seems that—my husband has two grandchildren, they’re now 16 and 17, the girl is 16—and I’ve noticed with her stuff, it’s all princesses, and the boy’s stuff is all violence. All violent games from the GameBoy on up. And I look at it, and I try very hard to bring other things in, but that’s what all their friends are reading, and watching, and playing. I’m disappointed, I really am. Somebody, some book company has to make it their job, or part of their imprint, part of their conscientiousness to say “Why aren’t we putting out books that do this?” The Free To Be You And Me classic, when it came ou,t there was nothing like it. We’ve already paved the way. Why doesn’t someone pick it up? I can’t do it all.

I think you’re describing two different challenges. It’s hard to ask individuals to take on all the work for anyone else. And you mentioned the persistence of the pricness myth. I felt conflicted about Brave. I like that she’s a different kind of princess, but the victory at the end is that she gets to choose her own husband, who will still be dyanstically important. A princess is still a princess.

Right. But it’s just that she was athletic, and she ran, and she took some action. That’s a big difference from the other princess, from Cinderella. But it’s true. In our princess story, Atlanta at the end decides not to marry, and go off to explore lands. We were feminists writing that. I don’t know that the people from Brave got our whole message, though they took a lot of it…I don’t know, it’s sort of a surrendering to a happy ending, or what you consider to be a happy ending. When I was doing That Girl, they wanted me to have a wedding at the end of the series. And I refused. I refused to have a wedding, to have her get married at the end of the show. And they said “It’ll be great! It’ll get huge ratings.” And I said, “But then I’m copping out to every girl who loved this show…This was the first girl to say “I don’t want to get married, I want to work. I want to have a career. I want to live in my own apartment.” All of those things. And the mail was extraordinary about girls wanting to be just like her, and grandmothers saying “Don’t marry Donald!” They really were very invested in this single girl. The idea of betraying them at the end of the show and getting married just seemed like a true betrayal. I wouldn’t do it. Even that, Clairol was the sponsor, and they wanted a wedding, and ABC wanted a wedding, the producers wanted a wedding. It took a feminist to say “No, no wedding!”
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On November 18 and 19 at 8 PM, PBS will be airing the next documentary from Ken Burns, The Dust Bowl. The two-part series is shattering account of the real estate boom and beliefs about climate change that lead homesteaders to destroy Midwestern sod, and the drought that turned that soil into dust storms resulting in a devastating, years-long environmental catastrophe. Burns and his producer Dayton Duncan were able to track down children who lived through the Dust Bowl, never-before-seen photographs and home movies of dust storms, and to weave them together with historians’ testimony to explain how the Dust Bowl influenced everything from American environmental science to women’s abilities to live up to their gender roles in a place where it was impossible to keep homes clean and children safe.

In July, I had a long conversation with Burns and Duncan about the research that made The Dust Bowl possible, why they relied on first-hand accounts rather than scientists to help advance our understanding of climate change, why art can be a better vehicle for communicating difficult ideas than journalism, and the role of government in American life. This interview has been edited for clarity.

I actually want to start out by asking you what attracted you to the material in the first place. Watching both parts of the documentary I was really struck by the parallels between our present situation and the regulation that leads to businesses encouraging people to overreach, and then the reluctance to contract with the American dream.

Burns: Well first of all, I should say my interest is born in my best friend’s interest, Dayton Duncan, who has been talking about this for more than 20 years as a subject. It’s something that comes down to me sort of with a kind of shorthand, the conventional wisdom that suggests just the most superficial of associations. So for us it’s always the ability to dive deep into a subject and find a human and intimate dimension to it that belies those conventional wisdoms and supplants them with something that’s more enduring and more, I think, impressive in a way.

Now, the thing we’ve discovered in every film we do is the way in which it always mirrors the contemporary. Whether it’s the Civil War or our most recent film on prohibition, they seem to be what Ecclesiastes said, that there’s nothing new under the sun – that they mirror political tendencies, economic tendencies, human foibles, human strengths –

For everything there is a season except the seasons come over and over again.

Burns: Exactly. They do indeed, and they tend to repeat themselves. I’m not a firm believer so much in that, as I am in the sense that human nature remains the same. And so what we watch in creatures is the same mixture of greed and generosity, the same degree of sort of mean spiritedness and courage. So all of these things are in play if you’re willing to, as public television allows us, dive deeper into a subject than the sort of dramatic, superficial retelling. We keep the drama, but we dive down deep.

And so in this case, we have an oral history of more than two dozen individuals—children—who survived the devastation of their parents’ farms, and their lives and sometimes even the lives of their siblings. This is an amazing story, and I think without pointing neon arrows at it, it can’t help but remind us. It’s not just ripped from today’s headline, about a a severe drought that’s afflicting a good deal of the country, but in all the intricacies of that political and economic … political and economic dimensions you brought up in your excellent question.

Well, one of the things I thought was fascinating – and I didn’t realize it until after I’d seen the movie – is that you put out an appeal for people to send photographs and films.

