What does it mean that the draft memo to halt federal funding for PBS and NPR leaked on a Friday afternoon, and the only person I know who seemed surprised was the woman pouring my wine?
I was in Cleveland Park last weekend at a dinner I did not particularly want to attend. Eliza had assembled what she calls her “thinking table” — a former undersecretary, two journalists who no longer file, a bipartisan lobbyist whose practice I will describe only as “adjacent to broadband,” and my sister-in-law Judy, who has worked at the National Archives long enough to know which silences mean what. The draft had been public for ninety minutes. Nobody mentioned it until the second course.
When somebody finally did, it was the lobbyist, and he raised it the way one raises a parking ticket. He said the funding question had been “on the table for years” and that “the institutional case was always weaker than the brand case.” He said “brand case.” About Frontline. About All Things Considered. About the only newsroom in three counties of West Virginia my sister-in-law’s husband can still get on the radio in his truck.
Eliza nodded the way she nods when she has decided not to argue. The undersecretary said the public-media model was, and I am quoting, “a Cold War artifact.” One of the no-longer-filing journalists said something about audience capture. Judy looked at her plate.
I said: a country that builds something for sixty years and then dismantles it on a Friday afternoon, with a draft memo, with no hearing, with the lobbyist for the people who would inherit the spectrum sitting at this very table — that country is telling on itself. I said it lightly. I am told I always say it lightly.
“Margaret, please,” Eliza said, in the voice she uses for both political opinions and undercooked fish.
Here is what I keep coming back to. The plan is not radical. The plan is a paragraph. It will be defended in op-eds by people who once sat on the boards of these stations, who once thanked them in book acknowledgments, who once accepted their awards in rented tuxedos. The defense will be that public broadcasting has “lost its way.” The defense will be that the market has matured. The defense will be that nobody under forty listens to the radio anyway, which is the kind of sentence one says about a thing one is preparing to throw out.
I am not making the case that Sesame Street is the last thread of the republic. I am making the case that we keep getting these memos on Fridays, and we keep absorbing them by Monday, and the lobbyist keeps explaining the brand case over the cheese, and the undersecretary keeps calling things artifacts, and the table keeps agreeing because disagreement has become a kind of bad manners. There is a word for a polity that has decided manners are more important than memory. The word is not flattering and I will let you find it.
Judy walked me to my car. She has the carriage of a woman who spends her professional life cataloguing what other people decide to throw away. She said, very quietly, that the Archives had received an unusual number of calls this week from station managers asking what their broadcast tapes from the seventies were technically owed. She said it the way you say a thing you are not sure you should be saying. Then she hugged me and went back inside, where the lobbyist was, I am told, examining his cufflink.
The memo will move. It will be softened, then hardened, then softened again, and somewhere in March a version of it will pass on a procedural vote nobody covers because Congress will be doing six other things that day. And at some dinner in some house in some neighborhood that calls itself thoughtful, a man in a good jacket will call it overdue. And the rest of the table will pass the bread.