The Jim and George Show -- Featuring John McCain

It seems that the sad story of the demise of one of Pittsburgh's public television stations is in the news again, if only tangentially. It only comes up because of the possibility that one of the lobbyists involved may have stirred John McCain's then-not-quite-geriatric loins.

McCain is lying when he says that he was not acting on Paxson Communications's behalf in writing to the FCC telling them to make a quick decision in the sale of the WQEX license. In fact, in a deposition in 2002, McCain openly admitted that he told Paxson's chairman that he would be happy to write the letter, with the caveat that he couldn't actually tell the FCC which way to make its ruling. McCain -- unlike the people who are gullible enough to believe his shameless misrepresentations -- is not a moron; he is as accomplished a practitioner as any of the doctrine of "plausible deniability." At the time, to anyone who was actually involved in or even aware of the fight over WQEX, the letter was a clear intervention on behalf of the people who wanted to turn the station's noncommercial license over to Cornerstone Television, the Wall-based pack of crack-brained fanatics whose lineup of "educational" programming most prominently includes "scientific" explanations of Creationism. Paxson meanwhile would have assumed Cornerstone's commercial license on Channel 40, where Cornerstone remains to this day, trying to mobilize obscurantism to restart the war in Laos, answering "prayer requests," and whatever other nonsense they're into.

The deal eventually fell through, although WQEX was eventually turned into a home shopping channel.

In Pittsburgh, it's worth it to us to remember who is responsible for cooking this up in the first place: it was the responsibility of George Miles, assisted by then-board chairman Jim Roddey. Also on the board at the time were other figures of local capitalist notoriety, like Elsie Hillman. As always in this country, we don't have much of a functioning public sphere, so we don't have an actual public television system that is free of commercial imperatives and open to some public participation. Instead, we have a quasi-public hybrid that is dependent on an upper-middle-class donor base, and -- while nationally it has produced some good stuff, from Sesame Street to Bill Moyers's programs -- consequently these stations devote most of their programming time to yuppie cooking shows and recycled 1970s British comedies. We then exacerbate the problem by doing what we have always done with public services since the Reagan Administration: we put people in charge of them who do not believe in public services.

George Miles has never been much into running even one television station that did not profit him directly, let alone two, and so he and his buddy Jim came up with the plan to dump QEX. Running a television station that is actually accountable to the local public and intended to advance civic purposes takes actual work, and that has never been either Jim's or George's gig, so they were hellbent on cutting their official responsibilities in half. They ended up facing unexpected resistance from Jerry Starr and from the late Alliance for Progressive Action (note: in the pre-Peduto years in Pittsburgh, the word "progressive" actually meant something). But when you're in charge, it's always easier to just outlast your enemies, because all you have to do is do nothing, and that's what rich people do best. So to force the FCC's hand, Miles and Roddey started simulcasting on QED and QEX, using the old technique of running public services into the ground to make them look useless, and this despite a raft of alternative proposals for QEX.

Miles and Roddey have always been the Bo and Luke Duke of the local ruling class, except that they give you a glimpse of what the Duke Boys would have been like if they had also been Boss Hog. Roddey goes through life looking for business opportunities, and makes no distinctions between that and his "public service," and in George he has found a particularly congenial partner, so much so that the two even briefly entertained the notion of getting into the gambling industry together.

When you're the Duke Boys and Boss Hog all rolled into one, you never have to jump the General Lee over the county line just one step ahead of the law -- and you never have to answer to the press, either. The Post-Gazette supported their boys all the way. The same couldn't quite be said of Cornerstone, which eventually pulled out of the deal for its own reasons, which apparently had something to do with principles -- lunatic, barking-mad principles, to be sure, but principles nonetheless, and that has a tendency to get in the way of Jim's and George's mad capers for the sake of money. It didn't take them long, though, to find another commercial partner, and the new Bush regime had put Colin Powell's son in charge at the FCC, so they eventually got their way.