Why public media?

‘Public trust is the rating that matters most to PBS’

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Pat Mitchell, then president of PBS, delivered this talk May 24, 2005, at the National Press Club, in the midst of escalating news coverage of the conflict between public TV and Kenneth Tomlinson, then chair of CPB. Mitchell was preparing to announce recommendations for public TV’s future, but the Digital Futures Initiative report was delayed until December 2005, after Tomlinson had quit CPB and the dust was clearing. Since becoming president of PBS, I’ve often been at podiums like this one, with audiences like this one, although perhaps not as well informed or well prepared as a National Press Club gathering or one with so many familiar faces, those of friends and colleagues in public broadcasting. I appreciate the presence of national and local leaders of this great institution of which we are the current caretakers, and along with them, I am grateful to have this opportunity to make the case for the value and relevancy, and in fact, essential need for a vital and viable public broadcasting service in a democracy. Leading PBS at any time comes with bragging rights to be sure.

Programs/Content

Lehrer expects to feel some heat: ‘What we’re doing is kitchen work’

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Jim Lehrer, co-founder and host of PBS’s NewsHour, spoke April 12, 2005, at the PBS Showcase meeting in Las Vegas, where he accepted the PBS Be More Award. At one point, he refers to CPB’s appointment of a pair of ombudsmen, announced a week earlier. Thank you. It is always a pleasure to be among the professionals who make up my public television family, and have done so for more than 30 years. There are indeed many familiar friendly faces in this room, but few that would have been in a comparable place when I began my life in public television.

Programs/Content

Mitchell probes Buster’s detour into controversy

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PBS has launched an internal review to find out why the gay mommies episode
of Postcards from Buster took so many people by surprise — especially
the show’s main funder, the U.S. Department of Education, and numerous aggravated conservatives. Two weeks after new Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings blasted the
children’s program for depicting same-sex parental couples, Minnesota conservatives were urging the state legislature to slash aid to Twin Cities PTV for airing the “Sugartime!” episode. Though PBS dropped the episode Jan. 25, mere hours before receiving Spellings’ searing letter, a quarter of public TV’s licensees — 46 of about 170 — have aired the show or plan to. Some aired it promptly and at the program’s usual hour.

Public Media Policybase

Secretary of Education objects to Postcards from Buster ‘two moms’ episode, 2005

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Margaret Spellings, secretary of education in George W. Bush’s administration, complained to PBS in 2005 about an episode of the animated Postcards from Buster children’s series with funding from her department. In the episode, Buster visits a Vermont family that has two moms. See also Current story. January 25, 2005
Ms. Pat Mitchell
President and Chief Executive Officer
Public Broadcasting Service
1320 Braddock Place
Alexandria, Virginia 22314

Dear Ms. Mitchell:

The Department of Education has strong and very serious concerns about a specific Ready-To-Learn television episode, yet to be aired, that has been developed under a cooperative agreement between the Department and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). The episode — “Sugartime!” — is part of the “Postcards from Buster” series, and would feature throughout the show families headed by gay couples. As you know, the cooperative agreement that PBS is using to support these programs is designed to prepare preschool and elementary age children for school.

Programs/Content

PBS, producers, Comcast wed to create digital kids’ channel

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Sesame Workshop President Gary Knell describes plans to create a PBS-branded
digital cable service for preschoolers as a “renewed marriage vow”
for PBS and the famed producer of Sesame Street, partners over three
decades in teaching young kids about letters and numbers and getting along. It’s a four-way marriage, however, and the two for-profit partners
are cable giant Comcast and Hit Entertainment, the London-based owner of Barney,
Bob the Builder, Thomas the Tank Engine and other kid brands. The deal gives public TV stations on-screen credit — “brought
to you by your local public TV station” — and access to future
shows from Sesame and Hit, but it associates public TV with a new digital
channel that carries ads during program breaks and that’s available
only to cable subscribers who pay extra for digital-tier service. [The channel was later named PBS Kids Sprout.]

When the 24-hour channel starts next fall, moreover, PBS will discontinue
its packaged PBS Kids channel, leaving stations to package their own kids’
services if they don’t participate with the partnership. For PBS and Sesame Workshop, the agreement announced Oct.

