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Originally published in Current, Aug. 19, 2002
Divided over ratings
Public TV people have been talking a lot about the value of ratings. When you look back and assess a program, what are the factors that you look at, and where does ratings information stand among those factors?
I can’t think of any program whose ratings changed my view of the program itself. Most recently, there was Frontline’s "Shattered Dreams." I think that was maybe the most important program that’s been done on the Middle East in the last 10 years. I was very disheartened to see the ratings for it.
Even if you knew the ratings wouldn’t be great, you’d produce that program again?
I would do it again, and I think it should be repeated on a weekly basis. I’m disappointed that more people didn’t see it—precisely because it was such a good program. But the ratings didn’t tell me that we’d done something wrong with that program.
You told us in April that you think public TV is in "great trouble," under "enormous challenge," suffering from confusion and irresolution and compromise of purpose.
Clearly, the system is troubled if not perplexed by the decline in ratings. It’s of different minds about the value of the audience it has or doesn’t have, and about audience demographics. As a system it has a kind of schizophrenic division between the programmers and the general managers, in regard to PBS.
The general managers seem more supportive of PBS and President Pat Mitchell and the programmers apparently are disaffected. You could say that there’s one group that’s looking strategically on behalf of their institutions and there’s another group looking more narrowly at who’s gathered in front of the screen. I don’t mean to take sides in that. I’m just saying the system isn’t united
The leadership at PBS has to negotiate direction with its membership. It has to negotiate carriage of programs. There are so many ways it seems to be prevented from developing the leverage that a network would have to act in unison.
Auctions: lost option
Is public TV focused well enough to have any substantial positive effect in this country?
It labors under huge disadvantages. Some of them are structural, but most are financial. A well and securely financed public television system could be more courageous, a more powerful voice as an alternative to commercial television. It could be greater than it is, but we’re marginally funded as a whole. We get additional funding through labyrinthine processes. It makes us extremely responsible, but it’s unnecessarily limiting.
Newton Minow and Larry Grossman have proposed to use some FCC proceeds from spectrum auctions to support noncommercial media production.
Like two spurned lovers, Minow and Grossman have taken an idea that might have benefited public television and bent it into such a broad disbursal that public television might only accidentally benefit from it. It may not happen anyway.
Here are two guys who had history enough of public television to appreciate it. But for some reason—and maybe they think it’s just politically expedient—they have taken this notion of spectrum auctions, and turned it not to support public television as a vigorous, secure alternative voice, but across all those colleges and libraries and universities.
Maybe with broader support something will happen. They seem to have given up on the institution of public broadcasting having that much support.
That’s their argument: It’s not politically feasible to direct that kind of support to public television. That just tells me that you have to work harder at it.
Introduction
Web page posted Sept. 4, 2002
Current
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Copyright 2002
