“At the heart of Lee’s provocation was this question: ‘How much does PBS reflect the audiences it was intended to serve?’
This question resonated with me. I’ve noticed that many of my peers don’t really tune into PBS, and their relationship to public television often ends at Sesame Street. I wondered how we could make PBS more inclusive, so I was eager to team up with Grace when presented with the opportunity to further explore this question. I quickly learned that Grace’s essay was hardly the first effort to call out public media’s diversity and inclusion issues. Perhaps that’s why in the spring 2021, when Beyond Inclusion, a BIPOC-led collective of non-fiction media makers (including Lee), released an additional open letter to PBS, seven hundred people co-signed, including PBS stalwarts Stanley Nelson and Sam Pollard.”
Read reporter Akintunde Ahmad’s full piece on Viewers Like Us at CJR.