Programs/Content

Video-rich website supports Eyes revival

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Before Eyes on the Prize returns to PBS Oct. 2 [2006] for its first broadcast in 13 years, PBS.org will unveil a major website built around content from the seminal documentary series. The site will offer streamed historic video from key moments in the civil rights movement, including speeches of the Rev. Martin Luther King. Nearly two hours of clips in all will be accessible on the Web in perpetuity. In October, American Experience brings back Henry Hampton’s 1987 television series, which redefined the way Americans talked and learned about civil rights and social justice.

Programs/Content

Once the feisty advocate for indies, AIVF fades to black

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The Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers, a 30-year-old group that coordinated activism and provided networking and training for independent filmmakers, shuttered its offices and shut down operations in late June. The Manhattan-based association told members in March that it faced a financial crisis, but an emergency fundraising appeal didn’t generate enough contributions to maintain operations. The AIVF Board is looking for another group to take over publication of The Independent, AIVF’s monthly magazine. Although the board considered a scenario of eventually resuming operations, it’s unlikely that the association will revive, said Bart Weiss, organizer of the Dallas Video Festival and board president. “I wish it could, but I don’t see how it could happen,” he said.

Programs/Content

Indecency’s winding road, 1978-2006

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July 3, 1978
FCC v. Pacifica Foundation: The Supreme Court upheld the FCC’s right to ban indecent speech when children could be expected to be in the audience. Pacifica’s WBAI in New York had aired George Carlin’s “Filthy Words” monologue in the afternoon of Oct. 30, 1973. Upshot: Confirmed both the FCC’s right to regulate indecent language and its definition of such speech as that which depicts “sexual or excretory activities or organs in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium.” Indecent material falls short of obscenities, which are banned at all hours. Aug.

Programs/Content

PBS Kids Go! channel: plan is no-go for now

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After fewer than half of PBS stations made commitments to carry a proposed multicast channel for school-aged children, the network pulled back its plan to launch PBS Kids Go! as a fully packaged DTV multicasting service in October. The network is instead exploring its options to distribute school-age fare via video-on-demand or broadband platforms.

“I don’t want to bring up a service and not have the resources to support it,” said PBS President Paula Kerger, who announced the decision to stations July 6 [2006]. Only one-third of public TV licensees expressed interest in paying for Go! as an a la carte service, while PBS needed buy-in from least half, she said.

Programs/Content

Spirits rise as PBS acts: science, kids, on demand

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During a PBS Showcase meeting distinguished by a sense of optimism that public TV had emerged stronger after last year’s political troubles, public TV executives unveiled their plans to make more PBS content available to viewers on demand, to expand children’s programming and pilot new primetime science series. “The digital revolution cannot be ignored. … It is calling us to reinvent ourselves on a seemingly daily basis,” said new PBS President Paula Kerger, during a May 17 speech that opened the conference in Orlando, Fla. “We need to expand the menu of services we offer for the era of ‘my time’ TV,” said WGBH President Henry Becton later that day.

BBC

Return of the Pythons: their PBS premiere

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Bring out your dead, practice your silly walks, and steel yourselves for something completely different, yet strangely familiar. PBS is launching a video onslaught of Monty Python humor—the classics as well as the humorists’ annotated favorites and an acclaimed sequel of sorts. PBS has scheduled Monty Python’s Personal Best, a pastiche of new material and clips from the TV series and movies, for Feb. 22, March 1 and 8. Separately, PBS will release all the naughty bits — the 45 original 30-minute episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus — this spring.

Programs/Content

It’s OK: Despite son’s disability, laughter is allowed in this film

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The title character of The Teachings of Jon is a middle-aged North Carolina man with Down syndrome who has an IQ of 20, can’t speak and has a job that pulls in 27 cents a week. “But my film is not about Down syndrome at all,” says Jennifer Owensby, producer, director — and Jon’s younger sister. She says the documentary is not really about Jon, either. “My brother can’t be the main character because my brother never changes. It’s my family and the audience as they’re watching who become the main character.”

The Teachings of Jon offers an entertaining short course on family values, albeit as embodied by a somewhat unorthodox family.

Programs/Content

Doc-makers get specific about copyright fair use

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Friday afternoon, things changed for producers who need to use somebody else’s footage and music in their documentaries. Clearing rights may still cost a lot and take too much time, as in the past, but Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi believe producers now have a solid rationale for not paying excessive and confounding fees for copyrighted materials in certain cases. On Nov. 18 [2005], the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers, the Independent Documentary Association, public TV’s Independent Television Service and the series P.O.V., and other media groups endorsed a Statement of Best Practices defining four kinds of situations when a producer, under the “fair use” provisions of copyright law, need not pay for a film clip, a shot of a painting or a snatch of music. Aufderheide, director of the Center for Social Media at American University in Washington, D.C., and Jaszi, an intellectual property expert at the university’s law school, convened groups of experienced filmmakers around the country to look closely at the producers’ (and their lawyers’) working definition of fair use.

