Current.org | Q&A with Bill Baker, WNET president

Current Q&A Bill Baker

Issue of TV quality ‘is starting to rise above the background noise’

William F. Baker, for 11 years the head of New York’s WNET, talked recently with Current about his new book, Down the Tube: An Inside Account of the Failure of American Television, and developments at Channel 13. The failure he refers to is on the commercial side, in which he worked two decades. WNET did suffer its own reverses in national production several years ago, but has rebounded, and last fall completed the field’s biggest capital campaign, devoted to programming. Next up: another capital campaign to equip the station for digital broadcasting and to outfit a new headquarters that WNET will occupy this fall.

Baker earned a doctorate in communications and organizational behavior at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, where he worked his first producing jobs. He worked nine years for Westinghouse Broadcasting Co., managing its Baltimore station, running Group W Productions and serving as president of Group W Television, 1979-87, before succeeding Jay Iselin as president of WNET. He is also serving as president of the New York Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

This edited transcript of Baker’s conversation with Current Editor Steve Behrens appeared in Current, June 8, 1998. Disclosure: Current is published as an independent journalistic service by WNET.

You conclude in Down the Tube that the coming of digital TV may provide the opening for improvements in the sad state of American TV. How would that come about?

Well, the book is fundamentally about the commercial television business. While there is some really fine commercial television still today, the bad television is getting worse. And that’s what troubles us, this down-spiraling, bottom-fishing for ratings.

With the digital television licenses being granted, broadcasters are being given an asset of the American people, like a piece of the national park system. Half of the land in this country and half of the electronic spectrum is owned by the federal government. People would be crazy to give up part of the national park system, without some kind of quid pro quo. So we think it’s appropriate that, with the licensing of DTV stations, that the concept of public trust and public service be reconsidered for that spectrum so that there is a kind of new floor of public service that has to be met before one can just make money with it.

We also think that public service should be required for cable operators. There would have to be some changes in communications law, but we think that’s possible.

It’s an opportunity for the American public to begin dialoguing on this subject, a subject that, as we point out in the book, has never really been fully vetted. We have ended up with this commercial television system we have, and an underfunded public television system, through a series of accidents, misregulation, lack of regulation, and unintended consequences of regulation. This is a good chance for a fresh start.

The public seems to be apathetic about media policy questions. They accept television being mediocre. They don’t regard it as an issue. But you say we’re due for a new swing toward regulation.

Yeah. We found that the regulatory environment in this country is cyclical, and we’re probably due for another pro-regulatory period. There is more concern now about television—witness a lot of public debate and page-one stories in the New York Times about Jerry Springer and South Park. The quality of television issue is starting to rise above the background noise. I’ve appeared on a half a dozen or a dozen commercial TV shows on this subject all over the country, not as a result of the book but because there seems to be issues brewing.

We have been conditioned to accepting television quality below what we deserve. It really is a conditioning response. I refer to it sometimes as “Valium in the drinking water”—it starts getting in there, and you don’t realize that there’s a problem because it’s so addictive.

People universally say television is for relaxing.

Or entertainment. Having been a commercial broadcaster for many years, I can tell you there is so much pressure on quarterly, bottom-line profits that some of our best programs today, like Nightline, 60 Minutes and The Today Show probably would not survive if they were started afresh, because those programs took many years to develop.

Our fundamental thesis is that the only measure of success in commercial television in this country is financial, and to aim only for the bottom line is to aim too low.

There seems to be almost an assumption, though, that in corporate life you have no choice but to do what is most profitable. If you don’t, you can be sued by your shareholders. How can broadcasters get around that?

We don’t blame anyone in the commercial television business. We blame the government. This book is derivative of George Dessart’s and my experience in the business. Many of our friends in commercial television have come to us saying, “Gee, we miss television of 10 years ago, 20 years ago. We feel that we can’t do our best work because of this huge pressure on us and we”—I’m speaking for them— “are sometimes embarrassed by what we put on.”

