Empowered to cook: Julia gives us the courage, shows us her joy

The publication last year of a 700-page, hugely detailed biography of Julia Child (Appetite for Life — Julia Child by Noel Riley Fitch, Doubleday) has bestirred a Manhattan memory. One evening toward the end of the 1960s, my wife and I were having dinner at La Caravel, a gracious French restaurant in New York. Dining there was a treat; the food was excellent and the service quietly efficient. The place held a special allure for me because it was the site of a superb documentary by Nell Cox, French Lunch. The short film records events in the kitchen from the first luncheon order through a frenetic, almost balletic crescendo of culinary movements at dinnertime — punctuated by the flare of flaming dishes — and finally subsides in a relaxed, post-service meal for the waiters and cooks themselves.

Association of Public Television Stations (APTS) Bylaws, 1998

These are the bylaws of APTS, as of June 1998, a District of Columbia nonprofit corporation that represents public TV in Washington. At that point, the group was calling itself  the Association of America’s Public Television Stations, or America’s Public Television Stations for short. ARTICLE I. OFFICES AND REGISTERED AGENT. Section 1. Registered Office.

Mo’ better radio

Believe it or not, there’s a stone tablet full of radio principles guiding This American Life. Ira Glass laid them out in a talk …

High court upholds authority of Arkansas network in debate case

The broadcast decision that embroiled Arkansas ETV in a landmark First Amendment struggle ever since 1992 was “a reasonable, viewpoint-neutral exercise of journalistic discretion,” the Supreme Court ruled May 18. The high court’s 6-3 ruling overturned an Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals decision in 1996 that the state network had infringed House candidate Ralph P. Forbes’ free-speech rights by refusing to add him to the two major-party nominees in a broadcast debate more than five years ago. “This is a great decision for viewers,” and will let the network continue airing candidate debates, said Susan Howarth, executive director of the five-transmitter state network, according to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. “The majority opinion gives us as much or more than we thought we would win in our most optimistic moments,” said the elated Richard D. Marks, attorney for Arkansas ETV. Marks had pictured the Circuit Court’s 1996 decision as “a grave threat” to state-owned pubcasters that could undercut their ability to make editorial judgments.

CTW finds its cable outlet: a venture with Nickelodeon

In a partnership that aims to position educational children’s programs at the forefront
of the digital cable movement, Viacom’s Nickelodeon cable network and Children’s
Television Workshop last week announced plans to launch a new network for kids, to be
called Noggin. The long-anticipated channel will feature programs from each partner’s library,
including old episodes of the venerable Sesame Street, to serve both preschoolers
and school-aged children. Early plans call for it to run without commercials, drawing
revenues solely from cable-operator fees. “In an era when many television networks have abandoned their responsibility to do
more than just entertain, we are extremely proud to be joining with the long-standing
leader in kids’ educational programming, CTW, to bring Noggin to life,” said Herb
Scannell, president of Nickelodeon. “We hope to make learning cool, through
Noggin.”

Ambrosino and ‘Nova’: making stories that go ‘bang’

In the first of May in 1971, Michael Ambrosino sat at his desk at 25 Wetherby Gardens in London writing a six-page, single-spaced letter to Michael Rice, vice president for programs at WGBH, Boston. “This project in science,” he wrote, “would begin to fill an appalling gap in PBS service. It would attempt to explain and relate science to a public that must be aware of its impact. “The strand would be broad enough to cover all of science and . .

Court gives WFUV fifth victory for its tower plan

New York state’s highest court early this month unanimously upheld WFUV-FM’s right to complete the radio tower on Fordham University’s Bronx campus, despite complaints from the nearby New York Botanical Garden that the tower spoils the skyline. This was the fifth victory in various administrative and court appeals. For nearly four years the tower has remained half-built. The ruling by the New York State Court of Appeals upheld a local zoning ruling that permitted the tower. Remaining federal historic issues are being mediated between the university and the botanical garden.

Jim Lehrer takes his own advice: Make sure it matters to you

Two decades ago, Jim Lehrer and Robert MacNeil gave public television a kind of news program that contrasted greatly with the aims of big-network journalism, and the distinction has grown year by year with the decay of the network news divisions. Contributing Editor David Stewart, retired director of international activities at CPB, profiled Lehrer for a forthcoming book on the major programs of public TV. In 1970, on a steaming summer morning in Dallas, I walked into a large room of the public TV station KERA and met Jim Lehrer for the first time. He was seated alone at the end of a long rectangular table, its surface strewn with daily papers, reporters’ notes, overflowing ashtrays and half-empty mugs of coffee. He was studying a clutch of wire service stories, shirt sleeves rolled back, tie pulled away from his unbuttoned collar — the city editor from central casting, I remember thinking.

