Not to jinx it, but it may be that public television is going to be all right in Arkansas. Knock wood.
State Sen. Jimmy Hickey credited progress on the Arkansas PBS front to a "back-room deal."
He meant it in the nicest way.
Arkansas PBS--or AETN for many of you not plugged into rebrands--is a public broadcasting entity that provides broad educational and cultural programming as part of a national network. It does so in a state run by extreme conservatives who don't always approve of broad educational and cultural information because it offends their values.
In the last regular legislative session, the state appropriation for public television got hung up after state Sen. Dan Sullivan of Jonesboro did an online search of a contractor retained by Arkansas PBS. He saw that the contractor seemed by Twitter posts to care about climate change. We don't so much in Arkansas.
Sullivan contended that Arkansas' public television contractors ought to be people who shared Arkansas values.
Arkansas PBS had retained the contractor based on his professional skill in writing for an innovative educational programming project in partnership with the state Education Department.
Arkansas PBS had not run him through a political litmus test, just as you don't ask a tow-truck driver how he voted in the presidential race before you let him deliver your car from roadside stranding to emergency service.
A few of the more extreme conservative state legislators, enough to deny the three-fourths vote requirement for appropriations, fell in behind Sullivan.
Then a compounding matter arose on the legislative right about--well, it had to do with what they call a "trailer," meaning a promotional snippet for a documentary film that Arkansas PBS aired called "The Gospel of Eureka."
The film was about the religious conservatives putting on the "Passion Play" in Eureka Springs in the shadow of a massive Jesus statue, while, down the way, there was a popular drag bar.
Reviews called it a sweetly intended production that sought to show the potential for peaceful co-existence among cultures.
I found the film almost as interesting as Eureka Springs. You sit out on the Crescent Hotel veranda and drink a gin-and-tonic while a big white Jesus looks over you from a hill amid the beautiful trees ... and, well, you know you're somewhere different from where you are normally.
There were two versions of the film. The film-festival version was more graphic than the PBS version, which, while tamer, was still something the Arkansas PBS review committee chose to put on late--11:30 or midnight, as officials recalled.
Legislators got shown a film-festival trailer.
Long story short: Hickey's "back-room deal" of the last regular session was that the Legislature would pass the appropriation so that Arkansas wouldn't be the only state in the nation without public television, and that legislators would present their concerns and questions to Arkansas PBS officials for answering in an "interim" meeting, meaning between sessions.
That meeting was Monday at the television network's facility in Conway.
Arkansas PBS officials presented a nice dog-and-pony show for an hour. They told of all the good things. Telecasts of high-school sports championship events seem big.
They said local officials review programs from sources like the federal Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and that they have at times, and surely will again, reject some--but not by political pressure, for that can't be, but for general appropriateness.
They offered to set up a system to watch with complaining legislators any previously aired programs that might have been found objectionable, the point being to achieve greater understanding about why they were run and why legislators thought they shouldn't have been.
State Rep. Mark Lowery of Maumelle, an unctuous sort who somehow is the state GOP nominee for state treasurer, asked maybe the best question.
He noted with approval that Arkansas PBS eschews advertising but seeks local underwriters that get no editorial control for the programs they underwrite. But he wondered what protections Arkansas PBS had in place for underwriting "pushed down" by the federal PBS.
The answer is that PBS allows member stations to opt out of a percentage of nationally provided programming--and more if it's for locally produced programming.
But the sterling value of the question was that it captured the essence of Arkansas' raging political attitude.
It's that we need to hunker down against what that horrible United States is trying to do to us. I have never thought of national PBS programming as "pushed down" on us. I thought Ken Burns' history of country music was so good I made a continuing donation.
Cooler heads and indications of good feelings abounded Monday. May they thrive, even if "Austin City Limits" puts that Beto O'Rourke-loving Willie Nelson back on stage some Saturday night.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.