We don’t fault many of the fine people in the business, including the top people. We fault the government for not demanding more. Most of the channels are owned by about four companies that are so huge that probably the only force that can deal with them appropriately is the government.

What we’re suggesting is something that has been done in almost every country in the free world: the government says it’s fine if you make money with this medium, but first there’s a baseline of service that you must give the people of the country.

This is not a black-or-white situation. There are certainly corporations that, in the best interest of their stockholders, will do the right thing and sacrifice some profitability.

I found in my long experience in commercial television that it is sometimes handy to have what we used to call the threat of the raised eyebrow at the FCC. You don’t really need much regulation; you need just a little bit of a threat, to have a company say, “Hey, we won’t squeeze that one last one-eighth of a rating point out of a television program. We won’t go and burn the American flag just to shock the audience.”

But broadcasters must have seen the raised eyebrow many times, and they must not really believe there’s any...

...any punch behind it. There’s never been many teeth in the law. In the history of television in this country, only a couple of stations have ever lost their licenses. But that threat alone was enough. I’m not looking to go back to old-time TV, but I think there has to be some kind of accountability.

Two members of the Gore Commission—from opposite sides of the table—recently proposed that the government give an extra DTV channel in every market to public TV, though it’s not clear there would be any new money to operate it. What do you think of that?

I’m obviously supportive of that. I think public television needs all the shelf space it can possibly get. But shelf space without economic support is useless. Maybe if we had shelf space, we could use it for things that create economic support.

I’m for things like tax credits for the commercial broadcasters who do good work. I am not for the commercial broadcasters just handing public broadcasters money. I’d like to see all boats lifted by a rising tide. I don’t want to see our commercial brethren get worse so that we can get better. I think we all should get better.

Could you look ahead for us to some time in the next 10 or 15 years when WNET is making full use of its DTV channel and there are lots of viewers out there with DTV sets? Will you have one or two HDTV streams at some times during the day and four or five standard-definition channels at other times? That’s what PBS has imagined. What would you put on those streams?

Let’s back into the things that are most important in digital television. I think public television has an obligation and a strategic advantage to broadcast the highest quality digital television programs. I think our best programming plays directly into that hand. Nature and Great Performances and Masterpiece Theatre are ideal candidates for HDTV. I also think a lot of our educational programming for the classroom would greatly benefit from clearer, high-quality pictures.

There would be no question in my mind that in an ideal world I would love to see one channel totally devoted to high-definition, educational television 24 hours a day in a city like this. I would also like to see channels multiplexed serving subgroups of our community. We in public television have never adequately served the foreign-language markets. We in public television have never adequately served one of our key markets, children; and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t have a 24-hour children’s channel.

Bedtime stories.

Exactly. And there also may be some economic opportunities that occur to us with these digital channels where we can use some parts of them to make revenue.

What organizations do you think will put these channels together? PBS is talking about a Know-How Channel for adults and channels for kids. There hasn’t been very much public discussion of any other options. Will we be hearing anything from other sources anytime soon?

Yes. I’m interested in seeing the stations develop streams of programming. I don’t know why that’s not possible. We are a system of independent public television stations. I think we need multiple editorial voices, and I think there’s an opportunity for the creativity of a system this big and this diverse to have many ideas grow and develop in the field.

So I don’t want PBS or anyone else saying, “Here’s what the new channels are going to be.” I’d like to have the system have a chance to cultivate, develop, experiment with some of its own.

Will that happen in the usual way that the syndication market works: somebody hires a high-priced salesman to get the channel carried here and there?

No, no, no. I think what will happen is that stations will experiment locally, and when successes are found, those may become national services. I want to have room and time to have that happen.

There may be a lot of time.

Yes. I don’t think anybody’s expecting widespread consumption of digital television for better than a decade.

What kind of revenue mechanisms could support these additional streams? Will they be supported through the usual mix of pledging and so on?

I hope more pledging is not part of the picture. I think public television pledges too much. I think we have to get to the business of getting out of the transactional pledging and into the pledging of service and value that we represent.

