When Chronic Uncertainty Makes for Uncertain Chronicles: A Case Study on PBS Independent Documentaries and their Storytelling on Latinx Migration to the US

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

In the United States, public service broadcasting has been chronically plagued by “financial insecurity, political intimidation, and corporate seduction” (Starr, 2002, p. 44). In comparison to elsewhere, public broadcasting been a marginal phenomenon in the United States because proponents in other nations were able to establish their systems before commercial broadcasters had achieved dominance over the airwaves (McChesney, 2004, pp. 243–244). From its early beginnings, public service broadcasting in the US has had to depend on meager federal funding, on the one hand, and unpredictable donations from subscribers and underwriters, on the other. The uncertainty that has come to characterize public media reached its peak when the US Telecommunications Act of 1996 allowed for the deregulation of the telecommunications market. The Act essentially equated the public interest with the public’s interest and purported that increasing the number of television channels by eliminating the limits on the number of broadcasting stations any one corporation could own would increase the diversity of offerings (cf. Fowler \\& Brenner, 1981, pp. 3–4). In reality, the Act forced public broadcasting to become more commercialized in order to be able to compete with the ever-expanding commercial television market (Cook, 2016, p. 93). From that point on, public television executives had no other choice but to reinvent PBS as a brand (cf. Mccauley et al., 2016; Perlman, 2016). Their branding strategy was to “turn the cultural value of the old PBS into financial value for the new PBS” (Hoynes, 2016, p. 50). The public service that used to be a given in public broadcasting—namely to serve as a forum for debate and controversy, to provide a voice for groups that may otherwise be unheard, and to show America in all its diversity (Carnegie Commission on Educational Television, 1967)—was now “increasingly being packaged and sold to consumers who [were] brand-loyal to PBS” (Hoynes, 2016, p. 46). In this paper, I ponder the consequences of this chronic uncertainty on the programming of Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). More specifically, I focus on the PBS series POV, the longest-running showcase of independent documentaries on American television, and its chronicling of LatinX migration to the US (1988-2018). Since deregulation coincided with what Henry Jenkins calls “convergence culture,” i.e. an environment “where old and new media collide, where grassroots and corporate media intersect, where the power of the media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways” (Jenkins, 2006, p. 2), I argue that PBS fed into this combination of deregulation and convergence to make itself more marketable. Through programs such as POV, PBS began bringing “perspectives that are considered ‘outside the mainstream’” (Poon, 2016, p. 135) in order to offer programming that complimented their already established reputation of “town hall of the air” with convergent grassroots content, seemingly plucked right off the street (Starr, 2016, p. 239). Finally, I suggest that this perceived need to cater to the non-mainstream translates to the kind of stories POV selects on a topic such as LatinX migration: contrapuntal narratives that reflect and converge with PBS’s own myth of the self, namely that of the uncertain underdog being mercilessly tormented by menacing, but ultimately fallible Goliaths.