PBS: the Yanni state.

FEW years ago, while researching one of my semi-annual screeds against public television, I asked a PBS marketing specialist to describe a typical PBS audience. Her answer was succinct: "affluent, highly educated, the movers and shakers, the socially conscious and well-informed."

This was the kind of quote every reporter lives for--guaranteed to embarrass the person who spoke it, as well as her employers, while offering maximum aid and comfort to their enemies. With thoughtless candor she had put the lie to one of public broadcasting's cornerstone conceits, which is that PBS is an egalitarian haven for the marginalized of American society, fiercely dedicated to meeting the "viewing needs" of those neglected in the Hobbesian marketplace of commercial broadcasting.

The story in which her quote appeared is now forgotten, but the quote lives on. It has been recycled in countless other pieces of anti-PBS agitprop. I lower my eyes modestly when I confess that Bob Dole even read it into the Congressional Record.

Still, I can't help thinking that over the years her quote has been misread. Of course it reflected something that is unassailably true. Public television is a government-funded plaything for the nation's well-to-do. But what her quote tells us about PBS is less interesting than what PBS tells us about the "affluent, highly educated movers and shakers" who watch it. Public television is a window into the soul of America's elite, an anthropological artifact as illuminating as the op-ed page of the New York Times or the underwear ads (are there any other kind?) in Vanity Fair.

The time to peek into the window is the month of March, during pledge week. It is then that affiliates broadcast the shows best fitted for their audience, who are expected to shower the stations with money in return. Each year's pledge drive seems to yield a new cash cow. One year it was a series by the "co-dependency theorist" John Bradshaw. Another brought us the New Age guru Leo Buseaglia. Very often the big draw is a chin-pull between Bill Moyers and one of his discoveries, like Maya Angelou or the "mythologist" Joseph Campbell, who famously moved and shook our movers and shakers with the injunction to "Follow Your Bliss." (America elected Bill Clinton three years later.) Taken together these shows suggest an unflattering picture of American intellectual life. Even so, the most jaundiced observers must have been dismayed this year when the annual pledge-drive poster boy proved to be a New Age musician named Yanni.

First, let's straighten out the matter of Yanni's name. He has only the one, apparently; he is among those celebrities--Cher, Sting, Meatloaf--who give fits to the New York Times copy desk, where courtesy titles like Mr. are still obligatory. (The Times once referred to Mr. Loaf.) But the single name, along with a tailored wardrobe, a gorgeous head of hair, and great teeth, have been enough to lift him to international stardom. His popularity has lagged somewhat in the U.S., until now. For this year's pledge drive he filmed a concert documentary with the Royal Philharmonic, and it proved a roaring success. My own local PBS affiliate aired the program like a tape loop, for good reason; one Saturday night showing raked in an amazing $51,000 in pledges. Some PBS stations even canceled a previously scheduled Andy Williams special to repeat Yanni's performance.

Yanni knows his audience. The concert took place at the Acropolis--a cleverly classical, PBS-like touch, for as any PBS videophile can tell you, the Acropolis is where a lot of famous Greeks such as I, Claudius hung out hundreds of years ago. And Yanni is Greek too! So it's like a full circle. Bathed in supernal light, the Parthenon looming above, Yanni appeared dressed in white, amid a bank of electronic keyboards. The musicians of the Philharmonic sat in black tie behind him. As the music billowed out Yanni winced, sometimes hiked his eyebrows, always made sure to toss the heaps of hair from his brow. Andy Williams is going bald.

WITH apologies to those who haven't heard it, I won't dwell on Yanni's music. There isn't much to describe. The strings provided long, pillowy sixth and ninth chords, over which Yanni played little tinkling descants on his synthesizer. Occasionally the rhythm altered, breaking the tedium and allowing Yanni to turn away from the audience and shift his weight from hip to hip. These moments alone were doubtless worth hundreds of thousands in pledges. And, so different from those troublesome pieces of classical music, when Yanni stops playing you know you're supposed to applaud.

And applaud they did, a crescendo rising from the mitts of the college presidents, lapsed priests, animal-rights activists, grad students, and guilty MBAs who compose the affluent, socially conscious audience PBS prizes so highly. In music Yanni offers them what Joseph Campbell and the others offered them in philosophy. It is a curious crew, this American elite, unlike any other elite in history, probably: moved by words without sense, humming music with no tune.

Mr. Ferguson is a senior writer for The Washingtonian.