CURRENT ONLINE
More than money problems
Why Markle and PBS split on Election '92

Originally published in Current, July 22, 1991

By Steve Behrens

In the end, there wasn't enough money, time or consensus to pull off the big 1992 Election Initiative that PBS and the Markle Foundation had been discussing since the fall of 1989.

''It was a unanimous agreement that we could not likely raise millions more in time to make it happen,'' says Jennifer Lawson, PBS executive v.p.

The initiative's $8 million kitty--$5 million pledged by Markle and $3 million by PBS and CPB--wasn't enough to fulfill the foundation's vision of making public TV the ''Main Street'' of next year's presidential election. And the public broadcasters, who would have liked to work with $8 million anyway, had to settle for their $3 million.

The foundation and public TV also had never reached agreement on key program ideas such as free air time for major candidates to speak directly to the electorate. Proponents had never fully discussed the idea with skeptical station executives or proposed refinements that would have made it acceptable to them.

Markle had in mind a project that was not only bigger but also more innovative than traditional campaign coverage. ''At a certain point you have to say, 'What these people want to do is different than what we want to do,' '' says foundation Program Officer Edith Bjornson.

Now Markle and PBS are separately planning their election projects, and PBS has already announced a high-profile National Issues Convention for January along with several special Frontline campaign programs. PBS will soon name an executive producer to coordinate coverage, PBS President Bruce Christensen says.

''We still have 50 percent more [to spend on campaign coverage] than we had last time,'' he points out.

Alvin H. Perlmutter, the veteran independent producer assigned by Markle 17 months ago to propose the initiative and commissioned by PBS seven months ago to develop it, is giving both Markle and PBS access to the treasury of more than 350 production proposals he had received for the project.

He also began talking last week with the heads of major-market public TV stations who meet periodically in a group called G-7 (after the group of industrial nations).

The problem apparently wasn't with Perlmutter's performance as hired public affairs impresario and man-in-the-middle. ''Al's staff are talented professionals and bear no responsibility for the unwanted outcome,'' Markle Foundation President Lloyd N. Morrisett wrote to colleagues after withdrawing from the project.

Where was the problem?

''I think we were not able to meet Lloyd Morrisett's expectation of putting election '92 at the top of public television's priorities,'' explains Christensen. Public TV was already giving top priority to revamping its program decision-making structure, he says.

With public TV in the turmoil of restructuring it was ''a very poor time'' for it to deal with the election initiative, Morrisett wrote.

Outsiders began to suspect problems in the initiative last month when PBS officials had little to say about it during the 1991 PBS annual meeting, June 8-11 in Orlando. They had recently come from a meeting with foundation officials, CPB and Perlmutter.

In Perlmutter's proposal, which had various funding options, $8 million would have made about 25 hours of programming--a small number of hours, though not unreasonably costly if they were good productions, according to participants.

''It became immediately clear that it did not buy enough hours,'' says Bjornson. ''The idea was to go on the air before primaries heated up and then to create a consistent presence until election week. That's a lot of programs.''

''We had always seen it minimally as a $16 million project,'' Bjornson says. ''And promotion dollars would be raised outside of that.'' PBS, however, insisted that promotion costs would come from the $8 million available. ''It began to be clear they were very happy to sit tight with the $8 million.''

True. ''We went into the initiative thinking $8 million would be an absolute boon to the system,'' says Don Marbury, director of the CPB Television Program Fund.

Anxious about ''free'' time

The public broadcasters were not universally pleased with parts of Perlmutter's plan, however. ''We were not able to deliver the kind of support from the stations that Lloyd [Morrisett] thought was necessary,'' Christensen says.

The greatest single obstruction was a key idea backed by the foundation and Perlmutter: to elevate the campaign above sound bites and 30-second spots, public TV would give major presidential candidates blocks of air time to speak directly and at length to the voters. That would ''begin to put public broadcasting in the center of electoral politics,'' Morrisett wrote later. ''It would in itself be an ongoing news event...''

But by June ''the value of 'free time' for candidates was still being debated rather than being seized upon as an opportunity and trying to figure out how best to do it,'' Morrisett wrote.

''It was very clear that none of the stations wanted the kind of unencumbered time given to candidates because of the pressure it would put them under,'' says Christensen. ''It would mean they would have to give free time to state and local candidates.''

Perlmutter had a different impression of stations' reactions. ''I have had many conversations with station people around the country. Some had questions about [free time], as any thoughtful broadcaster would have. We were sensitive to that. But from the very beginning, the idea of free time was enthusiastically received by a number of stations.''

''Nobody had ever said, 'This is a foundering point,''' says Bjornson. She had hoped public TV programmers ''would not be so jealous of their time'' when it could be used in assisting democracy.

Programmers had never had a chance to fully discuss and refine the plan with Perlmutter and others who backed it. Proponents had talked among themselves about banning or restricting pretaped segments, for example, or requiring that the candidate broadcast live for some percentage of the given time, says Bjornson.

