In 1998, the Clinton administration’s so-called Gore Commission reviewed the “public interest” basis of federal broadcasting law as part of its report on policies for the fast-approaching era of digital television. The Advisory Committee on Public Interest Obligations of Digital Television Broadcasters published its full 160-page report Dec. 18, 1998 (PDF). Federal oversight of all broadcasting has had two general goals: to foster the commercial development of the industry and to ensure that broadcasting serves the educational and informational needs of the American people. In many respects, the two goals have been quite complementary, as seen in the development of network news operations and in the variety of cultural, educational, and public affairs programming aired over the years.

If you were among a certain handful of people watching the Ken Burns/Lynn Novick bio Frank Lloyd Wright Nov. 10–11, you could get a whole lot more from the broadcast after it was over. Most people watching the two-night series saw only a stylized “E” icon appear briefly in the corner of the screen (with the disclosure “where available”), reminding viewers that the program was “enhanced.” But there was more for viewers watching on specially equipped personal computers in the seven cities where public TV stations were putting out DTV signals. As participants in a technical trial by Intel Corp. and PBS, they could take a virtual tour of Wright buildings they had just seen in the film, rummage more broadly through talking-head comments, and go deeper into an interview with old man Wright himself.

Various people tried to prepare Juanita Buschkoetter for the public reaction to The Farmer’s Wife, filmmaker David Sutherland’s cinema verite depiction of the real-life struggle to keep her husband’s farm and their marriage afloat, but the reponse to the show’s debut this fall was far beyond her expectations. “I had no idea how many people would actually watch it,” she said in a recent interview — let alone the folks who would go far out of their way to drive by the Buschkoetter house, or send the family generous gifts. “Since the film, people come by to take pictures, pull in and talk,” Buschkoetter added.

Henry Hampton, the visionary filmmaker who documented the history of the civil rights movement with the landmark PBS series Eyes on the Prize, died Nov. 22 [1998]. He was 58. Hampton recovered from lung cancer some nine years ago, but complications from the treatment that sent the disease into remission claimed his life. The official cause of his death was myelodysplasia, a bone-marrow disease. During a keynote address at the PBS annual meeting in June, Hampton said his doctors recently had given him a good prognosis, although he still perceived the disease as an “ugly beast waiting, sitting somewhere in the quiet, waiting for my guard to drop.”

Before the FCC 98-307 FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION Washington, D.C. 20554 In the Matter of Implementation of Section 25 of the Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act of 1992 Direct Broadcast Satellite Public Interest Obligations MM Docket 93-25 REPORT AND ORDER Adopted: November 19, 1998 Released: November 25, 1998 By the Commission: Chairman Kennard issuing a statement; Commissioners Furchtgott-Roth; Powell and Tristani dissenting in part and issuing seperate statements. TABLE OF CONTENTS I. INTRODUCTION II. BACKGROUND III. SUMMARY IV. DISCUSSION paragraph A. Definition of Providers of DBS Service 1. Part 100 Licensees 15 2. Entities Under Part 25 of the Commission’s Rules 18 3.

Direct broadcast satellite companies will have to set aside 4 percent of their video channel capacity for noncommercial educational programming, the FCC said last week. For a DBS operation like DirecTV/USSB, with around 200 channels, that would make eight for education. The companies will get to choose the provider of each channel. The vote Nov. 19 [1998] ended a long wait for set-aside rules. The 1992 Cable Act ordered the commission to reserve 4 to 7 percent of DBS capacity for noncommercial, educational use, and in 1996, pubcasters successfully defended the provision against a Time Warner law suit. The DBS ruling may frustrate PBS by prohibiting a satellite operator from assigning more than one channel to any single programmer.

Actor Edward James Olmos is heading a new interim organization that will spend CPB programming funds on public TV projects by and about Hispanic Americans. The Latino Public Broadcasting Project fills a gap left by the National Latino Communications Consortium, which lost CPB funding early this year when an audit by the corporation’s inspector general reported questionable spending practices and misuse of grant monies [earlier stories]. CPB has no “ongoing business relationship” with NLCC, said CPB President Bob Coonrod during a Nov. 17 press conference announcing the new alliance. “We now have an ongoing business relationship with the Latino Public Broadcasting Project.”