I think we have to get more from the government. I think that’s really one of our greatest hopes and greatest needs. I also think commercial models of operation will probably be developed for these digital channels, assuming we get governmental permission to do it, that make money, that can be used to support the main service. Certainly things have . . .

Are you thinking of projects like Larry Grossman’s proposed PTV Weekend channel, which was to be supported with on-air ads?

I don’t support Larry Grossman’s idea in the current environment, but I would strongly support it in a digital environment. And there are other models under which a station could lease channels or lease a part of a channel to some commercial interest so that we could make some revenue and run the main service.

What I’m concerned about in this world of multiplexed services is that it fractionates us so much that no one channel remains strong enough to keep the faith, to hold the fundamental mission and to maintain the highest quality. There are too many compromises. I’m seeing that in public television now, and it’s worrying me. It’s not seriously troubling, but it’s worrying me.

Can you give any examples of what is worrying you?

The answer is that I could but I’m not going to.

Generically?

In the generic sense, I think that some of our pledge programming has been too transactional and almost infomercial. I think there is a temptation for some national program decisions to be weighted on economic values rather than what is the ultimate best program for the American people. There’s nothing dangerous yet, but my antenna’s up.

If it turns out that the commercial market has much demand for DTV channel capacity, it’s easy to imagine that public TV stations will lease out, as you mentioned, part of their capacity strictly for revenue generation, looking at it as the endowment it never got from the federal government. Should there be a limit on that? Stations might even want to lease out most of their capacity because it could be the easiest money they’d ever make.

I can’t answer that. In my heart, I would hope that there would be some limits. Obviously you would want one full-time service in every community in America.

That’s all the FCC is requiring.

Right. For me to put rules on something that’s that far out in the future, I don’t know. Again, I think in the spirit of the way this system operates and the way I would like to see communications policy in this country operate, I think that’s the kind of thing that we need public dialogue on, and certainly internal industry dialogue.

Now with WNYE and WLIW and two state networks in this area, besides WNET, if you were all multicasting, you could have an enormous variety of specialized channels. You could actually have Indian and Pakistani channels. Given that most of those broadcasters are partially overlapped, however, and want to offer the basic PBS service to some of their viewers, how far can you go with specialization? Are you always going to have this overlap problem?

Overlap should be converted into an advantage. The only time it’s a problem is if we have overlapping stations with similar or identical missions competing, because then we cannibalize one another. But some overlapping stations serve discrete purposes, and a good example is WNYE, which does a lot of foreign-language broadcasting. And WLIW and WNET have been working harder and harder at differentiating themselves.

Could you talk a little bit about that, because there’s been some hostility in the past?

I think there’s been hostility perceived by other public broadcasters, but Terrell Cass and I aren’t at all hostile to one another. As a matter of fact, I would consider Terrell a professional friend. But there are some professional differences.

How are you going to differentiate yourselves?

I think that’s one of the things that Terrell and I have been talking about. We don’t think either time shifting or similar genre programs do that. On the other hand, WNET and, I think, WLIW feel strongly that we want both institutions to strongly exist. We don’t want any public television station to go away. We think there’s strength in having shelf space in the biggest city in America.

WLIW and some other overlap stations are working with PBS to prepare a second network with differentiated programs. It would be taking money from underwriters. They would buy some exclusive programming, most likely with CPB money in it. What do you think of that?

I think the economic goal has to be first making our [PBS National Program Service] the very best it can be. And I don’t think there’s enough resources going into the NPS right now. Secondly, I think we have to be careful. I haven’t seen any plans, so it’s really hard for me to comment on this, but there’s a huge risk that new channels will cannibalize the audience and the funding of existing channels.

In talking with the senior people in network and cable television—my former colleagues—I’ve discovered that this is the first year that cable has not been cannibalizing the network audience, according to the networks. That is being parroted by the cable networks themselves. I met with the heads of four of five of the quality cable networks, and they indicated that their audience is now being cannibalized by their cable competitors or by networks that they themselves own.

