Development

PBS to develop proposal for public affairs channel

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Backed by a $200,000 Knight Foundation grant, PBS will develop a proposal for a public affairs channel — working title, Public Square — that public TV stations could air on DTV multicast channels, the network announced Jan. 8 [2004]. The channel would offer “sustained electronic journalism” that contrasts with other networks where “sleaze repeatedly trumps substance,” said Hodding Carter, president of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, in a news release. “You might say what CNN’s potential seemed to be at the height of its potential is where we’re going,” Carter told Current. Repeats of PBS public affairs shows on the new channel could bulk up the programs’ audiences, cable-style, but Public Square would also need exclusive programming, said PBS co-chief program executive Coby Atlas.

Programs/Content

Pubradio guide advises broad application of news ethics

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A revised ethics guide for public radio asks journalists to “remain reportorial” instead of spouting opinions when they’re off the air, and it urges that they apply the same standards to call-in shows and websites as they do to newscasts. CPB, which underwrote the project, will release the concise guide, Independence and Integrity II, on its website this week [PDF]. The authors are Alan G. Stavitsky, associate dean of the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication, who wrote the original pubradio ethics guide in 1995, and NPR ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin. Though the pair consulted widely — discussing issues with pubradio and other journalists at the Poynter Institute last spring and then in workshops at three stations — Dvorkin says they didn’t end up with ambivalence about what they wrote. One reason is that the authors avoided hairsplitting in favor of brevity.

Programs/Content

Furlaud ornaments do float away — into listeners’ fond memories

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I know more than a few public radio listeners who, while admiring the news reports on Morning Edition and All Things Considered, reserve their most ardent enthusiasm for what Bob Edwards once called “ornaments” — short, revealing commentaries scheduled between the “important” stories. A master of the form, Alice Furlaud, has been supplying commentaries for nearly as long as NPR has been broadcasting, first from Paris and more recently from her home on Cape Cod. Like another of my favorite NPR commentators, the psychiatrist Elissa Ely, Furlaud is a uniquely gifted, acerbic writer with a New England plainspokeness that adds considerable authority to what she says. Furlaud and Ely make no effort to disguise their exceptional intelligence. If you believe, as I do, that intelligence adds abundantly to attractiveness, you may concur that they are very sexy stylists.

Programs/Content

WGBH girds for uproar from creationists

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An educational experience 4.6 billion years in the making,” says the clever tagline for WGBH’s big September series Evolution. The way the Boston producers have been preparing for the reaction from creationists, you’d think they expect the controversy surrounding it will last almost that long. “Evolution is two steps away from abortion,” said Anne Zeiser, director of national strategic marketing for WGBH, placing the flash point at which evolution ignites fundamentalist outrage. Recent polls show that 45 percent of Americans say they believe in creationism, and many Christians view Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection as an assault on their faith. Evolution, a seven-part, eight-hour co-production of WGBH’s Nova science unit and billionaire Paul G. Allen’s Clear Blue Sky Productions, will kick off the PBS fall season Sept.

Programs/Content

‘It’s going too fast’

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“I don’t remember talking to you before. I can’t remember yesterday. Tomorrow I won’t remember this. It’s not there.” “Is that distressing?”

Programs/Content

‘Hasty mistake’ at WFDD prompts talk of ideals

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For the faculty of Wake Forest University, the hush order given to reporters at the university’s WFDD-FM last September came too close for comfort.”I’ve never seen anything rile the faculty on this campus like this did, and I’ve been here 11 years,” says law professor Ronald Wright. “A lot of faculty members identified with those reporters. We’re both in the business of telling the truth.” “What has occurred on our campus violated certain ‘givens’ about what a university should be: a place where freedom of thought and expression thrive,” said this month’s report by an ad hoc committee appointed by the faculty senate. The defense of free speech on the campus in Winston-Salem, N.C., has whipped up antagonisms, uprooted most of WFDD’s news staff, and required lots of long, tense meetings, but the issues may be nearing resolution.

Programs/Content

Pubradio serves up UFOs down by the Rio Grande

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A weekly half-hour program about space aliens — probably the only one in public radio (but who knows?) — has just been renewed for 26 weeks. Starting last Halloween, SETLAB Radio (the acronym means “Study of Extra-Terrestrial Life and Answers from Beyond”) has aired Sunday afternoons in south Texas — on KMBH in Harlingen and its repeater, KHID in McAllen. Host Russell Dowden says he’s gotten dozens of reports from Rio Grande Valley listeners that they, too, have seen unidentified flying objects. Then, several weeks ago, someone anonymously sent in a “very weird and very real-looking” image of a bulb-headed alien supposedly photographed aboard a U.S. Navy vessel. “It looks a little different from the normal Gray alien type, and has funny, textured skin.

Programs/Content

This American Life: The pimp show turned out to be rare error, thank God

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This American Life is hot. The weekly radio program produced by WBEZ, Chicago, and distributed nationally since June 1996, airs on 325 public radio stations. Ira Glass, TAL’s creator and producer, has become something of a celebrity. The subject of lengthy feature stories in national magazines, he now turns up in TV and radio interviews to publicize a Rhino Records CD, “Lies, Sissies and Fiascos: The Best of This American Life.” His own life, frequently described by himself and others, emerges as one of frenetic activity, a contemporary Scheherazade, obsessively devoted to creating stories that he hopes “will give voice to those outside the mainstream.”