Programs/Content

PBS again taps viewer curiosity about old things

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A spin-off of Antiques Roadshow, PBS’s most popular series, will visit memorable guests from past installments and guide viewers through the ins and outs of the antiques market. Antiques Roadshow FYI debuts early in 2005 as a half-hour weekly magazine program. PBS will pair it with another new half-hour series to be announced next month. PBS announced the new Roadshow series July 8 [2004] during the Television Critics Association summer press tour. The network also announced a three-part history series, Guns, Germs and Steel, to be made with Lion Television and National Geographic Television.

Audience

As cume slips, duo aims to keep PBS ‘relevant’

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For the past four years under PBS President Pat Mitchell, the network has had two chief program executives: at headquarters in Alexandria, Va., John Wilson, a veteran  programmer who came to PBS a decade ago from KAET in Phoenix; and in Los Angeles, Jacoba (Coby) Atlas, a news and documentary producer who previously worked with Mitchell at CNN. In this interview they describe for the first time a new formal practice of using minimum ratings, along with other factors, to judge the success of programs. They also discuss brainstorming with producers to create new programs and the tight budgets that limit how many new things PBS can try. Atlas and Wilson spoke with Current at PBS headquarters and later by phone. This transcript is edited. Setting ratings floors
In your programming plan in the PBS budget for next year, you talk about establishing a new set of goals for judging programs. What factors will you consider?

Public Media Policybase

Why public television?: Public TV’s mission statement, 2004

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Public TV stations adopted this statement of mission at the PBS Members Meeting, Feb. 23, 2004. For more information. See also Current’s coverage, published March 8, 2004. Public television is the only universally accessible national resource that uses the power and accessibility of television to educate, enlighten, engage and inform.

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

Worlds away from Rukeyser’s Wall Street

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Wall Street Week with Fortune, the PBS series that reinvented itself last year after a messy split with original host Louis Rukeyser, is setting itself further apart from its progenitor. The program sharpened its reporting this fall on the scandal-plagued financial markets while expanding its coverage to economic trends beyond Wall Street. Acknowledging the steady drumbeat of news about improper trading practices and corporate malfeasance, Executive Producer Larry Moscow wants WSW to reflect investors’ ire over scams that deflated their portfolios and retirement accounts. Investors, he observed, are now saying, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”

“We want to put PBS at the vanguard of reporting on that rebellion by providing independent information about what’s going on,” Moscow said. “These are different times and we have to do things beyond sitting in the studio and talking about it.”

The shift in tenor was unmistakable in co-host Geoffrey Colvin’s introduction to the Nov.

Quick Takes

Network says PBS brand helps stations ‘be more’

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Inconsistent branding strategies make it increasingly difficult for viewers to see the connections between PBS, the programs it distributes and the local stations that air them. PBS convenes a meeting with station communications execs at Braddock Place this week to discuss how to rectify the problem, a remnant of age-old tensions over what public TV should call itself. The pow-wow follows up on a study by the branding strategy and design firm Interbrand, which concluded that the profusion of public TV brands undermines the PBS brand’s ability to raise money from viewers and sponsors. Interbrand noted that cable competitors and successful nonprofits focus on national brands. The consultants estimated that the PBS brand is worth $5.4 billion, based on their assessment of its ability to secure loyal donors and influence funding decisions in the nonprofit sector.

Programs/Content

Moyers a flash point in balance talks led by CPB

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CPB has revived debate within public TV about balance and fairness
in public affairs programs, citing specifically Bill Moyers’ dual roles
of host and uninhibited commentator on his Friday-night PBS show. After a vigorous debate among station reps and producers June 9 [2003]
at the PBS Annual Meeting in Miami Beach, CPB President Bob Coonrod
proposed to broaden discussions within public TV on standards of fairness. In a widely circulated letter exchange with PBS President Pat Mitchell,
he put topics from the session–including Moyers’ roles–on the agenda
for future talks between the two. “Specific notions of fairness, or perceptions of fairness, may
vary by individual or by region, but the overall message was clear:
There is a deep and abiding interest among our colleagues to try to
‘get it right,'” Coonrod wrote. After participants in the session
screened a Moyers commentary from Now, “there was serious
discussion .

