MediaWatch: September 1997

Janet Cooke Award: "Dumbing Down" the NEA Debate

The old saw about the media serving as a government watchdog doesn’t apply to the National Endowment for the Arts. The agency is perpetually derided by critics not only as a funder of perverse art, but as an out-of-control bureaucracy where no one actually knows where the money goes. For glossing over these concerns in favor of liberal sales pitches, CBS reporter Martha Teichner earned the Janet Cooke Award.

Charles Osgood began the August 17 segment with the classic liberal approach, suggesting the cultural future of America rests in one tiny government agency: "The state of the arts will be on the line very soon in the United States Senate, perhaps as early as the second week of September. That is when Senators will have to decide whether to follow the lead of their colleagues in the House and cut off the flow of federal money to the arts. Whether or not you think the arts are important enough to warrant official support, the issue is important because in an era of so-called ‘dumbing down’, it says so much about what sort of society we want America to become.

Teichner quickly cast conservatives as the bad guys, the instigators of "the roughest bout yet in what has become an annual congressional blood sport," noting that the Senate hoped to save the NEA, but House conservatives would "take another whack" at the NEA in a House-Senate conference committee. In the midst of rebutting arguments against the NEA, Martha Teichner’s story left some key points undeveloped:

1. Private funding dwarfs the NEA. Teichner did not note private arts giving exceeds $9 billion a year. Instead, Teichner put on Alec Baldwin touting Harris poll numbers showing Americans respond favorably to a loaded question: would they spare a tax dollar or two each year for the arts? Baldwin said some respondents noted they’d pay five dollars a year. "As opposed to the 38 cents taxpayers pay now for the NEA," Teichner underlined. Laurence Jarvik, an adjunct scholar at the Heritage Foundation saw it another way, informing MediaWatch: "The $99.5 million that funds the NEA also represents the entire tax burden for over 436,000 working-class Americans." And the poll? Jarvik countered: "The question never mentions the NEA. It just vaguely talks about a federal role in the arts."

2. The NEA is a bureaucratic mess. Teichner briefly noted: "For Representative Peter Hoekstra, wastefulness is an issue." For a rebuttal, she only aired a sentence from NEA boss Jane Alexander’s House testimony about the NEA spending $21,000 per employee on computers: "This is our whole information management system and our grants management system."

Hoekstra aide Derrick Max told MediaWatch that Inspector General reports show grantees are not accountable. The NEA Inspector General’s report from March 1993 found 57 percent of NEA’s reported grants projects costs were not reconcilable with accounting records; 74 percent of personnel costs charged to grant projects were not supported by adequate documentation; and 79 percent of required independent audits were not in compliance with Office of Management and Budget guidelines, meaning in four of five cases, auditors did not test or report on the grantee’s compliance with the terms and conditions of their federal grants.

3. The NEA’s grant distribution is unfairly urban-centered. Teichner added "another frequent accusation," introducing a soundbite of Newt Gingrich: "There are 140 districts whose $24,000 a year taxpayers pay taxes to subsidize art. And that subsidy goes primarily to New York and California." Teichner rebutted indirectly with Sen. Slade Gorton (who claimed the NEA is now reformed) and his home state of Washington, where $20,000 from the NEA helped to bring performers to a children’s theater festival in Seattle. Attended by 42,000 kids from all over Washington stat, many who’d never see a live performance anywhere else. It’s an example of how the NEA justifies big grants in major cities. Their seismic ripple effect is felt far from the source."

Max told MediaWatch not only are hundreds of House districts getting no NEA funds, but that one-third of the NEA’s grants over the last ten years went to just five cities.

4. The NEA doesn’t fund obscenity by accident. Teichner took on "the all-time favorite, the one that won’t go away, is that the NEA funds obscenity." Teichner interviewed Martin Mawyer of the Christian Action Network, which has toured the country with offensive images funded by the NEA or NEA grantees. Mawyer declared of people touring the exhibit were "shocked that the endowment has funded this." Teichner rebutted: "Except that in many cases, the NEA didn’t. It gave money to museums that happened to have exhibited the works. Even if the NEA dollars didn’t pay for the shows, Martin Mawyer makes no distinction."

Teichner aired another clip of Alexander before Congress: "I think that the National Endowment for the Arts record should speak for itself, Congressman, in that what is little known is that out of the 112,000 grants that we’ve made in our 32-year history only about 45 have caused some problems for people. Now that is if you look at the ratio, that’s a pretty good success ratio."

Robert Knight, the Family Research Council’s Director of Cultural Studies, told MediaWatch that 45 is a laughably low number: "In every report on the NEA from Heritage, FRC and other groups, it is always clearly stated that the examples given are merely the tip of the iceberg and are chosen to illustrate, not to constitute an exhaustive list."

As for how accidental these grants are, Knight noted an interview Jane Alexander gave the gay-left magazine The Advocate, in which she said the NEA should "introduce people gently to gay themes across the country." When asked "What sorts of grants would you reject out of hand," Alexander answered: "Its hard to say at this point if there is any grant that I might reject."

Jarvik agreed by citing a recent New York Times report on the Franklin Furnace, a notorious New York "avant-garde center" frequented by porn star Annie Sprinkle and other pornographic performance artists. The center is selling its real estate for $500,000 to match a half-million dollar challenge grant from the NEA. With that money, they plan to create a video archive of all the notorious Franklin Furnace routines and post it on the Internet: "By preserving these performances, and putting them on the Internet, the NEA is saying ‘This is what we believe in.’"

 Teichner did not return MediaWatch calls for comment. She concluded by touting mainstream projects: "Would the youth symphony survive if the National Endowment for the Arts were abolished? Would other arts organizations? We asked. The answer invariably was yes, but there would be casualties." She didn’t mean taxpayers stuck with the bill for avant-garde disasters and anti-family propaganda.

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