I mentioned that public television had been looking at creating a second service, and they said, “Why would you want to do that? Why would you want to diminish your audience?” I later talked with my colleagues including Sharon Rockefeller [of WETA, Washington] and Al Jerome [of KCET, Los Angeles], and we are commissioning Booz Allen [consultants] to look into that issue.

You mentioned earlier that you’re working with WLIW to differentiate programming on the two stations. Wouldn’t this PBS-2 channel just be an extension of that?

We want genuine differentiation. I’m concerned that the stations have different missions—not just different programming, but different missions. A children’s channel doesn’t hurt A&E, but a Discovery Channel clone does.

Having a different demographic angle is not different enough?

We’re all looking for younger demographics. What we wouldn’t want is to see the NPS be all over 60. The goal is to get a broader and younger audience into the NPS.

The most important thing is that we really shouldn’t take away anything from the NPS. That’s a service that, at least I feel, is badly underfunded and needs more resources. What will keep the public television system strong is if the NPS is a luminary service.

If we do anything that hurts the biggest public television stations in the market, it damages the entire system because if our audiences go down even a little bit, that hurts the ability to get underwriting, that hurts membership. And that has a ripple effect on even the smallest public TV stations since, among others, this particular station is the biggest dues-payer and contributor to the NPS.

	WNET's new home will be on two floors of the two-block-wide building at 10th Avenue and West 33rd Street, above Penn Station’s tracks.

This fall, WNET will move into an enormous building down on West 33rd Street. It will be equipped for DTV, of course, but what else is different in the way you’re setting in up, the way you’ll operate after the big year 00?

First, let me comment on the enormous building. We are selling the building we are in, making a profit, and going to a building that we will be renting. We will be going from 10 to two floors, so we’ll immediately have human efficiencies. We won’t be waiting for elevators, and so on. And that building will have an unpretentious but state-of-the-art technical facility—not studio-laden but technology-laden, with the best editing equipment and the latest technology.

One of the things we have found—and I found this out through my daughter, who produces a national program for CBS cable—is that, because of the incredible competition in New York, and the talent available in this city, she’s able to produce things cheaper here than when she was producing in the Midwest and other parts of the country. Because the equipment’s available, and the competition’s so fierce that it drives prices down.

We think that we should have one of the most competitive and efficient television facilities in America, and we think that will be good for public television. And we know it will be good for the New York television market.

You’ll have 40 editing suites?

Well, we said that originally. I think we’ll probably start at 20 and build from there. We don’t want to have over-capacity; we want to have what we need.

The commercial networks have been announcing what DTV picture format they’ll be starting with. And KCTS recently said it will go with progressive formats—480 lines and later 720 lines. Have you decided here what formats you’ll broadcast at first? Maybe there’s no hurry.

No we haven’t decided. I don’t think there is a hurry. I hate to say this, but public television will probably be the tail being wagged by the bigger dog. My personal inclination is 1080-interlaced, because I think that’s the very best technology. But we’re building a plant that can be adaptive.

I’ve seen them both, 720p and 1080i, and I think 1080i tends to be a better picture, especially if there’s any movement. If you’re looking at still pictures, that’s another thing.

What about your tower for DTV? The last we heard, all the New York stations were negotiating with the Port Authority for space on top of the World Trade Center. How does it look?

It is a scary and difficult time for all of the television stations in New York. The costs of going on top of either the World Trade Center or the Empire State Building, which are the only two logical choices, are incredible. And space is limited. Issues such as environmental impact are also major.

I cannot forecast at this point how it’s going to turn out. I know my commercial brethren are very concerned and upset and we’re trying to keep the television industry unified because we believe there’s strength in numbers. But, again, we think that public television will be the tail being wagged by the bigger industry. They’re the ones with the money and the power and the clout.

Is the Port Authority cooperating?

I would say early indications from the Port Authority were very difficult. The offers that came to my desk were amounts of money that WNET could not afford. But there are signs of movement.

Last fall, WNET raised $76 million in its capital campaign.

