After interviews criticizing station practices
She’ll shush about pledge, Mitchell says

Originally published in Current, Nov. 4, 2002
By Karen Everhart

PBS President Pat Mitchell said she'll stop publicly criticizing stations' on-air fundraising practices after a critic's column in the Philadelphia Inquirer Oct. 28 turned her comments into a slap at WHYY.

"We're turning off loyal viewers," she said in a column about pledge drives by Philadelphia Inquirer TV critic Gail Shister. "They find it irritating. There's got to be a way that's not so intrusive."

Mitchell's willingness to speak on the record about public TV pledge drives has generated at least three columns in major newspapers in the past 18 months, including a San Diego Union-Tribune interview in January that became a flash point among pledge veterans. The stories embarrassed local stations and are seen by station development officers as validating public resentment of an irreplaceable fundraising tool.

In an Oct. 30 letter to station managers, Mitchell said she now believes the press isn't the place to discuss public TV's sorest topic. She declined to be interviewed for this article.

Many public TV leaders view the complaints from local TV critics as an inevitable byproduct of fundraising drives. "Pledge has always been a target for criticism," said Susan Howarth, president of WCET in Cincinnati and PBS Board vice chairman. "There are reporters out there waiting to write negative articles about pledge. It doesn't necessarily take an interview with Pat for this issue to bubble up."

Despite her frustrations as president of PBS, Mitchell told Shister, she plans to renew her contract, which expires in March.

The PBS Board's compensation committee recently reviewed Mitchell's job performance and expressed "significant appreciation" of her contributions at PBS, her top executive v.p., Wayne Godwin, confirmed. The board and committee have "every intention of renewing her contract," a process led by the compensation committee and PBS Chairman Rex Adams.

"Incredibly damaging" criticism

The Oct. 28 column did not go over well at the main pubTV station in town, WHYY. Shister cited Mitchell's discomfort with Nicholas Perricone's wrinkle cure programs and noted that WHYY will air "Healthy Aging with Nicholas Perricone and Wayne Dyer's "There's a Spiritual Solution to Every Problem" a "combined five times" during its December pledge drive.

"This creates so many awkward situations for us," said Craig Hamilton, WHYY executive director of development. "We just brought in a significant number of new members in September, many of whom came in through the programs mentioned in the article as shows Pat doesn't like. This article tells them that they're not the kind of members we want."

The column offended station executives and development professionals in other markets who regard her comments as detrimental to their efforts. "I don't think it's good to be deliberating this issue in the press," said Julie Anderson, executive director of South Dakota Public Television. "The worst part about it is that [stations] appear to be at odds with our parent company, and that's not good for public perception."

Many station development officers have acknowledged that Mitchell's concerns about pledge are justified, said Cynthia Dwyer, v.p. of development at WNED in Buffalo. "We know there are people who abuse this practice, but to have the president of the organization disparage the way we raise funds is incredibly damaging."

WHYY execs feel particularly abused by Mitchell's comments because the station has tried to go after members who are attracted by public TV's mission rather than high-priced pledge premiums. It has shortened its pledge drives and tried to raise more money through direct mail and other off-air methods, Dwyer noted. Its membership rolls are growing, bucking the downward national trend.

In her letter to station managers, Mitchell said she regretted that her comments reflected negatively on WHYY. "Furthermore, I recognize that the press is not the best forum to air our views on pledge or other issues under discussion by the system," she wrote, "and it clearly wasn't in this instance."

Pledge days expand 78 percent in year

Mitchell has held other pledge discussions within the public TV family. She convened a membership summit at the Sundance Institute in April 2001 at which station executives and development officers from other nonprofits brainstormed about strategies to reverse what is now a 10-year decline in public TV membership.

With four stations, PBS began testing new ways to recruit members, and programmers developed plans to link membership with regular mission-oriented programs. PBS and a committee of station development officers developed a set of voluntary standards for pledge practices [earlier article].

In an Oct. 9 speech at the PBS Development Conference, Mitchell cited national pledge statistics to question whether public TV was moving aggressively enough to reform its practices. Pledge receipts grew to $135 million this year, partly because stations expanded their hours of pledging by 78 percent, but the total number of pledges dropped 20 percent.

"We had stations that pledged nearly 100 days last year," she said. "Now, surely, this is dangerous for all of us. Pledging for payroll is not what you signed on for, and it's surely not what our audiences and members expect from us ..."

"I fear that we are reaching a point at which pledge will define public television," she continued. "We--like pay-per-view, pay cable or commercial TV--will not be defined by our public service but by this one tool we use to connect with our viewers and to raise money. We will make it just too easy to reduce our services from 'public television' to 'pledge television.'"

Mitchell's responsibility as PBS president is to draw attention to troublesome trends for a major source of public TV revenue and "try to initiate a constructive conversation," said Godwin.

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