Programs/Content

Friday nights, PBS has balance on its mind

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PBS has initiated fast-track development of a new 10 p.m. public affairs
series to supplement its two-hour Friday night block. The half-hour show — to
be chosen from proposals submitted last week — will debut by July. Coby Atlas, the network’s co-chief program executive, already has commissioned
a pilot adapting a pubradio series — KCRW-FM’s weekly Left, Right
and Center. She expects to ask for minipilots of up to four proposals
before green-lighting the winning concept next month. CPB, which is jointly
funding the new series, is also “in the mix of decision-making,” she
said.

System/Policy

PBS loses biggest underwriter as it considers 30-second credits

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ExxonMobil will stop underwriting Masterpiece Theatre after spring
2004, the oil company announced Dec. 13. It has spent more than
$250 million on MT and other PBS programs over 32 years. In recent
years, the company has spent about $10 million a year, providing full
funding for the drama series, says Jeanne Hopkins, v.p. of communications
at WGBH, which packages the series. For years before merging with Exxon, Mobil had also supported another series
of largely British dramas, Mystery!, but Mobil had dropped funding
of the sister series Mystery!

Programs/Content

Knocking God’s party: Moyers, PBS hear from angry conservatives

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Bill Moyers came out swinging three days after the Nov. 5 midterm elections,
and the target of his jabs—America’s right wing—came swinging back. Conservatives said he made a hysterical partisan attack on Republicans in his commentary on PBS’s Now with Bill Moyers Nov. 8. Lamenting the GOP sweep of both houses of Congress, Moyers slammed the
majority party’s agenda, which he believes will “force pregnant women
to give up control over their own lives,” use “taxing power
to transfer wealth from working people to the rich” and give “corporations
a free hand to eviscerate the environment.”

Programs/Content

‘What we try to do . . . is say something new’

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“The best of American television can be traced to this one man,” said NovaExecutive Producer Paula Apsell, referring to her boss and the latest winner of CPB’s annual Ralph Lowell Award — Peter S. McGhee, who retires this month as v.p. of national production at WGBH, Boston. McGhee accepted the medal at the PBS Annual Meeting in June as recognition “of my work, and of your work, of all our work,” he said in acceptance remarks. He has overseen and in many cases launched some of public TV’s most ambitious documentaries as well as enduringly popular entertainments — no less than a third of the PBS schedule.He worked in public TV nearly four decades, since four years after earning his master’s degree in journalism at Columbia University. McGhee joined National Educational Television, New York City, in 1964 and moved to WGBH in 1969, becoming manager of its national production effort in 1975. Since then he has helped build on the earlier successes of Nova and Masterpiece Theatre while launching Frontline, American Experience, Antiques Roadshow and numerous landmark limited series.

Programs/Content

Twin ITVS goals: capturing diversity on videotape, getting it seen

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Last year was a good year for the Independent Television Service. ITVS had weathered its first 10 years as a funder and presenter of independent productions for public TV. It was feted with retrospectives at museums and film festivals across the country, which highlighted such fare as The Farmer’s Wife, La Ciudad, First Person Plural, The Devil Never Sleeps and Still Life with Animated Dogs. And it brought in a new executive director, Sally Jo Fifer. Having worked nine years as executive director of the nonprofit Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC), Fifer was uniquely qualified to steer the difficult course between stations and independents.

Public Media Policybase

University of North Carolina Television Q&A on equity in CPB and PBS formulas

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UNC-TV released this Q&A to explain its request for changes in the formulas for CPB grants and PBS dues that it took to the North Carolina congressional delegation in 2001. The strategy raised controversy in Congress and in the system [article] but brought quick resolutions by CPB and PBS. 1. Does UNC-TV believe that the CPB/CSG and PBS formulas should be linked? Not necessarily.

Programs/Content

Families try homesteading for spring Frontier House

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A diverse group of Americans placed in a remote and inhospitable locale must overcome physical challenges and psychological stress for a chance at winning a huge prize that will change their lives. Sound like an idea for a “reality TV” series? Actually, the description fits not only a forthcoming PBS series — The Frontier House, a sequel to 1900 House that’s scheduled for next April and May —