System/Policy

Rochester indie-movie venue now operated by WXXI

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WXXI in Rochester, N.Y., has acquired a downtown movie house, The Little Theatre, it announced Dec. 19. The art-deco theater, founded in 1929 as part of a “little theatre” movement promoting alternatives to Hollywood’s mass-audience movies, still specializes in indie and foreign films, including anime and docs. In recent decades it was expanded from one to five screens, and to 940 seats, and it became a nonprofit. “The Little,” as it’s known locally, screens more than 100 films a year and hosts several annual community film festivals.

Quick Takes

Mattel acquires Kids Sprout channel partner HIT Entertainment

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Toy giant Mattel is buying HIT Entertainment, part owner with PBS and Sesame Workshop of the Kids Sprout children’s educational cable channel, for $680 million, according to the Hollywood Reporter. With more than $180 million in annual revenue, HIT is one of the largest independent owners of intellectual property for preschoolers, holding titles including Thomas & Friends, Barney, Bob the Builder, Fireman Sam and Angelina Ballerina. Sprout launched initially as a video on demand service on April 1, 2005, and became a cable and satellite channel in September 2005 (background, Current, Nov. 1, 2004).

Quick Takes

WFCR takes new name: New England Public Radio

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Western Massachusetts broadcaster WFCR-FM has adopted a new name — one that seems to speak of ongoing expansion: New England Public Radio. CEO Martin Miller announced the plans at a station event Wednesday night. Celebrating its 50th anniversary, the station announced it has arranged to buy new quarters in downtown Springfield, south of its longtime home in Amherst, and has bought a new FM frequency in the Berkshire Mountains town of Adams, northwest of Amherst. The news and classical music station, licensed to the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, added a second program schedule, all-news/talk, on a leased station in the 1990s and in October acquired WNNZ-AM for the schedule. By building translators in addition, one or both of its program streams now span from southern Vermont to northern Connecticut, New Hampshire to Albany, N.Y. Where it may encounter competition from another growing regional public radio franchise, Northeast Public Radio (WAMC).

Quick Takes

CPB launches $4.4 million, 20-station American Graduate program

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CPB kicked off its American Graduate initiative Tuesday (May 3) at the Newseum in Washington, D.C.

The $4.4 million project aims to boost graduation rates in 20 communities nationwide, using multiplatform content for at-risk students and their teachers. Host Ray Suarez, a senior correspondent for PBS NewsHour and the event’s host, said the graduation rates among Hispanics and African-Americans was only about 54 percent in 2007. “This is something we really don’t have an option to fix — we have to,” Suarez said. Appearing were Hill Harper, star of CSI:NY, a graduate of Brown University and Harvard Law School; he also wrote the best-selling Letters to a Young Brother: Manifest Your Destiny. Actress America Ferrera, best known for Ugly Betty, talked about her mother’s anger when Ferrera’s sister was told “not to bother” with applying for college because she was Hispanic.

Quick Takes

O’Keefe sting, part 2: Attempt to hide $5 mil gift blocked by Slocum, Schiller

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In the second part of the right-wing undercover sting of NPR, released Thursday (March 10), a senior fundraiser told one of the men posing as a wealthy Muslim donor that she would explore whether NPR could shield his organization’s gift from government auditors. The phony donor recorded phone conversations with Betsy Liley, senior director of institutional giving, in which he inquired whether his organization’s planned $5 million gift to NPR would be subject to a government audit, given that NPR receives federal funding. NPR released e-mails from its top executives to document that ultimately the fake philanthropist didn’t pass scrutiny. Joyce Slocum, NPR general counsel who was appointed interim c.e.o. after Vivian Schiller’s resignation on Wednesday, wrote on March 4 to the donor posing as Ibrahim Halem Kassam, and told him to produce tax documentation of his nonprofit trust, the Muslim Education Action Center. In the audiotape of Liley, released as excerpted and full-length versions yesterday, the donor says, “It sounded like you were saying that NPR would be able to shield us from a government audit — is that correct?”

Quick Takes

Forty years ago: KPFT bombed off the air twice in its first year

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Pacifica Radio’s KPFT in Houston “was the first radio station in the United States to be bombed off the air” in May 1970, soon after going on the air, recalled Rick Campbell in a Houston Chronicle blog. That October, 40 years ago this month, the station was dynamited into silence a second time during a broadcast of Arlo Guthrie’s song “Alice’s Restaurant.”

Three members of the Ku Klux Klan were arrested; two got off by testifying against Jimmy Dale Hutto, who was convicted and sent to jail. He allegedly planned to bomb the Pacifica stations in Berkeley and Los Angeles. When the station resumed broadcasting in January 1971, PBS’s Great American Dream Machine covered the event live. “Outside this room, people are celebrating free speech,” said station manager Larry Lee on PBS, “and something is wrong when free speech is a cause for celebration, and there are armed police out there guarding us.” Guthrie wrote a song for the occasion, including these lyrics: “When I get to Houston, pull out my strings, walk to the station, you can hear me sing — you get bombed, all God’s chillun get bombed.”