People

A radio woman’s tale: reclaiming her voice

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All of these years, Diane Rehm’s voice: the vehicle for ordinary sentences she enunciates so emphatically that they carry their utmost weight. But creaky on the edges, hitting snags. It’s a voice reliably there at midmorning on her NPR talk show, familiar; listeners love it. Except for the inevitable detractors, who say they find Rehm grating, or schoolmarmish. Love or hate that voice, it’s illuminating to learn that a physical problem contributes to Rehm’s on-air distinctiveness.

People

Jim Lehrer takes his own advice: Make sure it matters to you

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Two decades ago, Jim Lehrer and Robert MacNeil gave public television a kind of news program that contrasted greatly with the aims of big-network journalism, and the distinction has grown year by year with the decay of the network news divisions. Contributing Editor David Stewart, retired director of international activities at CPB, profiled Lehrer for a forthcoming book on the major programs of public TV. In 1970, on a steaming summer morning in Dallas, I walked into a large room of the public TV station KERA and met Jim Lehrer for the first time. He was seated alone at the end of a long rectangular table, its surface strewn with daily papers, reporters’ notes, overflowing ashtrays and half-empty mugs of coffee. He was studying a clutch of wire service stories, shirt sleeves rolled back, tie pulled away from his unbuttoned collar — the city editor from central casting, I remember thinking.

Programs/Content

‘Something was very wrong’

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Four days before the May 27 airing of “Innocence Lost: The Plea,” Frontline’s third documentary on the Little Rascals child-abuse case in Edenton, N.C., the prosecutor announced she was dropping all remaining charges in the long and troubling legal action. For producer-director Ofra Bikel and her colleagues at Frontline, the decision brought a rare sense of gratification. Over the past seven years, Bikel’s persistent scrutiny of a prosecution she had come to believe was unjust has made a big difference in many people’s lives. Whether the effect has been for the better or the worse depends on how close you live to Edenton, and which side of the Little Rascals case you want to believe. “It’s not very often that a television program can set people free,” commented David Fanning, Frontline’s senior executive producer.

Programs/Content

What we offer: the case distinguishing NPR news

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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.

Programs/Content

Dear Impresario: Let’s recreate PBS as the citizens’ channel

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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.

Programs/Content

FDR defenders enlist TV critics to refute Holocaust film

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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.” But when series producers sat down to evaluate the advance criticism with Ostrow and his team of historical advisors, they came to a different conclusion. “We came out of those meetings with confidence that the film was not only accurate, but it said what the authors of the film wanted it to say, and that they were on good ground,” said Judy Crichton, executive producer.

Programs/Content

To empower active citizens with knowledge, locally as well as nationally

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When President Clinton had just taken office in 1993, Current asked an assortment of outside-the-Beltway people connected with public broadcasting to write open letters to him about the field’s public-service potential. One was Bill Kling, president of Minnesota Public Radio in St. Paul and founder of American Public Radio. Dear President Clinton:

I know that as a listener to public radio around the country, you know its national programming well. At a time when the spirit of a new national agenda is high, the mission of public radio fits well into the public understanding and assimilation of that agenda just as it has for every administration since Lyndon Johnson’s.

Programs/Content

This time we let our listeners hear directly from candidates

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In fall 1992, a number of public broadcasting’s gatekeepers opened their gates to give candidates unedited, unmediated “free time” to talk with the electorate over the air. Here’s a first-hand report on the experience, from two public radio program directors — Dave Becker of WDUQ, Pittsburgh, and Dave Kanzeg of WCPN, Cleveland. We’re here to confess to breaking a few broadcasting rules. They’re not in any FCC handbooks or federal code, but they seem to be universal anyway:

Never break your regular format for politics. Never give up control of your station’s sound to politicians.

Programs/Content

Advocates of free time for candidates are many — those who try it are few

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Though the 1988 campaign prompted many calls for television networks to let candidates talk directly to the voters, candidates again this season have to buy time or squeeze through the media filter to get on the air. That’s not to say that some producers aren’t trying the idea; the ones who do, however, are finding that their success in presenting candidates in an unedited, nonconfrontational format hinges on the political considerations of candidates, networks and viewers. Voices of the Electorate, the two-part series produced by Alvin Perlmutter’s Independent Production Fund (IPF) and two minority citizens’ groups, is the most visible recent example (Current, Sept. 21). The series aired last month after PBS and the American Program Service ordered last-minute cuts to eliminate Democratic candidate Bill Clinton’s unedited comments, which both distributors deemed ”inappropriate.” APS said Clinton’s remarks didn’t respond to the minority issue discussed in the program.

Programs/Content

Frontline: an ‘essential’ mechanism for telling serious stories

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Frontline sometimes comes on like a multimedia prosecutor, revealing the evidence in pictures, voices and logic, and driving toward a conclusion. It’s usually a very sobering conclusion, too, because the series has increasingly specialized in reminding us of our society’s worst failings — war, cheating and lying in high places, racism, crime and predation of all kinds. On Nov. 5, [1991], Charles Stuart’s “Don King, Unauthorized” went after the boxing promoter — a man with two killings in his little-known past, who has collaborated with the media to paint himself as a harmless jokester with a funny haircut. On Nov.