PBS put forth a new framework for thinking about its relationship with member stations last week, asserting that they’re all in the same boat, endangered by common competitors and capable of saving themselves through collective action through PBS. For PBS, the timing of the Fall Planning Meeting could hardly have been better, since many station executives were favorably impressed with the recent $75 million Reader’s Digest Association program deal. President Ervin Duggan laid out a “station equity model” that will guide the network’s actions and pledged that PBS will add 50 percent to the funds wielded by its chief program executive by the year 2000 — an increase from $110 million to $160 million.

PBS’s chief program executive is a high-profile job that comes with a salary cap, a heavy workload and no excess of resources. But for seven months the c.p.e. has been a high-profile vacancy; the network is still seeking a permanent successor for Jennifer Lawson, who left the job in March with her deputy John Grant. Though many station programmers are pleased with the performance of the interim proprietors of the National Program Service, mainly former No. 3 programmer Kathy Quattrone, they eagerly await word that a new program impresario has been hired. So much about the future of public TV depends upon the distinctiveness, noncommercial values and viability of the NPS, and the c.p.e.

At the threshold of the new millennium, another Congress has the opportunity to allocate a portion of a precious national asset to an equally historic investment in the education of our people.

Fifty-seven years ago, in her last novel, Edith Wharton told the story of The Buccaneers — a platoon of lovely American girls invading England, plundering titles and winning social success. Then, last winter, the colonies were again attacking the sceptered isle. Americans were conspiring with the BBC to spice up and Americanize the five-part mini-series based on Wharton’s novel. The BBC/WGBH coproduction, which has its first U.S. airing Oct. 8–10, opened in February in Britain, and some British critics charged that the “ratings-grubbing American partners had insisted on a sexy ending,” recalled Masterpiece Theatre Executive Producer Rebecca Eaton at the Los Angeles press tour this summer.

This commentary traces public broadcasting back to its earliest days and its root principles of populism and public education. Media historian Robert W. McChesney, founder of the citizen group Free Press, draws on his 1993 book Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy: The Battle for the Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928-1935 (Oxford University Press). This is an edited version of McChesney’s March 1995 talk at the University of California, San Diego. Though the federal contribution to public broadcasting is being extended, if at a reduced rate, for two or three more years, the handwriting is on the wall: there may be no more government subsidized broadcasting in the United States by the end of the decade.

In a Roper Poll taken March 18-25, Americans ranked public TV and public radio among the services that provide the best value for the tax dollar. Only military defense of the country and the police had higher percentages of the sample calling them an “excellent value” or a “good value.” Highways, public schools, environmental protection and the court system ranked lower. The pollsters asked: “Here is a list of some different services that the government provides using tax dollars it collects from the public. Thinking of what you get for what you pay in taxes, would you read down that list and for each one tell me whether you feel you get excellent value for the dollar, or good value, or only fair value for the dollar, or poor value for the dollar?”

A longtime NPR correspondent — then vice president in charge of the network’s news division — adapted this article from his remarks at Washington State University. Buzenberg later held top news posts at Minnesota Public Radio before moving to a prominent nonprofit newsroom, the Center for Public Integrity. Critics of sleaze, sex and violence in movies, music and the media have given public broadcasters their best chance yet to make a positive case for the value of public broadcasting to American society. In contrast to the anything-goes-as-long-as-it-makes-money values of some commercial media, public broadcasters have a compelling story to tell. It is a story of high standards and public-service journalism, even though public broadcasting also has been under attack, the most serious since it was established by Congress in 1967.

This is the view from Martin Goldsmith, then host of NPR’s daily classical music program Performance Today, who served as announcer, producer and program director at Washington’s WETA-FM between 1974 and 1986. From the same thinking that has offered “seamlessness,” “affinity,” “modes” and “appeal-driven programming” as ways of capturing the public radio audience now comes “customer service.” At first glance, this concept seems perfectly reasonable, even admirable. It conjures up images of the radio programmer as shopkeeper, hustling to fill his customers’ orders, keeping them satisfied so that they’ll continue to place their orders at that familiar stand on the dial.

In a time when American audiences give themselves to performers who act like “real people,” the irony of Tom and Ray Magliozzi is that they are who they seem to be. The listeners get it. Ratings for the brothers’ radio show, the automotive-philosophical-political call-in colloquium, dubiously titled Car Talk, are among the highest of any NPR program — 1.9 million people a week, listening to 362 stations, which ranks the program after Morning Edition, All Things Considered and Fresh Air. The Magliozzis’ genuine mechanical expertise notwithstanding, listeners most often say that the appeal of Car Talk is Tom and Ray themselves.

In 1995, Current asked three of public TV’s highly regarded program-makers to write “Dear Impresario” letters to the next chief programmer at PBS — a position then vacant. Danny Schechter is the executive producer of Globalvision Inc., producers of Rights & Wrongs: Human Rights Television, which the previous PBS programmer, Jennifer Lawson, had declined to distribute. PBS’s future rests on a “vision thing.” We all know that systems generally are resistant to change, and that managers of most of our most venerable and vulnerable enterprises tend to be risk-adverse and prudent, seeking to be safe rather than sorry. Yet as we look at the landscape of modern life, we can see the wreckage of those institutions that clung to old ways of thinking and doing in a turbulent world.

Here are brutally shortened summaries of proposals in the two funding plans that went to Congress in spring 1995: “Common Sense for the Future” from CPB, and “The Road to Self-Sufficiency” from the quartet of the public stations’ major national organizations, APTS, NPR, PBS and PRI. CPB APTS, NPR, PBS and PRI Trust fund Recommends a trust fund and says it has examined options for financing it, but doesn’t name them. “We look forward to exploring these and any other alternatives Congress may suggest to make such a trust fund viable.” A temporary financing mechanism would build up trust fund until it becomes large enough to pay out sufficient annual interest.

Pubcasters have given Congress two separate proposals for future funding of the field: one from CPB and the other a joint effort backed by APTS, NPR, PBS and Public Radio International. [Comparative summary.] Both proposals took a dim view of the revenue potential of on-air advertising and placed greater hope in further enhancement of underwriting. But they diverged on several matters, with CPB detailing cost-saving proposals that will be controversial among some stations. Congress makes moderate cuts in CPB appropriations already passed A House-Senate conference committee answered two of the questions hanging over public broadcasting: $275 million next year and $260 million the year after.

After questioning by Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), the National Telecommunications and Information Administration has begun an internal review of its refusal of equipment grants to a North Carolina public radio station that carries 90 minutes of church programming on Sundays. Since early this year, NTIA has been threatening to rescind a $175,000 grant to Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, N.C., for tower reconstruction at WFDD-FM, the university’s NPR-member station. NTIA grants officer George White told the university in a March 21 letter that it could receive the grant only if it dropped the religious programming, according to Helms. Helms, a friend of Wake Forest President Thomas K.

PBS President Ervin Duggan’s strongly worded opposition to advertising created a public rift in the “presidents group” that has been coordinating relations with Congress. In a speech April 11, Duggan said that public TV, if deprived of federal aid, would be tempted to turn to advertising, which he compared to prostitution. The right-wing <em>Washington Times</em> promptly headlined, “PBS chief portrays Republicans as cruel pimps of privatization,” which upset some Republicans including House Appropriations Chairman Robert Livingston (La). “I really can’t discuss this,” CPB President Richard Carlson told the newspaper later, “but we’re trying to do serious work here and I wish people would stop making speeches like this.”