Programs/Content

Where the Crossroads films and funding went

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CPB’s big America at a Crossroads initiative funded 20 independently produced documentaries on aspects of the post-9/11 world, at a cost not wildly above the predicted $20 million. [This list tracks the 21 grants to producers and the resulting 20 broadcasts. See also Current’s related 2009 article and timeline.]
The funding
Costs of the project’s major phases:
$2,520,724 — for R&D on proposals from 36 producing teams, the first cut in the grantmaking process,
+ 12, 629,507 — for production of the final 20 selected projects, and
+ 5,644,158 — for WETA’s work as “Crossroads entry station” including packaging and promotion of the series and outreach efforts. = $20,794,389 — total cost
Here’s a boxscore counting the productions. Number of documentaries for which CPB announced funding in 2006 for its America at a Crossroads project

20

Additional commissioned in 2006
(The Muslim Americans)

+1

Total productions announced for funding

21

MINUS Not completed (Invasion)

-1

Total completed and broadcast

20

Total distributed to public TV by PBS

19

Distributed by Oregon Public Broadcasting/NETA, Fox News Channel and other outlets

1

Total distributed

20

The films
The first 11 Crossroads films premiered on PBS in April 2007 as a packaged series: 

April 15, 2007
Jihad: The Men and Ideas Behind Al Qaeda, originally Holy War

April 16
Warriors and Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience

April 17
Gangs of Iraq and The Case for War: In Defense of Freedom

April 18
Europe’s 9/11, originally Spain’s 9/11, and The Muslim Americans

April 19
Faith Without Fear, originally The Trouble with Islam, and
Struggle for the Soul of Islam: Inside Indonesia  

April 20
Security versus Liberty: The Other War and The Brotherhood, originally The Terror Dilemma

Nine more docs aired later on PBS, listed by broadcast date:

June 11, 2007
Kansas to Kandahar: Citizen Soldiers at War, originally Citizen Soldiers

Aug.

Quick Takes

PBS buys stake in National Public Media

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PBS has purchased a 10 percent equity share in National Public Media, the national on-air and online corporate sponsorship rep whose clients include NPR, Pbs.org and public radio and TV stations across the country. Formerly known as National Public Broadcasting, NPM was established in 2007 when WGBH and NPR bought NPB. NPR owns 80 percent of the company,  and WGBH owns the rest. As part of the new agreement, PBS President Paula Kerger will be seated on the board along with Vivian Schiller, president of NPR, and Jonathan Abbott, president of WGBH.

Programs/Content

Why & How: ‘Unnatural Causes’

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In this Q&A, content creators talk with Current about why they decided to pursue a project and how they produced it. What: Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick?, a four-hour PBS series that the network scheduled for four Thursday nights on public TV starting March 27. Who made: Larry Adelman, series creator and executive producer, co-director of California Newsreel. Production companies: California Newsreel with Vital Pictures. Presenters: the CPB-funded National Minority Consortia.

BBC

Return of the Pythons: their PBS premiere

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Bring out your dead, practice your silly walks, and steel yourselves for something completely different, yet strangely familiar. PBS is launching a video onslaught of Monty Python humor—the classics as well as the humorists’ annotated favorites and an acclaimed sequel of sorts. PBS has scheduled Monty Python’s Personal Best, a pastiche of new material and clips from the TV series and movies, for Feb. 22, March 1 and 8. Separately, PBS will release all the naughty bits — the 45 original 30-minute episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus — this spring.

System/Policy

CPB to replace Cox as president

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CPB announced Friday it will replace President Kathleen Cox, its president for 10 months. She had been predecessor Robert Coonrod’s No. 2 executive and his chosen
successor when the CPB Board promoted her, effective July 1, but last week’s
terse news release cast her as a temporary hire who was finishing up a series
of research projects inspired by a McKinsey & Co. study of public TV she managed for Coonrod. “Last spring, in no small part because of her significant contributions to [implementing the findings of the study], Kathleen Cox and CPB agreed to a one year contract to serve as president and CEO,” the statement read.

System/Policy

Cincinnati’s WGUC acquires seven-station X-Star Network

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WGUC will buy another Cincinnati public radio operation, WVXU and six affiliated repeater stations, from Xavier University. The sale price of $15 million is the second-largest sum ever paid for a pubradio license, WGUC President Richard Eiswerth told the Cincinnati Post last week. Selling WVXU was “tough but very necessary,” said Xavier’s president, Michael Graham. The Cincinnati school will use the funds to build a student learning and residential center. The deal had been in the works since September but kept under wraps, according to WGUC.

