Current (https://current.org/tag/pennsylvania/)
For the first time since state funding was cut in 2009, Pennsylvania’s eight public television stations could see funding restored as Gov. Tom Wolf included $4 million in his proposed budget.
Judy Jankowski, who held top management positions at several public broadcasting stations, died Dec. 17 [2011] at Kindred Hospital in Westminster, Calif. She was 61. She started her long pubcasting career as a traffic manager at WOUB in Athens, Ohio, worked as g.m. of Pittsburgh’s WDUQ from the mid-1980s until 1994, and then managed another leading jazz station — KLON, now KKJZ in Long Beach, Calif. — until retiring in 2005.
Seventeen million dollars slipped through WQED’s fingers last week when a partner in its long-delayed deal to sell sister channel WQEX abruptly backed out, even though they had won a go-ahead at the FCC a month earlier. George Miles, president of the Pittsburgh station, paraphrased a newspaper report on the turnabout: “We have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.” Important issues about pubcasting’s reserved channels were at stake in both WQED’s victory and its defeat, but they got little attention as all eyes turned to a couple waves of explosive controversy surrounding the FCC decision:
First, in mid-December [1999], reporters swarmed over the news that Presidential candidate and FCC overseer Sen. John McCain had intervened to hurry up the FCC decision on behalf of Paxson Communications, a campaign contributor that was part of the three-way WQEX deal. Then, at the end of the month, religious broadcasters recoiled and conservative politicians raged when the FCC spelled out its thinking behind its WQEX decision. This week, Rep. Michael Oxley (R-Ohio) and 42 or more co-sponsors will introduce a bill to undo the FCC’s new guidelines for religious broadcasters on reserved educational channels.
On Dec. 15, 1999, the FCC approved a swap/sale deal that would have enabled Pittsburgh public TV station WQED to sell its second channel, WQEX, to raise capital and pay longstanding debts. (The deal fell through Jan. 18, 2000, when Cornerstone TeleVision backed out.)
See also separate statements by the commissioners. WQED developed the complex plan after the commission in 1996 declined to drop the noncommercial reservation on WQEX.