''We didn't have much discussion about it because Al [Perlmutter] had not yet finalized a plan that we could review,'' Lawson explains.

Markle had begun Capitol Hill discussions that seemed likely to yield a desired exemption from equal-time laws, Perlmutter says. The exemption would allow public broadcasters to air statements by major candidates without obligation to include minor ones.

Christensen himself likes the idea of giving candidates ''unencumbered time,'' as he calls it--''it's where public television can make a difference and should make a difference.'' But at both the 1990 and 1991 PBS annual meetings, station officials, particularly program directors, had opposed the idea, Christensen says.

No green light

Without PBS's enthusiastic approval of the project, Markle couldn't convince sister foundations to add money to the pot, says Bjornson. ''The kind of things funders kept asking were, is PBS really behind this? What assurance do we have of editorial independence? How do they expect to broaden the traditional PBS audience so it won't be preaching to the PBS choir?''

Markle had accepted primary responsibility for grant hunting, says Bjornson, but needed assurances from PBS. ''We told them in effect, give us some arrows in our quiver.''

''I don't think, for example, we had any notion when or whether programs would be scheduled. There was no organized cooperation on promotion. We did not know whether there was willingness to say, 'This needs a strong independent editorial presence.' Would every program have to get an OK? At no point did PBS say, 'This is an incredible opportunity.' ''

''An underlying basic problem was the issue of control,'' says a public broadcaster close to the initiative. ''The Perlmutter people thought they had a mandate to actually put this programming on the air. In fact, the PBS scheduling function would be critical, because they wouldn't agree to put it on the air as outlined. PBS had never fully signed off on Perlmutter as executive producer.''

Whose project was it?

Though Markle was a longtime funder of public TV, the foundation was still considered an outsider by some. ''We're not the kind of system where anybody can just buy their way in because they have money,'' APTS President David Brugger told the Washington Post this month.

Perceptions of the project were shaped early last year when the foundation hired Perlmutter to study prospects for 1992, Morrisett wrote in a post-mortem. ''Although PBS encouraged the study, they declined to participate in financing it,'' Morrisett said. ''One result of that decision was unforeseen but highly detrimental to the project. The study and concept were considered by some people to be Markle ideas and things imposed on public broadcasting rather than being developed in partnership with it.''

Markle and public TV came apart at their second June meeting, on the 24th. ''It was stated that Markle wanted to proceed [to assemble] the $12.7 million,'' says Perlmutter, ''and PBS and CPB felt they did not want to join forces and say, 'Let's try to raise the rest of it.''

Lawson recalls: ''We reached a point at our June 24 meeting when we couldn't take additional months or weeks to try additional fundraising. We couldn't hold up our planning.''

Though Perlmutter had prepared a revised program plan, there was little discussion of it. ''By this time, there had been no movement,'' Bjornson says, ''and if PBS was not prepared to go forward, there was not much to talk about except how to stop.''

Morrisett summarizes the situation in his post-mortem: ''This June we found ourselves (1) without an agreed-upon program plan, (2) without the national leadership for advertising and promotion [hiring a specialist had fallen through], (3) without sufficient funds and (4) without the policy commitment of public broadcasting that might promise a successful result.''

News of the disengagement with Markle led to press discussion of public TV decision-making. The Washington Post quoted Morrisett as saying it's ''very unclear how they make decisions at PBS.''

''We will never be able to respond in exactly the same way a commercial network does, and that's what [the press wants] to hear,'' replies Christensen. Failed projects in commercial TV just don't come to light, he observes, because the networks make their decisions behind closed doors. ''Public television not only has the normal dynamics about decisions but also lots of folks lobbying for what they want. If people see it as unwieldy, we haven't solved that problem yet.''

Plans moving ahead

A week after the June 24 meeting, PBS announced the breach and its first plans for 1992 coverage:

WETA announced the National Issues Convention and its Austin site in a press conference in the Texas city July 11. But the station will have to raise $3.5 million to $4 million to pull off the convention, according to Richard Richter, who with Richard Hutton is in charge of the project at WETA. The Public Television Outreach Alliance contributed $300,000 to CPB as part of its 1992 election project. (WETA President Sharon Rockefeller said she is not making statements or decisions about election coverage now that her husband, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., is a likely candidate.)

The idea of the issues convention was proposed in a 1988 Atlantic magazine article by James Fishkin, a University of Texas government professor and now advisor to the convention project. His book discussing the idea, Democracy and Deliberation, will be published in fall 1991.

To cover the convention, WETA has proposed eight hours of programming over three days--some live and some taped and edited.

 

Footnote: The Markle Foundation and CNN announced plans in October 1991 for a $3.5 million package of programs on the cable network to be paid for by the foundation.

 

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Later news: A year before the 1996 election, PBS had plans for $5 million in campaign programs.

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