In an article by Jessica Garrison, Another Casualty of State Budget Crisis? L.A. Times, Aug. 2, 2009, at p. A31, the Los Angeles Times reports that Huell Howser, the big, handsome fellow with the deep fried, honey-drippin’ Southern accent, who hosts the local California Gold PBS program on KCET, has accepted $320,000 from the California Redevelopment Association as partial funding of a TV program in which Howser — in the words of the L.A. Times — “gushed about the marvels of redevelopment policy.” See http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-redevelopment2-2009aug02,0,2684843.story So much for the vaunted integrity of PBS, those wonderful folks who are forever extolling their own virtues during their interminable commercial pitches for financial support.
We haven’t seen the program yet, but we intend to, after which we will likely have more to say on this topic. So stay tuned, folks. This one should be a doozy.
Follow up.
Go on line to http://www.calredevelop.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Home&Template=/CM/HTMLDisplay.cfm&ContentID=4291
There, you will find The California Redevelopment Association’s call to its members to submit redevelopment “success stories” for Howser’s program. The submissions so far, that will be the subject of that program are: The historical downtown in Winters, the downtown in Clovis, the “old town” in Temecula, Redding, the “Alkali Flats” neighborhood in Sacramento, the Victorian train depot in Perris, the site of the old Naval Training Station is San Diego, affordable housing in Signal Hill, and housing for the homeless in Santa Barbara. None of these are what you might call major redevelopment projects of a kind that have been the subject of controversy.
We see no sign of any of the — shall we say? — less than successful redevelopment projects like the ones in Hawthorne, Redondo Beach, North Hollywood, Pasadena, etc. Nor do we see any mention of redevelopment projects that are renowned for their — shall we say? — creative financial arrangements, like the City of Industry, for example, or how the North Hollywood redevelopment project blew through $100 million in public funds with nothing to show for it, and indeed, if the Los Angeles Times is to be believed, made things worse.
We do not intend to commit here the sin of cherry picking with which we charge the California Redevelopment Association. But it seems to us that when a well regarded broadcast medium like PBS and its local TV station KCET set out to tell the story of redevelopment, they should tell a balanced story that while understandably perhaps bragging about the CRA successes also acknowledges the failures, and does not mislead the public by providing a one-sided view of a highly controversial activity.
As the media people never tire of telling us, their function is to inform the public, not to propagandize it.