Minnesota net endows itself with sale of mail-order firm

With the $120-million sale of for-profit sister company Rivertown Trading to Dayton Hudson, Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) gains a secure subsidy while ridding itself of a longtime public relations problem. The Minnesota Communications Group–parent of MPR and the for-profit Greenspring Co.–announced March 23 it was selling the catalog business to the Minneapolis-based retail giant, parent of department store chains including Target and Marshall Field. MPR and Greenspring President Bill Kling and two other top execs share the bulk of $7.3 million in payouts under a plan previously laid down by their boards of directors. But the big beneficiary is MPR, which gets about $90 million of the net proceeds to add to its existing $19 million endowment fund, giving it by far the largest endowment in public radio. The endowment should give MPR annual income equal to the average $4-million-a-year contribution Rivertown made to the network over the last 10 years of its existence.

Fred Friendly: ‘a tough man but, my God, full of ideas’

Fred W. Friendly, the legendary CBS News producer who tried to bring innovation to public TV in the 1960s and later developed a celebrated series of televised seminars on major public policy issues, died March 3 at his home in New York City. He was 82. “He was a great broadcaster, a great innovator, a great friend of public television,” observed PBS President Ervin Duggan in a release. At CBS, Friendly worked for years with Edward R. Murrow, producing many of his appearances, including the milestone 1954 report that questioned Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist campaign and the famous CBS Reports: “Harvest of Shame” on the lives of migrant workers, aired in 1960. He was named president of the news division in 1964 and quit two years later when the network carried an I Love Lucy rerun instead of a Senate hearing on the Vietnam war.

Merger: we’re not talking now, but we might be talking later

It may be a simple question–are PRI and NPR talking about a merger?–but that doesn’t mean it gets a simple answer. To keep their options open, the presidents of the two networks are employing nuances that reach beyond the English of newspaper headlines and into metaphysical realms of potentiality. Asked to clarify their positions Feb. 19 [1998], NPR’s Delano Lewis said talks with PRI are still ongoing and PRI’s Stephen Salyer said they’re not, “currently.” Lewis was questioned at the NPR Board meeting after trade periodicals delivered conflicting assessments that both came from Salyer:

“NPR-PRI merger talks are off, says Salyer,” said the headline of Current’s Feb.

Seven years in a ‘dynamic environment’

Cecily Truett and Larry Lancit rolled the dice. In the spring of 1991, they took their production company and its best known product, and laid them at the feet of GKN Securities Corp., a small investment firm, which organized the initial public offering of their production company. By then, the Lancits had filled a trophy case with awards as producers of Reading Rainbow. But Lancit Media Productions’ earnings were barely enough to scrape by. It was certainly not enough to expand.

Funny and civilized Frank Muir: patron of Pythons and radio games

Hands-up, all those who listen regularly to My Music, the half-hour radio panel game produced by the BBC and distributed by WFMT-FM in Chicago to about 60 public radio stations in the U.S.

Ah, I see a hand there in the back. It’s all right, you may remain anonymous. How many, then, have heard of its companion program, My Word!? Two more. Let the four of us leave the room to recall some favorite segments from these superb series, two of the most civilized radio programs on the air today.

Teletubby on a happy walk

Eh-oh!

Over the hills and far away, Teletubbies come to play. In Teletubbyland, a lush green landscape of undulating hills spotted with clumps of bright flowers, the world is safe and fun — a place to explore and learn through play. We know this because the sun baby, who rises over the set at the beginning of each episode, gurgles, coos and shrieks with pleasure at the adventures of the Teletubbies, four alien yet adorable, toddlerlike beings who live there, cared for and entertained by otherworldly gadgets. Teletubbies, the groundbreaking BBC children’s series that’s prompted both an outcry and a massive consumer craze since its debut last March debut in Britain, is about to arrive in the PBS schedule, April 6. The series is based on the premise — already much-debated in Britain — that very young children are watching television but don’t understand it, so they might as well have a show that’s designed for them.

Fred Wiseman’s novelistic samplings of reality

As I write these words, Frederick Wiseman’s 30th film, Public Housing, is about to be broadcast, Dec. 1 [1998], through PBS, the national network that has presented all of his documentaries. It concerns the Ida B. Wells housing development on Chicago’s South Side. The sites of his past documentaries have varied from high schools to hospitals, from public parks to private playgrounds. He has shown us the inside of military and police units, welfare and model agencies, prisons, a primate research lab, a meat packing plant and a zoo.

We’ll look back on this old Barney: an early input-output gizmo you could hug

Dolls have talked for years, but it was Microsoft’s ActiMates Interactive Barney that became a full-fledged peripheral for the computer–with hints of the nifty and bizarre stuff that will flood the world when digital broadcasting begins. Next month, at Toy Fair ’98 in New York City, the company is expected to announce the addition of an Arthur doll to the ActiMates line, and Children’s Television Workshop will introduce a similar smart doll of its own. And if the technology inside these little wriggling, sensing and talking input-output dolls develops as rapidly as other digital devices do, in a few years we’ll see smarter descendants become tools and toys for older kids and adults as well. For kids in the 2-3 range, and for Microsoft, Barney was enough of a phenomenon for now. Though Sesame Street’s much cheaper “Sing & Snore Ernie” easily outsold it, hundreds of thousands of Barneys galumphed out of the stores.