Programs/Content

Pacifica Radio Archives unearths missing 1964 London speech by Martin Luther King Jr.

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Fifty years ago, Pacifica Radio correspondent Saul Bernstein recorded a 62-minute speech delivered in London by Martin Luther King Jr., in which the civil rights leader spoke about apartheid and the then-recent sentencing of Nelson Mandela. The recording, believed to be the only full record of King’s speech, was thought to be lost to time. But a half-century later, Pacifica Archives Director Brian DeShazor uncovered Bernstein’s recording in a dusty box while working on a Saturday, researching another project, “American Women Making History & Culture, 1963-1982,” a two-year effort funded by the National Archives to preserve hundreds of recordings. Now listeners to Democracy Now!, which airs on Pacifica’s five stations around the country, will hear the speech on the show’s Martin Luther King Day edition, and donors to the financially struggling network can receive a copy as a premium. DeShazor said he found the tape due to a lucky break.

Programs/Content

WNYC shares previously unreleased recordings of Martin Luther King Jr. interviews

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New York’s WNYC has released for the first time recordings of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. interviewed on several occasions in the 1960s by Eleanor Fischer, a Canadian Broadcasting Corp. reporter who later worked for NPR. The interviews capture King discussing a wide range of subjects, including his childhood, his adoption of nonviolent resistance tactics, and the Montgomery bus boycott. The recordings were among tapes given to WNYC’s archive in 2008 after Fischer passed away. “We are a rich archive in content but not a huge staff of people and we have received many collections,” wrote Archive Director Andy Lanset in an email to Current.

History of public media

CPB will seek operator to develop American Archive; director leaves project

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Having lost its digital projects fund last year, CPB lacks the money to develop the American Archive much further, according to Mark Erstling, senior v.p. The next step is to find an outside institution to adopt and support creation of the proposed archive of public stations’ historic audio, video and films.

That helps explain why professional archivist Matthew White left CPB Jan. 13 after two years as executive director. “It was very clear to him that things were going to change significantly,” Erstling says, and White accepted an offer to lead a “significant” archiving project abroad. White could not be reached for comment. CPB declined Current’s multiple requests for interviews with White over the previous two years.

Programs/Content

Fans’ demand prompts revival of sci-fi classic

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WNET, dastardly villain in a two-decade scheme to deprive science-fiction buffs of the coolest public TV program of all time, this summer will redeem its reputation among fans. “The Lathe of Heaven,” digitally remastered and repackaged with additional material, will be distributed to public TV stations for broadcast in June [2000]. A home video and DVD will be released in the fall. Originally broadcast on PBS in 1980, the drama inspired a cult following that never forgot the show, and never let WNET forget it, either. Fans of the program came together in an “extensive Internet community” to rage against the producing station’s “ruthless warehousing” of their favorite public TV show, and one site accused WNET of “corporate amnesia,” recalls Joseph Basile, director of program rights and clearances.

Programs/Content

Hull dived into the PBS archives, found himself among old friends

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After a year of combing through PBS’s archives, Ron Hull has uncovered a treasure-trove of programs worth reviving one way or another. Though he still spends part of each week in Nebraska, where he teaches a university class in international broadcasting, Hull has made considerable progress on his special assignment at PBS headquarters in Virginia: he has read through some 12,000 old file folders, come up with 850 programs that might be useful, and begun the gargantuan task of screening the first 10 minutes of these myriad possibilities. He’s been assisted in this by Nancy Dillon, assistant director of program data and analysis. The revival prospects that he’s found could come back through the National Program Service, be syndicated through PBS Select or PBS Plus or be offered as fundraising programs. When Bob Ottenhoff, PBS executive v.p., recruited Hull for this assignment last spring, he also asked the veteran programmer to look for shows that could be released on home video, sold overseas, or packaged for a dedicated cable service. The idea was to cull the archives for programs that could find new broadcast audiences or generate new revenue streams for PBS.

History of public media

History-makers tour new archives

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The old-timers wandered curiously among the shelves, munching cookies and poking into file boxes, looking casually for their footprints in the history of public broadcasting. It was the concluding field trip of this month’s Public Broadcasting Reunion [related article] — a bus ride from Washington to nearby University of Maryland at College Park, where the new National Public Broadcasting Archives is open for business. Donald R. McNeil, the founding director, and Thomas Connors, his designated successor, showed off a facility that already has:

2,500 shelf feet of corporate records from CPB, PBS, NPR and other organizations;
360 shelf feet of personal papers and dozens of oral histories of the field;
5,600 audio tapes from the National Association of Educational Broadcasters, WAMU-FM and WETA-FM; and
3,000 videotapes from PBS, WETA-TV, Maryland PTV and other sources, among other things. Five hundred file boxes from Children’s Television Workshop are on the way, and 800 more reels from NPR. Standing in the high-ceilinged, half-empty room in the basement of the university’s Hornbake Library, Connors invited the visitors to talk with the archives about old correspondence, reports and other items that might make the day of some future historian.