CPB

Probe finds Tomlinson’s unilateral actions at CPB exceeded chair’s authority

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Kenneth Y. Tomlinson repeatedly violated provisions of both the Public Broadcasting Act and the corporation’s guidelines for board members’ behavior, according to the report of a six-month internal investigation released Nov. 15 [2005]. Tomlinson, who resigned from the CPB Board earlier this month, meddled in programming decisions, injected politics into hiring procedures and ignored contracting guidelines, CPB Inspector General Kenneth A. Konz found. The report spurred another round of press coverage focusing on an institution that, until this spring, flew mostly under the Washington press corps radar. The inspector general’s findings substantiated much of the early press coverage.

Programs/Content

A cuddly sloth is set for science series stardom

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It’s a Big, Big World, a preschool science series from Mitchell Kriegman, promises to be the next big thing for PBS Kids. The series, which will launch with a major promotional push in January, “was an inspiration to us when we thought about what PBS Kids can be,” said John Wilson, PBS co-chief programmer, during the PBS Showcase meeting in Las Vegas. Kriegman, Emmy-winning creator of Disney’s Bear in the Big Blue House and Nickelodeon’s Clarissa Explains It All, unveiled the series during an April 12 [2005] breakfast at the PBS conference. “From my point of view, I’ve arrived in my career” by bringing to PBS a competitive show that will help children learn and grow, he said. Kriegman began developing the concept after 9/11.

Programs/Content

Is Bill Moyers the last of a breed or was he the first?

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When Bill Moyers signs off after the Dec. 17 [2004] broadcast of Now with Bill Moyers, he will leave behind one of the longest and most productive careers in the history of public television.He came to PBS in 1971, the first of the crossover journalists — Tim Russert and George Stephanopolous are among his heirs — who parlay experience in government and politics into high-profile journalism. He’s produced and appeared in more than 400 hours of programming — the equivalent of almost 20 years of Frontline, American Experience or Nova. And the equivalent in variety as well: covering not only news and public affairs, but also addiction, death, religion, sports, music, China and the Hudson River. He’s won a raft of awards, among them 30 Emmys and 11 Peabodys, including a rare individual Peabody for career achievement.

Programs/Content

Target: sitters who could be teachers

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KCET in Los Angeles unveiled a multimillion-dollar initiative to help prepare kids for kindergarten by training the adults who care for them. Two new daytime talk series — one produced in English and the other in Spanish — are centerpieces of the project. Through daily broadcasts of A Place of Our Own and Los Ninos in Su Casa, KCET aims to provide skills, information and inspiration to unlicensed caregivers and enlist them in the important work of nurturing early learning skills. These friends, neighbors and relatives of parents often work in isolation and have little access to training. Shaped by input from leading educators and formative research on its target audiences, the station’s education initiative has raised $20 million so far, including the largest grant in KCET’s history—$10 million from the energy company BP.

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.

Programs/Content

Appalachia: 3 video profiles in full relief

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Thoughts of Appalachia may stir up visions of either hillbilly backwoods or quaint Edens, but both miss the complicated truth illuminated by three documentaries coming to public TV. The docs diverge in their depictions of the mountain region

Programs/Content

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 public TV 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?

Programs/Content

Wiseman at work in Idaho state legislature

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The Idaho Legislature is the subject of Frederick Wiseman’s next cinema verite documentary. Starting with his controversial film Titicut Follies in 1967, Wiseman has filmed the day-to-day workings of American places and institutions — public housing developments, high schools and an old Maine seaport town, among other subjects. His last PBS broadcast, Domestic Violence, was filmed in a shelter for abused women and children, called the Spring, in Tampa, Fla. Wiseman, who doesn’t discuss his film projects until they’re near completion, declined Current’s request for an interview. But he told Idaho statehouse reporter Betsy Russell that he chose the Idaho Legislature because he wanted to film an American institution in the West.

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.

Programs/Content

Back to these old houses

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“As educational as magnetic,” says Los Angeles Times TV critic Howard Rosenberg. “Intimate, eye-opening and completely fascinating,” raves Salon’s Joyce Millman. “Brilliantly disguised as just another reality show . . .  the very best TV show of 2002,” gushes Aaron Barnhart of the Kansas City Star.

Programs/Content

In master control, Fred Rogers re-enters my life

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Mister Rogers was one of the first programs that I can remember watching. I was, of course, part of the show’s target demographic back then. I can’t recall much from my preschool years, but I do know that I loved the trolley, I loved the neighborhood and I loved Fred Rogers.Like many early loves, it faded with age and distance. I moved on to programs intended for older kids: flashier, action-oriented, violent in the ways that caregivers and watchdogs lament and children adore. For the most part, I forgot about Fred and his neighborhood, reminded only on occasion by the parodies that proliferated in the ’80s as yesterday’s innocents grew into sarcasm and despair.

Programs/Content

Meeting the HD demand: PBS matching rollout to buyers’ slow uptake

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With its pockets emptier than usual and few viewers demanding high-definition pictures, PBS is moving to HD more cautiously than the commercial networks. Rather than converting its schedule overnight, as the networks seemed to have done, PBS’s HD planners suggest moving to the fine, widescreen picture as fast as viewers buy receivers capable of displaying it. For every 10,000 HD receivers purchased, the network proposes to produce one additional hour of high-def programming. PBS now broadcasts about 48.5 hours of HDTV a year. Nearly half of that—22 hours—comes from the Latino drama American Family and the rest from monthly specials.