Short of cash, WETA cancels issues parley
Originally published in Current, Oct. 7, 1991
The National Issues Convention, an ambitious plan to spotlight the issues important to American voters early in the 1992 election year, has been dropped for lacking of funds.
Executives at WETA in Washington decided Oct. 1 [1991] to discontinue fundraising and planning for the convention and informed their partners in the project.
The producers would have assembled a scientifically selected sample of 600 voters in January for a convention where they would caucus on issues and question presidential candidates directly. The convention would have yielded eight hours of national programming, some live and some pretaped.
''When we met in late June, we all thought the National Issues Convention was a long shot,'' said WETA President Sharon Rockefeller in a release, ''but everyone agreed it was such a worthy project that we would go ahead and try to raise money for it. Unfortunately, the $4 million price tag and the short time span proved too difficult in this period of recession and financial caution.''
Full court press
WETA had put a ''full court press'' on the fundraising, with five staffers working almost full time for seven months, according to station spokeswoman Ann Pincus, and had raised just $1.3 million.
More than half of that, some $750,000, would have come through in-kind contributions from the University of Texas and businesses in Austin, Tex., where the convention was to be held.
No big-league funders had come through. The largest cash grant was from the CPB-supported Public Television Outreach Alliance, which put up $390,000 and intended to develop nationwide activities around the issues convention. Richard Richter, the WETA producer working on the convention, says the station will develop a new election-year project for the outreach alliance.
Staffers are already talking about working toward a similar project for election year 1996, he says.
''With perfect 20-20 hindsight,'' says Richter, ''we really didn't have enough time to raise the money, particularly during the recession and during the summertime, when boards of directors don't meet, and foundations don't move that quickly.''
Came to deadline
''I'm sure that some foundations would have eventually come in if we had been able to wait as late as December,'' says Richter, ''but if we were going to go ahead, we would have needed to begin spending money immediately.''
Planners had tried to scale down the project, ''but once you get below the 600-delegate figure, you start to skew your margin of error so greatly, the sample would not have been sufficiently representative,'' Richter explains.
The shutdown was another in a series of reverses for plans to expand public TV's role in the 1992 election. Last month the Markle Foundation turned down a $4 million proposal by independent producer Alvin Perlmutter and in June the foundation and PBS cut short plans for a larger election project involving public TV. Markle had also been asked to assist the WETA project, but had not responded, according to Richter.
Later news: Later news: PBS and the University of Texas revive the issues convention for 1996.
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