Burns: We had just finished a film about the Second World War, and we had been dealing with people at the very end of their lives…We were quite anxious that we had maybe missed it. And then I recorded some appeals that were played in the local stations in the area of “no man’s land,” in Colorado, Texas, and Kansas, and Colorado and New Mexico, and also the Central Valley in California that permitted us to at least use the resources of this extraordinary grassroots, bottom-up network to sort of reach out to people. And then our co-producer, Julie Dunfee, and another researcher, Susan Shumaker, went down on the ground and spent the shoe leather necessary to find the people to talk to them, to see if they were viable, to visit nursing homes. And what we realized is that we would be able to recreate the Dust Bowl through the memories of children and teenagers. Their parents are long gone, but their memories are as vivid and as accurate and as, in some ways, compelling, as ever because they were children watching this apocalyptic ten year period happen around them.

Did you get much in the way of photographs or actual video footage from them directly?

Duncan: Well, you know, central to the research was the PBS network and Ken’s appeal on that. And it’s surprising, he’d say “Send your stories or things to this station – not to us.” And then they would willow through it and send us the things. Cal Crabill, [one of the documentary's subjects], that’s how we found out about him. He saw it on a station in California and decided to write, and tell us about his story…Because it took place in the 30s in a relatively poor and sparsely populated part of the country we have a couple of home movies that are in the film. We have a lot of footage that was taken by newsreel companies once the catastrophe was becoming more self-evident. But we’ve got lots of photographs in the film and in our companion book that have never been published before – that people brought to us, and also from the historical societies that might have them in these folders. A couple of the ones of the storm descending on the town of Elkhart, Kansas, one of it descending over Hooker, Oklahoma, nobody’s ever seen those before.

So we were really pleased at the amount of material to add to the things that are already available, though took some searching from the FSA photographers, Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein and others. So we had a great amount of terrific visual material to choose from. We had about 6,000 photographs that we collected-

Burns: Which is surprising.

Duncan: -and we used about 400.
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Downton Abbey‘s been a tremendous hit for Masterpiece on PBS, and the public broadcaster is responding by importing another period British drama. Call the Midwife, which follows the adventures of a group of young midwives working with Anglican nuns in the exceedingly poor Poplar neighborhood in London’s East End, has been a giant hit in the UK, where its ratings beat out Downton Abbey. It’s a show about what it means for young women who aren’t yet having their own families, and who received their training in modernized hospitals, to deliver the babies of women who have much more experience in the ways of childbirth than their midwives do, and to do so in environments of extreme poverty because their patients mistrusted hospital care.

But it’s also a story about what it meant to be able to provide serious, personalized care for the first time in the immediate aftermath of the implementation of the National Health Service. Midwives made house calls, returned multiple times a day to check on the condition of frail infants, and would keep coming back as long as they were needed. Jessica Raine, who stars in Call the Midwife as a young nurse named Jenny Lee, told me:

The program really champions the NHS because it was very new. It had only just come about. And it’s difficult to imagine England without the NHS, but they didn’t have one. It was a really exciting new thing that the pooor in East London were really benefitting from, and they had not experienced it before. It champioins nurses, it champions people going out in the streetts, which I personally am really proud of becasue I don’t think people in that industry, they’re not celebrated. I love that midwifery has come to the forefront because it’s such an undocumented profession. You get to go into family’s houses, you get home visits, and every sitaution is different.

Call the Midwife is one of the rare cases of fifties or sixties nostalgia where it makes actual sense to want to bring back some elements of that period. There’s no reason to wish for the days of requiring women to have enemas and shave their pubic hair before going into labor, of course, but with serious cuts to National Health staffing underway, there’s something powerful about the dream of extremely personalized care and home support for new parents. The changes to American health care under the Affordable Care Act are just getting started, of course. But Call the Midwife is a reminder both that expanding access to care dramatically changes the lives of people who benefit from it, and requires both the medical professionals who treat them and the patients themselves to make cultural adjustments. It’s the stuff of both great drama, and of better health.

The New York Times reports that, in the first year that National Endowment for the Arts’ Arts in Media grants were open to gaming and web-based projects, those projects ended up winning funding ahead of established PBS programs:

Among the PBS programs receiving significantly less funding are “Live from Lincoln Center,” which was granted $100,000 last year and nothing this year. The Metropolitan Opera received $50,000 to support its national “Great Performances at the Met” telecasts, $100,000 less than last year. WNET received $50,000 to support other “”Great Performances” productions and the same amount for “American Masters,” compared to $400,000 for each last year.

“The PBS NewsHour” will receive $50,000, half that of 2011, for arts segments; independent documentary series “Independent Lens” will get $50,000, down from $170,000, and documentary series “POV” will receive $100,000, down from $250,000.

WNET, however, did receive $75,000 towards production of a new series, “The Electric Animation Festival,” and its companion Web site, and PBS received $50,000 to support the creation of mobile apps for its arts initiative. A number of other individual documentary films and smaller programs also received funds, as in years past, as did NPR, and numerous public radio productions.

Opening up the grants to more kinds of media projects makes a great deal of strategic sense for the NEA: it lets the organization meet arts consumers where they’re at, makes the organization look forward-thinking in supporting projects that might not garner support or be treated like priorities within their industries but still have important potential, and frankly, it also gives the NEA bases of support in industries that might previously have been indifferent to the organization, or the cause of public funding for the arts. But it does raise a fundamentally tricky question for the NEA in the future. How much of the organization’s work should focus on keeping alive high culture that has wealthy patrons but trouble attracting a new generation of mass-market attendees? And how much should it focus on driving the culture of the future? Obviously these priorities aren’t mutually exclusive, but they are competing for resources, and I do wonder how the mix is going to shake out.