The year 2003 doesn’t seem so far off when you’ve got plenty to do in the meantime. Between now and then, public TV will raise funds for, install and turn on hundreds of digital TV transmitters. In its order mandating a speeded-up digital transition, adopted April 3 [1997], the FCC gave public TV stations six years to add digital signals–at least a year longer than commercial stations. Some pubcasters will go digital long before that and others will have trouble doing it at all. Responding to urgings from America’s Public Television Stations and other commenters, the commission reduced power inequities among stations.

'In the Life' is approaching its fifth anniversary on public TV, aired on more than 90 transmitters and rejected for twice as many.

The prospect of radio commentaries by a controversial death-row inmate “accelerated” Temple University’s decision to pull Pacifica news off WRTI, the university said. In a memo to Pacifica News Director Julie Drizin, Temple Vice President for Public Relations George Ingram said he was canceling a half-hour news feed and the one-hour Democracy Now to make room for additional jazz and university-related programming. But he also said: “Quite frankly, the decision was accelerated by the news Democracy Now would air the Mumia Abu-Jamal radio commentaries. . . .” The commentaries began airing in other cities last week. Abu-Jamal, a former radio journalist in the city, was convicted in the 1981 shooting death of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner.

A movement among big-market stations to accept 30-second underwriting spots is turning up the heat on PBS to resolve longstanding discrepancies between national underwriting policies and more permissive practices at local stations. Some say six of the top ten stations are accepting the longer spots; others count 19 of the top 20. Among the stations now accepting 30-second underwriting messages are WNET, New York; KCET, Los Angeles; KQED, San Francisco; WCET, Cincinnati; WTVS, Detroit, and KRMA, Denver. The national underwriting that directly supports production of national programs has slipped in recent years, while local stations’ spot sales have grown–probably surpassing the total for national underwriting in recent years.

The White House requests a 30% increase in CPB's appropriation in fiscal 2000 while proposing to zero out PTFP.

You probably wouldn’t want one. Not if you knew what they’re like. Leave them alone and they’ll rip your couch, dig up your garden, growl at your kids. This is the word on Jack Russell terriers, like the zippy, smart little dog that stars in Wishbone on PBS. Wishbone is so amazingly cute that many children demand a doggie just like him, and thousands of adults want one, too. The upside of this dog is so readily apparent that the greatest admirers of the breed, including the Jack Russell Terrier Club of America, feel obligated to spread the word about the downside.

Richard Carlson, a Republican credited with defending public broadcasting from attacks by members of his party, announced Jan. 24 that he will leave the CPB presidency June 30 or before. He opposed overlapping stations and pushed new rules to limit grants to them–winning support among politicians but losing the backing of many station execs. He spoke up for objectivity and ideological balance in programs, while spurning demands that CPB take a more intrusive role in programming to detect and correct imbalance. He trimmed the CPB bureaucracy and paid a quarter of the staff to leave, changing its human face, with consequences not yet known.

San Francisco’s KQED-TV remains one of the most-watched public TV stations in the country, but, in the 1980s and ’90s it suffered under the expectations of a viewership that recalled its early years. David Stewart reminds us of KQED’s fertile ’50s and ’60s. In his history of public TV, The Vanishing Vision, James Day recalls that the first year of KQED/San Francisco, 1953, was nearly its last. Its headquarters was in the back seat of a station wagon. Day, the president, and a staff of eight had managed to keep the station on the air, but the board, alarmed by its increasing debts, had decided to call it quits.

Current: There was a long period when TV critics regularly wrung their hands over the death of the long-form documentary. Now PBS has several strong documentary series, and documentaries are the basic material of several cable networks. Some documentaries like Hoop Dreams have been hits in theaters. Should we stop wringing our hands now? Judy Crichton: The truth is there was always an enormous appetite for nonfiction television, and we now know how to do these films a great deal better than we ever knew before. But funding has always been erratic and the funding problems now are absolutely dreadful. What makes it very, very sad, I think, is that we have more people doing very good work today than ever in the history of nonfiction television.

What do viewers and listeners have to say about public broadcasting’s purposes? You can work backward from their letters and calls to stations and producers about the field’s achievements. Relief from yappy dogsDear NPR, Ever since I arrived in Ukraine in June, I have suffered acute NPR news withdrawals. Sure, I miss my family, my friends, and all those “things” that have come to represent my previous life in America — hot showers, clean tap water, brown sugar for my oatmeal and lighted stairwells. But I suspect that it is the lack of those familiar voices that woke me up each morning in Salem, Ore.,

KQED has dropped plans for a public TV documentary about pioneering Napa Valley winemaker Robert Mondavi after widespread newspaper reports that an organization funded largely by Mondavi had supplied the first and only seed money.

Observers are watching hopefully as Laura Walker, the first CEO hired to run WNYC as a private entity, sets out to double WNYC's weekly cume and make it a high-energy, high-profile and spiritually indigenous New York cultural and news center.

The New York Botanical Garden, still fighting the completion of a nearby 480-foot tower for WFUV-FM, told the FCC late in October that the station should disguise the antenna as a 185-foot double flagpole. In its reply to the commission, WFUV said the notion was “without technical or practical merit” and asked for approval of its construction permit. The botanists are “trying to sidetrack the commission” and extend the two-and-a-half-year delay, says Ralph Jennings, g.m. Before proposing the double flagpole, the garden had suggested a stone tower to hold the antenna, but it was not feasible, he says. “All these things would be pretty, but they’re about 200 feet high, which is no higher than what we’ve got now.”

Nebraska ETV canceled a senatorial debate broadcast in August [1996], and Iowa PTV was taken to court last month as the ripple effects of a federal circuit court decision involving Arkansas ETV spread throughout the Midwest’s Eighth Circuit. As it did in 1994, the circuit court had ruled on Aug. 21, [1996] that the Arkansas network had no right to exclude independent congressional candidate Ralph P. Forbes from a Republican-Democrat debate that it was sponsoring and broadcasting in 1992. Richard D. Marks, attorney for the Arkansas, Iowa and Nebraska networks, called the decision “a grave threat to public broadcasting.” In the parallel case in Iowa, pubcasters were elated with two rulings last week: first, a U.S.