Details of reality aside, public TV has quite a future
Originally published in Current, March 16, 1998
By Steve Behrens
NEW YORK CITY--The future stays just ahead of us, fair game for speculation at seminars like "The Future of Public Television," March 6 at a midtown think tank.
On hand were a crew of public TV people (mostly former), some professors, some Europeans, some lefties, a lone libertarian with a fixed smile, and a PBS vice president working hard to convince them that public TV had changed for the better in recent years.
It was criticism "among friends," said Eli Noam, a telecom expert at Columbia University's business school, though most speakers liked the concept of public TV better than its realities. The seminar was organized by his Columbia Institute for Tele-Information and Germany's Bertelsmann Foundation, and held at the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center. The papers will be published in a book.
Especially hopeful was testimony from a New Yorker that local programming is important to public TV's future. (Earlier recommendations from Manhattan Island have tended to favor national productions.) Richard Somerset-Ward, a producer and onetime head of BBC-TV music and arts programming, said local programs are "the most crucial" for public TV and soon can be accommodated when stations begin multichannel DTV broadcasts.
He cited the "interesting" experiment of WTVI, Charlotte, which carries a "no-bodybags" nightly newscast produced for it at modest cost by a commercial station in town.
Somerset-Ward commended an alliance that former PBS President Lawrence Grossman has proposed with community cultural institutions. Grossman, an expected speaker who was not able to attend the seminar, sketched this alliance in a November 1997 lecture for the National Academy of Public Administration. Libraries, museums and universities "were completely bypassed" by radio and TV, and should be brought into an alliance with pubcasters to allow them to "operate outside their walls," Grossman said. These alliances would be assisted by a national trust fund supported with fees from spectrum users.
If pubcasters "play their cards right," Somerset-Ward said, they can become the telecom hubs of these alliances. But like other speakers he had doubts public TV can get its act together. Unfortunately, he noted, "almost any form of leadership is unacceptable to public television."
Jim Fellows, president of Central Educational Network [and chairman of the Current Publishing Committee], endorsed Somerset-Ward's outline of multiple-channel service, which presents pubcasting a legitimate provider of services in its own right "and not just an antidote" to commercial TV. "This is the time to make progress in this," Fellows said.
Prominent advertising researcher Leo Bogart observed later from the audience: "The area for local public broadcastters that represents the greatest opportunity is the area of local news," given the weakness of newscasts on commercial TV.
How commercial TV doing?
The seminar organizer, Eli Noam, caused some ripples with his own study attempting to quantify the growth of PBS-like programming on commercial channels, mostly on cable.
Last year, a cable subscriber in New York City could receive 74 channels, including many featuring "public-interest" programming, a loose category in which he included news, cultural, educational and religious programs, among other kinds.
Between 1969 and 1997, the volume of those programs grew 20-fold to 3,568 hours a week, just on the commercial channels; half of it was news. Noncommercial channels, including public TV and public access, offered 553 hours. Of all the program hours on commercial channels, "public-interest" programming occupied a growing share--doubling to 43 percent of total hours in 1997.
Still, Noam found, the commercial market is failing to provide various kinds of programming: cultural performance, foreign-language (except where populations are concentrated), left and right wing, controversial, good kidvid and programs for the poor.
Andrew Schwartzman, president of the Media Access Project, shortly predicted that Noam's figures will be "misused" by private-sector advocates to claim that commercial TV doesn't need to do anything more for the public interest.
Noam's definition of "public-interest" programming was "extremely problematic," he said. Schwartzman's own definition of "public interest" programs was: "what the marketplace does not provide," a much harder one for commercial stations to meet.
Monroe Price, a media law specialist from Cardozo Law School, proposed an admittedly "radical" alternative: assigning the operation of the public TV system through a bidding, every five or 10 years, that would be open to all kinds of companies.
He sought to serve the objectives of public-service broadcasting and not to protect incumbent organizations, he said. Like others, Price observed that public TV has "something in the existing structure ... incompatible with the kind of decision-making necessary for new technologies."
When commercial media are underperforming, corporate takeovers force them to improve themselves, but pubcasting is protected from pressures to change, Price reasoned. Its structure could even be seen as "a vast and effective anti-takeover device."
A sunnier view came from John Hollar, executive v.p. of PBS, who delivered what Noam called "the most upbeat presentation by PBS I've heard in years." PBS is "staying squarely on mission," but is now more focused and active than ever, Hollar argued. It isn't "dithering" about the onset of DTV, for instance, but already planning for multichannel DTV in the daytime.
But other speakers focused on public TV's shortcomings, if only to explain how they got that way. Willard "Wick" Rowland, once a PBS planner and now dean of journalism and mass comm at the University of Colorado, traced public TV's "byzantine" structure to conscious responses to the American political environment.
"Notice the deal to be dealt," he said. Only in the U.S. must pubcasters avoid being entertaining. "There's nothing shy about public broadcasting in other societies." He traced this discrepancy back to the end of World War I, when America began feeling its oats, adopting a pervasive "we've got it right" attitude that ignored European ways.
"This is not Europe, thank God," replied Solveig Singleton, director of information studies at the Cato Institute, a think tank that favors the smallest possible government. Rowland appeared to turn red.
Singleton called public TV "an inherently unstable institution," neither government nor business, and not that important anyway, because "it's just television," and dull besides. Later she took that back: "I don't actually think public television is dull. I don't watch television at all."
Luncheon speaker was former Sen. Larry Pressler, now "part investment banker, part lobbyist, part lawyer," as he described himself. Pressler recalled how Republican leaders had the votes in the House and Senate to set up a $1.5 billion trust fund to cut pubcasting loose. "We had an endowment all set, but [pubcasters] didn't want it. . . They were afraid to take the first step, I guess."
Pressler didn't explain that pubcasters were also rejecting an endowment that would pay out about one-third or less of the amount CPB received this year from Congress.
"Clear shyness" about risky topics
On the progressive side of the speaker roster, University of Pennsylvania Prof. Oscar H. Gandy Jr. urged that pubcasting's public subsidies be directed toward programming for the poor and not for audiences that can get their programs through advertiser-supported media.
B.J. Bullert, a documentarian, American University professor and author of Public Television: Politics and the Battle over Documentary Film, said she finds public TV behaving like other established institutions--pursuing its own interests without giving attention to the views of weak minorities.
She doesn't expect a station to be able to develop programming with or about dissatisfied workers in a major factory if the company is a big donor to the station.
James Ledbetter, Village Voice writer and author of last year's public TV history, Made Possible By, said the field, with its imports of British drama, is a "tremendous failure" in reflecting American culture. But dramas based on long-settled British issues of the 19th century are safer for PBS than Tales of the City, he said.
Jack Willis, former president of KTCA in Twin Cities and now a fellow at George Soros' Foundation for Open Society, recommended a campaign for a trust fund "to get out from under the hand of government and commercial interests," and the creation of an institution outside of pubcasting to develop new program streams that public TV cannot develop because of its "clear shyness of taking on risky projects."
Outside link: Information about the seminar on Columbia Institute for Tele-Information web site.
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