Ken Burns, Documentary Filmmaker:
Well, not very well. I think we’re all in a bit of a state of a shock and also sort of reeling at the shortsightedness of it all. This is such an American institution trusted by people across political divides, geographic divides, age groups.
And what’s so shortsighted about it, I think, is that this affects mostly rural communities or the hardest-hit. My own films probably get somewhere around 20 percent of any given budget from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. That’s a significant hit. We will scramble. We will have to make it up.
I’m confident that, with the extra work, it will happen. But it’s those projects at the national level that might get 50 or 60, maybe even 75 percent of their funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, they just won’t be able to be made. And so there will be less representation by all the different kinds of filmmakers.
People coming up will have an impossible time getting started. I think the first film that I made and was broadcast by PBS in the early ’80s called “Brooklyn Bridge,” had money from CPB and from various CPB programs. And so there’s a kind of pall that we feel.
My biggest thing is, I travel around the system all the time. And I meet in big markets and small markets. And you begin to see the way in which, particularly in those small rural markets, the PBS station is really like the public library. It’s one of those important institutions. It may be the only place where people have access to local news, that the local station is going to the city council meeting.
They’re going to the school board meeting. They’re going to the zoning board. There’s a kind of sense of local accountability. And as news becomes nationalized and even internationalized, there’s a loss there. It’s not just — they’re not just losing the prime-time schedule. They’re losing also contacts with emergency alert systems and Homeland Security and continuing education and classroom on the air, along with our — with children’s programming and prime time.
So there’s a sense that this is an incredibly shortsighted move to do this.
