Public broadcasting’s response to a detailed inquiry by Sen. Larry Pressler (R-S.D.) arrived on Capitol Hill the evening of Feb. 10, accompanied by three boxes of supporting material. All but one of the major national organizations submitted responses to the Senate Commerce Committee chairman’s 16-page, single-spaced questionnaire, which included more than 200 questions about the field’s financing, program policies and interrelationships [earlier story]. Pressler earlier had withdrawn some of his queries about political contributions by public broadcasting employees and personal data on NPR staffers. CPB said collecting the information by the senator’s deadline cost $92,000 for staff time, legal fees and copying.

“When you basically cut the legs out under the gang that’s gotten you to this point, this has to mean something,” said a prominent programmer, “so the question is, what does it mean?” Passed over for the top programming spot in PBS’s January reorganization, Jennifer Lawson resigned her position last week. Her deputy, John Grant, also quit. Lawson joined PBS five years ago as its first chief program executive, entrusted with greater authority and more cash than previous PBS programmers to shape the schedule and bargain with producers. The departures of Lawson and Grant will clear the way for executives hired by President Ervin Duggan to follow their own programming vision–a subject of much speculation and some anxiety among station programmers who met with PBS earlier this month.

Three polls taken last month gave majorities of 62 to 84 percent favoring CPB’s federal funding. Then, a few days later, comes one showing the public 63 percent okaying cutbacks. Why such a flip-flop? “Question wording can move poll results very drastically,” replies John Brennan, polling director at the Los Angeles Times, which published the fourth poll. In the first three polls, the questions about CPB appropriations simply asked whether the funding should be continued or eliminated or, in the case of PBS’s own commissioned poll, whether it should be increased, maintained or decreased. The results were that: 62 percent opposed eliminating the funding in the Business Week/Harris Poll, 84 percent told PBS’s pollster “increase” or “maintain,” and 76 percent said “continue” in the USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll.

When public broadcasters awoke on Jan. 23 [1995], they saw the headlines and their heads started spinning. Newspapers reported that Bell Atlantic [later renamed Verizon] was interested in a partnership with CPB “that would have the Baby Bell step into the funding role now played by the federal government,” as the Wall Street Journal put it. That news came from Sen. Larry Pressler who revealed on CBS’s Face the Nation that the company and other telecom firms were interested in buying or partnering with public broadcasting after Congress privatizes it. To people who thought they understood media economics, it made no sense.

For an industry that has “elitist” planted on its back like a hard-to-reach sticky label, the most critical piece of public broadcasting’s campaign to save itself may be the grassroots response. Opponents of CPB funding in Congress complain they’re swamped with calls and some charge that pubcasters, because they get federal funds, can’t legally lobby. Stations argue that they are within their rights as long as they don’t use federal money to lobby. When constituent calls and letters reach a “critical mass,” they penetrate even the toughest mind-sets in Congress, said Bond. “Constituents always can make a difference. If we can change someone’s position, that’s the best we can hope for, to send the signal that this is not worth bloodying your hands for.”

The little town where I grew up — Manning, S.C. — was small enough that we could walk to church on Sunday. My Sunday School teacher was a Southern matriarch named Virginia Richards Sauls, one of nine daughters of a South Carolina governor. Miss Virginia, as we called her, never tired of telling us the great stories of the Bible. Her favorite was the Parable of the Talents. In that parable, a rich man leaving on a journey entrusts his property — measured in what were called talents — to his three servants for safekeeping. He returns to find that two servants have invested their talents well — so well, in fact, that their worth has doubled.

An inquiry by Sen. Larry Pressler last week put public broadcasters on notice that they face hostile scrutiny during Senate consideration of CPB’s reauthorization. The South Dakota senator’s office sent a 16-page, single-spaced questionnaire to CPB and other major pubcasting organizations seeking a myriad details about the field’s finances and program policies, as well as the political contributions of those working within the field and personal data about all members of NPR’s staff. [Later article on the responses.] Pressler later withdrew a handful of the more than 200 questions after CPB Chairman Henry Cauthen advised him that answering them would violate individuals’ rights to privacy.

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.

In many ways, Orlando Bagwell’s work announced his arrival as a notable creative talent years ago, when he and a handful of mostly inexperienced, young producers collaborated with Henry Hampton on Eyes on the Prize, the civil rights series that made television history in 1987. The opportunity to work as a member of Hampton’s team “changed my whole life,” Bagwell recalled. A young father who made his living primarily as a cameraman for public broadcasting stations and producers, Bagwell had come to believe that path would take him through life — until Hampton offered him the chance to produce and direct his own films on the civil rights movement.

Indian country’s first satellite radio network is set to launch Oct. 31 with a weekday hourlong anthology of native programming from producers around the country. Supported by a 27-month, $459,000 grant from CPB, American Indian Radio on Satellite (AIROS) will link about 25 tribal stations in 10 states — many on reservations where radio is the sole telecommunications service. AIROS directors see the network as a first step toward an ambitious goal: building and linking stations on 250 Indian reservations. “It’s historic,” says Susan Braine, an Assiniboine Sioux, who has been the network’s one-woman staff since January. “It gives us the ability to communicate with each other in a way mainstream America has taken for granted — has used and abused!

You seldom hear that members of an association are voluntarily doubling their dues, but that’s about what the Station Resource Group is doing. Ten years after an informal group of station managers, the Dallas 15, hired Tom Thomas and Terry Clifford, the stations are raising their commitment and buying more of the consultants’ time. When Thomas and Clifford return home from last weekend’s annual SRG retreat — Aug. 18-22 in Park City, Utah — they’ll bring back a “to do” list and authorization to spend full time on it. Until now, SRG has taken about two-thirds of their time, Thomas estimates.

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein wowed a lunchtime audience at the Public Television Annual Meeting in June 1994 with her personal testimonial for public TV, relating her experience in terms far more vivid than the bland, generic phrases usually used to describe and defend the medium. Wasserstein received the Pulitizer as well as a Tony and other awards for her play The Heidi Chronicles in 1989. From the podium at the PBS conference, Wasserstein looked out on a vast dark room full of noshing broadcasters. When WNET invited me to speak to this intimate little luncheon in Orlando today, I jumped on a plane because I had nightmare visions of an imminent merger, and Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse hosting the MacNeil/Lehrer Report and Charlie Rose opening his show by singing, “Be my guest, be my guest .

When the new administrator of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration drew a “bright line” against equipment grants to a station that broadcasts a weekly religious service, that was okay with the Constitution, a federal judge has ruled. Larry Irving’s decision to make WFUV-FM ineligible for NTIA grants was “within the bounds of the law,” said Judge Charles R. Richey of the District Court for Washington, D.C., in a summary judgment June 29 [1994]. WFUV’s long struggle with NTIA took an unexpected turn last year when Irving, a new Clinton Administration appointee, reversed a previous NTIA ruling and told the Fordham University station that it was ineligible because of the Mass that it airs every Sunday morning.