It was the biggest fundraising effort ever in public television by a single station.

We have spent a considerable amount of the funds, mostly on educational and national programming. Virtually all of the money in our endowment is either for education or for national programming. As you know, Channel 13 has had large operating losses on its national programming, and this is a way for us to continue doing national programming that we think is important for public television.

About $20 million of the campaign funds are already spent for programs that either have been produced or are now being produced. The rest will generate interest.

How much of that $76 million is going into the new building?

None of it.

So, for the DTV equipment and this move, you’ll ...

We’re going to have to have another fundraiser.

A different kind?

Yes. I always heard it was easy to raise money for equipment, and most of the public stations have been successful at that. We have always found it difficult, but we’re going to try.

We think we need at minimum about $15 million, maybe more. The other money we can’t even touch anyway, because it’s all for programming.

You’re going to have to spend a good deal of this equipment money pretty soon, aren’t you?

Yes. But don’t forget, we’ve made a profit of $10 million, we hope, on the sale of this building, so that will go immediately into the new equipment. Beyond that we need another $15 million. Without knowing what’s going to really happen on top of World Trade or Empire.

When Henry Kravis retired the other day as chairman of the station after eight-and-a-half years, he told the Times his top priority has been changing the station’s mission “so that everything we did was focused on education.” He said, “We are not just a television station, but an educational organization.” What did Kravis and the board do to make that change take hold internally? How far has WNET gone in making that change?

It is complete and deep, right down to the bone. The way Kravis made it happen was, he gave us a $5 million gift and started the Kravis Multimedia Educational Center. That’s the thing that put us into the digital multimedia universe, and teacher training.

He insisted, and got the board to insist, that we never lose that focus, so that is now ingrained in our institution, and it will never leave us, and we are grateful we have it.

Are you aiming to change the perception of the station, for the average New Yorker, or among educators and policymakers?

One, I think we have changed their perception of the station, so all of our research shows that we are a greatly loved, trusted institution. We are loved for, first, the programs we telecast or produce for the National Program Service, especially our performance programming. The other is that we spend a large amount of money on outreach tied to our NPS programming and tied to education. The best example of that is what we did with Bill Moyers’ “Close to Home,” on addiction. And literally tens of thousands of people were directly touched by our educational outreach: brochures, literature, telephone calls. Actually hundreds of thousands of people in the New York metro. That Bill Moyers program was public television at its best. It combined great television with education and an attitude change about an important social issue.

You mentioned WNET being known “especially” for arts programs. Does research show that’s what people care most about?

We’ve done some research locally and nationally, and it has shown that the area where public television still has the high ground is performance and culture. And we’re proud of that because we produce Great Performances and American Masters and City Arts, which just won a Peabody Award and 15 Emmys. That’s quite something for a local television show. I’m not saying we’re not highly regarded in other categories, but we dominate this category, and public television can’t afford to lose it.

You produced a piece of the Tony Awards presentation last year, supplementing what CBS did. Did the station decide at some time that you were going to make a closer alliance with the arts community in general?

We have embraced the arts community, mostly through our board members, who are on the boards of most of the other big New York cultural institutions. And we think it’s a strategic position, just as for example, WETA does a very good job with Washington and politics because they’re there.

We have some of the finest producers in the world here on our staff in performing arts, as we do in science and in other areas. So we play to that strong hand.

You’re going into your fifth season of City Arts. That’s an impressively long run for a local show at WNET, and especially for one with lots of field production. How are you keeping it going? [Feature on City Arts and City Life.]

We’re funding it almost 100 percent through philanthropy and discretionary dollars. Very few underwriters. The credit ultimately goes, I think, to Ward Chamberlin and Jac Venza, who both wanted something like this to happen, and Glenn DuBose, who really wanted to make a unique television program using the latest technology and utilizing the base of talent in this city. We’ve used 200 independent producers on this program.

Well, there you’ve got a spinoff now called City Life, with four episodes this spring. What hopes do you have? Is that going to be growing into a regular series or...?

