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.
PBS will look at theater, arts and nonprofit executives to fill its long-vacant position of chief program executive, President Ervin Duggan told reporters in a Washington press briefing in January. Several candidates for the job from the commercial media world had possessed the “skill sets” that PBS is seeking, but are making “stratospheric salaries” between $600,000 and $700,000, plus stock options, and won’t work for PBS, where all salaries are capped by law at about $150,000, Duggan said. He believes PBS can find “the instincts of the impresario” and lower salary demands among nonprofit leaders [November 1995 article on search] . Jennifer Lawson, the former chief program exec, resigned last February after Duggan announced plans to hire an executive above here.
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. The Reader’s Digest commitment amounts to one-quarter of that gain, he said. The station equity model calls for “pointed, strategic, coherent” management by PBS of the system’s brand, program rights and other national assets of the stations, Duggan said in a Current interview after the Nov.
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. is largely responsible for safeguarding those assets.
Admired series disappears into copyright limbo
Followup, 2008
The series contained so many musical clips that the producers apparently didn’t want to spend what it would take to extend their broadcast rights. For years, as a result, the series has not been available for broadcast or for purchase on DVD or videocassette. As a result, PBS’s online store began selling videos of Time-Warner’s rock history series not originally made for public TV, The History of Rock ‘N Roll. New York Times critic John O’Connor preferred the BBC/WGBH series. Buying extensive new rights to resume broadcasts of the famed doc series Eyes on the Prizecost hundreds of thousands of dollars in 2006.
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.
PBS and MCI will develop a computer information service that supplements public TV programming while letting consumers place online orders for books, videocassettes and other program-related materials. The telecom company said March 23 [1995] that it would invest at least $15 million in the venture over the first five years. It was one of a series of MCI announcements publicizing its plans for expansion of Internet activities. Four days later, the company detailed its plans to offer Internet access services nationwide under the brand name “internetMCI,” and opened a shopping mall on the Internet called “marketplaceMCI.” And on March 29, the company said it hired cable programming veteran Scott Kurnit away from the Prodigy online service to oversee its information services unit, including the venture with PBS.
Of all the facts, half-truths and distortions used by public broadcasting’s opponents in the ongoing contest to redefine the field’s public image, the Barney Billions seem the most enduring and damaging.
In many ways, Orlando Bagwell’s work announced his arrival as a notable creative talent years ago, when he and a handful of mostly inexperienced, young producers collaborated with Henry Hampton on Eyes on the Prize, the civil rights series that made television history in 1987. The opportunity to work as a member of Hampton’s team “changed my whole life,” Bagwell recalled. A young father who made his living primarily as a cameraman for public broadcasting stations and producers, Bagwell had come to believe that path would take him through life — until Hampton offered him the chance to produce and direct his own films on the civil rights movement. Now, less than a decade after Eyes premiered, the 43-year-old producer’s credits include some of the most important films dealing with African-American history and culture that have aired on public television — most recently, “Frederick Douglass — When the Lion Wrote History” and “Malcolm X — Make It Plain.”
Bagwell finds himself at another crossroads, seeking and embracing new challenges so that he will continue to find gratification in his work. Having learned his craft in historical documentaries, Bagwell is stepping into performing arts programs, a form he explored as a producer/director for WNET’s Dancing miniseries.
On July 11, PBS begins beaming its long-anticipated Ready to Learn service to 11 pilot stations, embarking on what planners acknowledge will be a bumpy journey toward better TV for early childhood learning. What comes off the bird will essentially be an expanded, repackaged version of the existing children’s service that, with the help of new educational break messages, will offer a learning-friendly environment for kids. Off-air, outreach activities will target the audiences most critical to the task of preparing children for school–parents, teachers and child-care providers. The on-air and off-air prongs of public TV’s Ready to Learn strategy are scaled-back versions of proposals that PBS floated at last year’s annual meeting. The estimated $72 million needed to launch a comprehensive national service has not as yet materialized.
As PBS’s fourth president, FCC member Ervin S. Duggan, 54, will take the lead of public TV at a time when momentous developments seem near. The field’s biggest ventures beyond single-channelhood are just ahead, along with the high promise, high cost and high-definition of digital technology. And the stations, at their fall planning meeting in mid-November, appeared ready to begin talking seriously about restructuring for that future. Good thing that Duggan enjoys “that feeling of flying out off the cliff, and floating, and testing my wings,” as he remarked Dec. 1 [1993], at the press conference where his election was announced.
