behind the news

Playing the Numbers

May 3, 2005

There are myriad obstacles — laziness, time constraints, or an inability to see the forest through the trees — that can blind reporters to the salient issue at hand in the story they’re working on.

We’ll never know the exact cause, but clearly that kind of myopia was at work yesterday when USA Today ran a story concerning public reaction to the latest episode of “indecency” in broadcasting.

First, some background: Back in January, in a staged publicity grab, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings publicly complained to PBS about an episode of “Postcards from Buster,” wherein a cartoon bunny visits Vermont and meets children in a family headed by two mothers. (At the time, Spellings had full knowledge that PBS had already decided to shelve the episode, making her complaint moot.) Bristling with post facto indignation, Spellings wrote that “many parents would not want their young children exposed to the lifestyles portrayed in this episode.”

Next — in an echo of the inflated indecency complaints the FCC received in 2003 and 2004 (of which the conservative Parents Television Council made up 99.8 percent and 99.9 percent, respectively) — USA Today reports that Spellings “received nearly 200,000 e-mails, letters and postcards” supporting her complaints about the episode. The response, the paper tells us, “rivals that of all indecency complaints filed with the Federal Communications Commission in 2003.”

We have to wait until later in the story before we’re finally told the source of those 197,610 missives: 157,537 of them came from one group, the conservative American Family Association (AFA). Rallying against Spellings’ comments and PBS’s censorship, the Human Rights Campaign, a gay-rights group, sent 36,233 responses. Another gay-rights group, we’re told, sent in an additional 1,000 complaints. That means that aside from these three groups, all of about 3,000 Americans cared enough to bother to weigh in. That’s barely enough warm bodies to fill up the bleachers at a college volleyball game.

Spellings’ comments accomplished two things. By elevating an in-house debate that had already been resolved into a public episode, she essentially put public broadcasting on notice that no dissenting viewpoints will be allowed. In addition, she alerted the AFA, which, obviously smelling blood in the water, quickly rallied the troops for a mass email campaign a la the Parents Television Council — thus giving Spellings’ viewpoints the sheen of broad public support.

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This kind of one-hand-washing-the-other goes on all the time in Washington. But that’s not the way you’ll read it in USA Today. Save for the brief mention of the AFA, the paper didn’t dwell on the issue of small interest groups attempting to influence public broadcasting and moved on instead to take a cursory look at PBS’s funding. Nor did it cite historical precedent for this kind of stunt.

And that’s too bad — because this is exactly the kind of once-over-lightly press coverage that fringe organizations have come to rely on as they inundate public agencies with supposedly spontaneous mailings attacking whatever is deemed to be the target of the moment.

–Paul McLeary

Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.