Our enthusiasm is only limited by our budget, so we thought that if this institution created such a fine program, City Arts, can’t we use those resources to do something that’s not just arts-oriented? And we challenged our crew and this is what they came up with. And we’re hopeful.

What will be happening with the Tonys this year?

We’re going to do what we did last year. It was a success. It was a breakthrough with the Broadway community. They had pretty much avoided public TV, because they were fearful that putting too much of their material on television might hurt their audiences. Well, they found it had exactly the opposite effect, and they have embraced us and we have embraced them. So we think we’ve got something. We’ve got a tiger by the tail, and we’re hoping to do much more.

We heard some talk about a regional arts channel for cable. [Later story.] Is that it?

Right. We’re looking at the feasibility of developing an arts channel. We hope to have some progress to announce soon.

You say in your book that news is where the action is, and, indeed, the networks are moving toward having newsmagazines every night of the week, and viewers can always find several talk shows in progress. Is there a place for public TV to do more in this competitive area?

I think news is incredibly competitive right now. But even so, it’s amazing how still the NewsHour is almost by any measure the best newscast in America. It is an expensive program, and my main focus right now, being the station that originated that program, is to do everything we can to keep it funded. So I’m not thinking about anything other than that right now.

Would I like to see more? Yes. Is this the best time to do more? Probably not, given the limitations on funding.

You’ve been to the North Pole once, the South Pole twice, the Antarctic five times. Do you have any other explorations planned at the moment, other than digital TV?

No. I’ve been blessed with some remote property that our family owns, in the East and in Canada. And I try to, in the summer, disappear into these wilderness places that have no flush toilets and no electricity.

That’s how I charge my batteries. And that was one of the places where I was able to work on writing the book. I didn’t realize how hard writing a book was. I thought it would be easy. It’s the hardest thing I ever did. But I had a terrific co-author. And it took five years.

How did you know [co-author] George Dessart?

I knew George from his work at CBS. He was an executive when I was at Westinghouse. And he is a past president of the New York Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. And I am the current president.

And, by the way, one of the things that we’re doing with the New York Chapter is a television program—and I have to admit I got the idea from Jerry Franklin of Connecticut Public Television, which did a local program about the history of television in Hartford. We’re doing a program on the history of New York television, produced by the TV academy, which will run on WNET.

You also have, coming up, a 10-hour Ric Burns/Lisa Ades mini-series on the history of the city, which you’re doing with WGBH. Have you seen much of it?

Yes, we’ve seen quite a bit of it. It’s exceptional. It’s what you would expect from Ric Burns, one of the greatest producers in America. And I think it’s a good example of two large public television stations cooperating, too.

You had been working with David Wolper Productions on a separate series about the city [while WGBH was working with Burns and Ades].

We decided it was not practical to do two of them, and it was better to combine our resources. But Wolper may end up doing the program on the history of television in New York.

You just had a second PBS Premiere event for potential underwriters with the PBS Sponsorship Group. Is that group turning out to be more than the sum of its parts?

Yes. It’s nice to see new things that are tried that really work. Everybody gets on well, and I think some real progress has been made.

Well, that sounds like a happy partnership with PBS, but the major stations usually seem to have a lot of anxiety and distrust whenever PBS is involved. When the public TV Forum met in March, that area of relations was the top priority to deal with. And at the Forum, you said that you feared turning over channel capacity to PBS or a commercial partner, who would “take it away from us.” What’s the problem you see with PBS?

I don’t know that I said it exactly that way. My concern is that centralization works well to a degree, but part of the strength of public television is our on-the-ground, unique local-venture nature.

But the growth in public television in recent years has come from PBS, and while that’s terrific, it’s important for the real strength of our system, namely the stations themselves, to grow. So I keep hoping that there will be a model that allows the stations, big and small, to grow—and not grow in the way a cable network grows, which is from the top down. I think we can survive as an industry only if we grow from the bottom up.

Web page posted July 6, 1998; revised Feb. 2, 2007
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