While earning the adulation of the nation’s toddlers, the six-foot dinosaur with his own PBS show has received an adverse response from some adults, among whom Barney-bashing is now in vogue.
These are the recommendations of the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on Public Television, released in the July 1993 report Quality Time? The complete 188-page paperback, including a background paper by Richard Somerset-Ward, published by the Twentieth Century Fund Press, is available for $9.95 through the Brookings Institution (1-800-275-1447). See also [Current coverage and list of task force members, Aug. 9, 1993. On mission
The mission of public television should be the enrichment and strengthening of American society and culture through high-quality programming that reflects and advances our basic values.
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.
The Markle Foundation, then a major backer of public TV, proposed in 1990 that PBS develop the Voters’ Channel, a project planned to make more useful information available to voters. Here are excerpts from the 132-page feasibility study prepared for Markle by the independent production company Alvin H. Perlmutter Inc. Markle offered $5 million to help PBS undertake the project in time for the 1992 election, but the foundation and PBS could not reach agreement on plans. The project was dropped in June 1991. [Current coverage.]
Preface | Summary of Recommendations | Introduction | Is It Feasible? Preface
American government has become weaker in the age of television.
The Public Broadcasting Service reached across the Potomac River and some bad blood to pick Jennifer Lawson, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s television program fund director, to become executive vice president for national programming and promotion at PBS. The senior programming position at the Alexandria, Va.–based PBS has been open since October 1988, when senior vice president Suzanne Weil left PBS to become executive director of the Sundance Institute for Film and Television. A quintet of senior PBS executives, including President Bruce Christensen, has since acted as a programming committee. The new chief will develop a comprehensive program plan and take an active role “to get the PBS schedule into shape, so it can deliver the kind of program power that all of us believe will be the result of the changes we’re talking about occurring over the next few months,” Christensen said. Lawson said there is “a growing consensus to have strong programming leadership, some details of which will be decided at the summit meetings” between CPB, the National Association of Public Television Stations and PBS.
This detailed paper was published in the October 1972 issue of Educational Broadcasting Review, the journal of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters. The paper — by Hartford Gunn, the first president of PBS — led to PBS’s creation of an annual program market called the Station Program Cooperative, which became, for nearly two decades, PBS’s main method of aggregating station funds to produce ongoing series. Introductory note by Avon Edward Foote, editor of Educational Broadcasting Review
One of the important functions of EBR is to circulate documents which embody important new concepts, proposals, and suggestions. The values are two-fold: full publication makes it possible to study the actual details of a proposal rather than rumors or speculations about it, and distribution through the EBR engages the entire profession in the process of analysis and deliberation. The article that follows is one of those documents.
On Nov. 11, 1969, eight days after a quartet of public broadcasters signed PBS’s Articles of Incorporation, they adopted these initial bylaws. See also the network’s amended bylaws as of 2000. The initial By-Laws of the Public Broadcasting Service have been preliminarily adopted by the Incorporators to permit Public Broadcasting Service to begin to function under the laws of the District of Columbia. They are subject to ratification or modification by the Public Broadcasting Service Board of Directors upon its election.
On Nov. 3, 1969, four public broadcasters, including the presidents of CPB and National Educational Television (NET), incorporated a new nonprofit organization to interconnect the public television stations, taking on those functions of NET. See also the PBS bylaws, adopted eight days later. We, the undersigned, natural persons of the age of twenty-one (21) years or more, and citizens of the United States, desiring to form a nonprofit corporation pursuant to the District of Columbia Non-Profit Corporations Act (28 D.C. Code Chapter 10), adopt the following Articles of Incorporation for such Corporation:
ARTICLE I.
The name of the Corporation is: PUBLIC BROADCASTING SERVICE. ARTICLE II.
Probably the most famous congressional testimony delivered on behalf of CPB appropriations came from Fred Rogers on May 2, 1969. The young writer/producer/host of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood made common cause with Sen. John Pastore (D-R.I.), who chaired the Senate Commerce Committee’s communications subcommittee. Public broadcasting was seeking an appropriation of $20 million, and the Nixon White House was proposing half as much. Margaret Mary Kimmel and Mark Collins narrate the scene in their book, The Wonder of It All: Fred Rogers and the Story of an Icon (PDF, scroll to page 20). “It’s a strange moment in the hallowed halls of the Senate,” Kimmel and Collins write — “a grown man reciting a child’s song to other grown men, but by now they feel as if they, too, are complicit in Rogers’ mission.”