Public radio’s Gen-X listeners don’t fit their generational stereotype; they’re closer to its older audience than to their peers, said a report from public radio’s Audience 98 research project. Pubradio programmer J. Mikel Ellcessor comments and then trades letters to the editor with the Audience 98 researchers. Dan Yankelovich and Pete Townshend: are they the conceptual bookends of generational cohort analysis? In the mid-1960s, Dan Yankelovich explained the “generation gap” and introduced the world-at-large to generational cohorts. These “cultural variations in time” articulate the enduring importance of key life-stage experiences, and the social context within which they occur. The combination irrevocably influences the entire generation’s values and preferences.

On a warm summer day in 1946 I find myself, somewhat improbably, at the helm of a U.S. Navy ocean tug, threading through a crowded, palm-fringed Pacific atoll called Bikini. We stay only long enough to anchor the derelict ship we’ve towed here from the Philippines. Several days later, making slow progress east to Honolulu, we learn that the wreck we had pulled into that pristine island sanctuary had been obliterated — along with everything else in the lagoon — by two atomic bombs. More than a few of my shipmates are bitter that, unlike others, they had been denied an extremely close look at the destruction.

The House and Senate resolved last-minute differences over public broadcasting’s fiscal 1991-93 authorization bill and late last week passed the three-year, $800 million measure. The bill also makes a variety of other changes, including requiring the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to collaborate with the public TV system to develop a new plan for distributing CPB’s national TV production money. The bill also requires CPB to establish a $6 million-a-year fund for independent productions. The Senate passed an earlier version of the bill October 7, but when it reached the House telecommunications subcommittee, Chairman Edward Markey objected to language requiring CPB to seek private funding to replace public broadcasting’s aging satellite program delivery system.

Even on crappy old analog TV — the way nearly all of its audience will see it Nov. 9 — PBS’s premiere high-def offering is a Whitman’s Sampler of eye candy. Made by public TV’s most experienced high-def production team, at KCTS in Seattle, “Chihuly Over Venice” amuses your eye with color while impressing you with the glassworking skills of Dale Chihuly’s sidemen, and introducing you to the glass master, a mercurial Seattle character. Producer/director Gary Gibson, who documented a Chihuly exhibition in 1993, returned to the artist more than two years ago to begin the station’s next big HDTV project–the first without much aerial footage, after a successful string of Over This-and-That travelogues.

Masterpiece Theatre was a relatively short run for Alistair Cooke, and his intros mere appetizers. For more of Cooke, as he turns 90, sample some of his half-century of BBC essays. Some journalists make reporting seem easy, almost effortless. They express wise and frequently complicated ideas with directness, intelligence and wit. Their manner is both straightforward and entertaining — and above all, informative. They are uniquely talented and very few in number. Alistair Cooke is one of them. This sort of reporting is not, of course, easy. But now, with his 90th birthday approaching Nov. 20, Cooke has had a lot of practice.

In 1998, the FCC addressed a longtime gap in its set of procedures with this rulemaking proposal. See the resulting April 2000 FCC order laying out the new procedure. Before the Federal Communications Commission, Washington, D.C. 20554 In the Matter of Reexamination of the Comparative Standards for Noncommercial Educational Applicants, MM Docket No. 95-31 FURTHER NOTICE OF PROPOSED RULE MAKING Adopted: October 7, 1998 Released: October 21, 1998 Comment Date: [45 days after publication in the Federal Register] Reply Date: [65 days after publication in the Federal Register] By the Commission: Commissioners Furchtgott-Roth and Tristani issuing a joint statement 1.

One evening in London, in 1966, Anne Darlington, a Johns Hopkins graduate on a Fulbright Fellowship, was surprised to see Louis Rukeyser, then chief of ABC’s London bureau, on a BBC interview program. She remembered him as a writer for her hometown newspapers, the Baltimore Evening Sun and the Sun. Four years later, in January 1970, Darlington was preparing a TV series on sports fishing for the fledgling Maryland Center for Public Broadcasting when someone at a Baltimore cocktail party suggested that a series on economics and financial management might be more appropriate. One of the Center’s executives scribbled the idea on a piece of paper and gave it to Darlington, adding, “Do you think you can do anything with this?”

Two years after the CPB funding crisis began to subside, public TV’s assigned public-policy representative, the president of America’s Public Television Stations (APTS), was giving variations on this stump speech at meetings of pubcasters. This is an edited version of David Brugger’s remarks to the FirstView instructional TV screening conference in August 1998. One of the important revelations to station professionals and lay volunteers during our last Capitol Hill Day was that their members of Congress often fed back the message they had heard from the more than 85 percent of their constituents in your home towns who said they wanted continued or increased federal funding — this, in many cases, from members of Congress who had been ardent opponents of federal funding just 18 months before.