NPR’s decisions to air, and then not to air, Mumia Abu-Jamal’s death-row commentaries might yet take another turn. The network is committed to airing prisoners’ voices — perhaps Abu-Jamal’s, in a form different from the stand-alone commentaries originally planned, NPR Vice President Bill Buzenberg said Wednesday. “I see this as a decision to pull back” and “postpone,” he said. “We’ll make other editorial decisions down the road.” The silence from prisons allows a public hysterical about crime to maintain its stereotyped image of prisoners and not think about them as complex human beings, says Sussman. The NPR-distributed Fresh Air interview program, meanwhile, may hire an inmate commentator (separate story below).

Weeks before the debut of an American Experience film on the U.S. response to the Holocaust, defenders of President Franklin Roosevelt undertook a quiet campaign to influence and later discredit historical analysis presented in “America and the Holocaust: Deceit and Indifference.” In the disturbing film, aired April 6, 1994, producer Marty Ostrow argued that the Roosevelt Administration knew that the Nazis were systematically slaughtering Jews and followed a policy of not rescuing them. The critics’ complaint, in the words of William vanden Heuvel, president of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, was that the film was “one-sided and grossly unfair, indifferent to the truth and deceitful in concept.”

With about 90 percent of the population covered by its signals, public radio has reached all the ”easy” regions and is now filling in the gaps, usually in less-populated areas. Even when there’s money to add repeating transmitters, however, there are often technical glitches. The furor has died down somewhat in recent weeks, but when public radio first came to Chillicothe, Mo., in August 1993, hundreds of people wanted it to go back where it came from. In an area where households without cable were accustomed to picking up Kansas City Royals games and other programming on weak signals from TV stations 70 miles away, the new 100 kw FM signal was so much closer that it blasted the ballgames right off the tube.

This article is based on remarks by Marshall Turner, then chair of the CPB Board, at the board’s Jan. 27, 1994, meeting. Turner is an engineer and partner in the San Francisco venture capital firm of Taylor and Turner Associates and a longtime board member of PBS and KQED-TV/FM. Some say that the advent of new media — in particular, the challenge of cable television — has decreased the need for public broadcasting and its partial federal support. The opposite is true. Such suggestions miss the point of public television’s enduring potential. Our opportunities to serve the American public are growing as a result of changes in the broadcasting environment.

As PBS’s fourth president, FCC member Ervin S. Duggan, 54, will take the lead of public TV at a time when momentous developments seem near. The field’s biggest ventures beyond single-channelhood are just ahead, along with the high promise, high cost and high-definition of digital technology. And the stations, at their fall planning meeting in mid-November, appeared ready to begin talking seriously about restructuring for that future. Good thing that Duggan enjoys “that feeling of flying out off the cliff, and floating, and testing my wings,” as he remarked Dec. 1 [1993], at the press conference where his election was announced.

Reportedly denied eligibility for a federal equipment grant because it carries one church service a week, Fordham University’s WFUV-FM has sued the Commerce Department for relief. Both the university and the Commerce Department’s Public Telecommunications Facilities Program (PTFP) apparently use First Amendment arguments to justify their cases. The Jesuit university says Commerce is violating its First Amendment right of free speech as well as the Communications Act, which it says prohibits government control of program content. And PTFP’s overseer, new Assistant Secretary of Commerce Larry Irving, reportedly believes that awarding equipment grants to stations with religious programming would undermine the church/state separation required by the First Amendment.

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.

Public radio last month used an old Ted Turner technique to launch a 24-hour bilingual radio network for Latinos. The superstation in this case is KSJV-FM in Fresno, Cal., flagship of Radio Bilingue’s noncommercial station group. WSJV’s schedule officially went up on the public radio satellite system Sept. 16 [1993], the anniversary of several Latin American countries’ independence from Spain. The network—named with the Spanish word “Satelite”—gets its operational funding from the CPB Radio Program Fund and matching funds for satellite equipment from the Public Telecommunications Facilities Program. The CPB fund backed the project with $500,000 grant in 1992, for its first two years, and is considering a $600,000 renewal in the next Radio Program Fund grant round to be announced early next year, according to fund Director Rick Madden.

The man who put New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia on the radio, reading the comics during a newspaper strike — M.S. “Morrie” Novik — talked the other day about his first trip west of Chicago. That excursion to Iowa more than 50 years ago was also the first time the head of New York’s municipal radio station, WNYC, had much contact with the midwesterners who were big in “educational radio.” Novik recognized they were up to the same thing he was, and he joined a fellowship that continues today. He was among his fellows again Oct. 8-9 [1993], during a Public Broadcasting Reunion, where a big roomful of admitted idealists reminisced, ribbed each other, tut-tutted about things these days, and unabashedly proclaimed their values.

After a seven-month investigation of the factual accuracy of ”Liberators: Fighting on Two Fronts in World War II,” WNET announced Sept. 7, 1993, that some portions of the documentary were ”seriously flawed” and that the New York station would continue to withhold the film from PTV distribution until it is corrected. Judging by the producers’ reactions, the film is unlikely to return to the public airwaves. In a statement issued by Bill Miles and Nina Rosenblum, the filmmakers stood by the oral testimony presented in ”Liberators,” criticized WNET’s review for not being conducted independently, and accused WNET and PBS of censorship.

With the warning that public television must “reinvent itself” if it is to “meet the needs of the American public in the 21st century,” a task force appointed by the Twentieth Century Fund recommended fundamental restructuring of the existing public television system in a report issued [in July 1993]. [Task force members included former PBS President Lawrence Grossman; Ervin Duggan, soon to be appointed to head PBS later in 1993; and other prominent national-level figures in media and finance.] Completing what task force members characterized as a reexamination of the basic purpose and principles of public broadcasting on the 25th anniversary of the field’s creation, the 21-member group envisioned a significant role for public television in the multichannel environment of the future — one that calls for an expansion of educational programming, strengthening of its mission at all levels, and a redirection of federal funds toward diversified national programming.

These are the recommendations of the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on Public Television, released in the July 1993 report Quality Time? The complete 188-page paperback, including a background paper by Richard Somerset-Ward, published by the Twentieth Century Fund Press, has been available for $9.95 through the Brookings Institution (1-800-275-1447). See also [Current coverage, Aug. 9, 1993.] On mission The mission of public television should be the enrichment and strengthening of American society and culture through high-quality programming that reflects and advances our basic values. In order to fulfill its mission, America’s system of public television needs fundamental structural change.

These are the recommendations of the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on Public Television, released in the July 1993 report Quality Time? The complete 188-page paperback, including a background paper by Richard Somerset-Ward, published by the Twentieth Century Fund Press, is available for $9.95 through the Brookings Institution (1-800-275-1447). See also [Current coverage and list of task force members, Aug. 9, 1993. On mission The mission of public television should be the enrichment and strengthening of American society and culture through high-quality programming that reflects and advances our basic values. In order to fulfill its mission, America’s system of public television needs fundamental structural change.