From: Trent Clark
As a kid, my moral code and my parents’ teachings on “right versus wrong” were reinforced by Fred Rogers and his puppet neighborhood. My book report on criminal justice was enhanced by watching legislators discuss “Why do we need prisons?”
My high school government teacher gave extra credit for watching the MacNeal-Lehrer News Hour, which he called “the least biased news out there.” And I remember deeply religious talk show personality Michael Medved, an unrelenting critic of Hollywood, noting “violence, sex and drug use appear on public TV, but at least they show you the devastating consequences.”
My friends all saw the same programming. I wondered, “What united our self-governing society before public TV?” The tug-of-war between ideas that underpins a constitutional republic needs a common tablet, an independent media in which money and merely great ideas compete equally. “Gone With the Wind” and Ken Burns’ “Civil War” are windows into the same history. Seeing both makes us more informed.
My question was answered at the Library of Congress. My job right after college was working at the United States Senate. I would unwind with late evening visits to the quiet but beautiful Jefferson Reading Room. There I discovered “Broadsides.”
Today, 30-second cell phone videos sway American opinions. A hundred years ago, talking images broadcast to vacuum tubes changed the nation. The tech sweeping the world in 1776 was the printing press, and it was used as innovatively as cell phones today.
At the founding of America, paper was expensive and ink even more so. At best, only half of all men could read, and women did not admit to doing so in public. Most American homes possessed a single book, the Holy Bible, and it was justified only as a precious heirloom.
And yet the battle for American hearts and minds was waged in pamphlets and treatises. Samuel Adams’ “The Rights of Man,” Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense,” Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay’s “The Federalist Papers” and even the “Declaration of Independence” were written and published to align and persuade in favor of American freedom.
So, if the printed word was not available to most Americans, how did we reach consensus on independence? The answer was there in the Library of Congress under the heading “Broadsides: America’s first public media.”
The Library website explains broadsides were “by far the most popular ephemeral format used throughout printed history … Broadsides [were] intended to have an immediate popular impact and then to be thrown away.”
More fascinating to me was the role of “broadside reader.” At pubs or town halls or markets where broadsides were displayed, “literate” retirees would, for a “bit and a sup,” read to the public gathered around.
It was this free and widely available media that coalesced the nation. It was open to all. Patrick Henry and George Mason countered Hamilton with “anti-federalist” broadsides. The result was states demanding inclusion of a “Bill of Rights” before ratifying the Constitution.
The U.S. Congress has now completely eliminated its investment in Idaho Public Television, a “collateral damage” caused by defunding perceived “biased national programming.” That means the landowner who owns two-thirds of Idaho no longer underwrites “Outdoor Idaho.”
Federal investment in government transparency in Idaho, a mission lauded by the conservative Mountain State Policy Center, will now drop to zero. And “Idaho Experience” episode “Idaho’s Nuclear Navy” will no longer be funded by the area of government who runs Idaho’s National Lab.
If you don’t like what Idaho Public Television produces locally, then give them your thoughts. They do listen. Simply pulling funding is no solution. A free self-governing society needs a common tableau as non-commercial space in which to propose and discuss ideas that challenge us and make us better.
The history of “broadsides” convinces me we have never operated without such space. It may be dangerous to think we can do so today.
Trent Clark of Soda Springs is Advocacy Committee Chair for the Friends of Idaho Public Television, the 501(c)(3) that funds nearly 60% of the service in Idaho. He has served in the leadership of Idaho business, politics, workforce and humanities education.