CPB

Public broadcasting system revenues, 1982–2003

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The system’s revenues passed $2 billion late in the 1990s and $2.3 billion during fiscal year 2003, the latest year for which the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has complete figures. Dollar figures below are in thousands. The portion from private, non–tax-based sources passed 50 percent of the total in fiscal year 1986 and has hovered around 60 percent since FY1999 (see “Private sources row”). Source: CPB’s annual Public Broadcasting Revenue reports. For breakdowns between public TV and public radio and other details, see CPB’s latest full report, for fiscal 2003 system revenues, in a PDF file.

System/Policy

PBS loses biggest underwriter as it considers 30-second credits

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ExxonMobil will stop underwriting Masterpiece Theatre after spring
2004, the oil company announced Dec. 13. It has spent more than
$250 million on MT and other PBS programs over 32 years. In recent
years, the company has spent about $10 million a year, providing full
funding for the drama series, says Jeanne Hopkins, v.p. of communications
at WGBH, which packages the series. For years before merging with Exxon, Mobil had also supported another series
of largely British dramas, Mystery!, but Mobil had dropped funding
of the sister series Mystery!

Tech

Pubcasting on the Web, three years later

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PBS Online is celebrating its third anniversary this week with a doubled
staff, an expanded mission, an upgraded teachers’ service that opens next
month, and a much faster connection with the Internet, to be turned on this
month. In the three years since PBS launched its site, the Web has grown to 39
million users a week in this country, with online ad sales approaching $1
billion. During the same period, public broadcasting’s largest web site,
PBS’s, has built an audience of more than 2 million unique visitors a month,
who choose among some 50,000 pages. Things have moved so fast, says PBS Online
chief Cindy Johanson, “it seems like it was 10 years ago, not three.” PBS expanded its Internet connection by one-third last February, and demand
soon had it hitting the ceiling again.

Obituaries

Public TV defender, visionary Ralph Rogers dies in Dallas

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Ralph B. Rogers, the Dallas businessman who re-founded and perhaps saved PBS in the early 1970s, died Nov. 4 after a long illness. He was 87. In business, Rogers was millionaire founder and, until recently, chairman of Texas Industries, a concrete and building materials firm now known as TXI. But in his civic life, he was many men–“one of the last survivors of a generation of leaders who shaped Dallas after World War II,” according to the Dallas Morning News.

System/Policy

Gingrich wants to ‘zero-out’ federal funding to CPB

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House Speaker-designate Newt Gingrich said on his weekly cable TV show last week that he wants to “zero-out” CPB funding this year. Remarks by Gingrich (R-Ga.) and new Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Larry Pressler (R-S.D.) fit perfectly into a dire scenario described in newspaper columns by commentators from Linda Ellerbee on the left to New York Post critic John Podhoretz on the right. Anticipating a coming legislative struggle, presidents of the public broadcasting’s national organizations have joined a task force convened by CPB President Richard Carlson. The leaders aim to “generate a full positive and informative picture of … what public broadcasting does and what it is that CPB funding buys,” said CPB spokesman Michael Schoenfeld.

History of public media

The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967

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Enacted less than 10 months after the report of the Carnegie Commission on Educational Broadcasting, this law initiates federal aid to the operation (as opposed to funding capital facilities) of public broadcasting. Provisions include:

extending authorization of the earlier Educational Television Facilities Act,
forbidding educational broadcasting stations to editorialize or support or oppose political candidates,
establishing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and defining its board and purposes
authorizing reduced telecommunications rates for interconnection
authorizing appropriations to CPB, and
authorizing a federal study of instructional television and radio. Public Law 90-129, 90th Congress, November 7, 1967 (as amended to April 26, 1968)
Title I—Construction of Facilities
Extension of duration of construction grants for educational broadcasting

Sec. 101. (a) Section 391 of the Communications Act of 1934 (47 U.S.C. 391) is amended by inserting after the first sentence the following new sentence: “There are also authorized to be appropriated for carrying out the purposes of such section, $10,500,000 for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1968, $12,500,000 for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1969, and $15,000,000 for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1970.”

(b) The last sentence of such section is amended by striking out “July 1, 1968” and inserting in lieu thereof “July 1,1971.”

Maximum on grants in any State

Sec.

Public Media Policybase

Educational Television Progress Report, Sen. Warren Magnuson, 1965

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Sen. Warren G. Magnuson (D-Wash.), then chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, laid out the case for federal aid to public broadcasting in this report published a month before the creation of the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television. The senator entered the report in the Congressional Record as an “extension of remarks” for Oct. 22, 1965. Little more than two years later, President Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act.  

Mr. President, in 1962 the Congress enacted the Educational Television Facilities Act which made it possible for direct Federal support for educational television stations.