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Originally published in Current, Aug. 19, 2002
Public TV could have more coherent impact if it scheduled and promoted programs uniformly, McGhee argues.
The cost of ‘localism’
Assuming that Congress isn’t going to come around to the idea of permanent adequate funding, is there any way to get from here to a better-funded system by changing its costs or its structure?
I’ve been in national programming for essentially all my career in television, so I don’t understand, from the point of view of a practitioner, the value of local programming. It consumes a large portion of the [funding] pie that public television has. It doesn’t attract a proportionate share of the audience or regard from that audience. The audience, not surprisingly, seems to be more aware of the national programming, which tends to be more highly produced. For that reason, it’s not surprising that national programming may have more influence than local, which is produced on a shoestring. This is not an original thought—
The Boston Consulting Group, for one, said something like this in a report in 1991. [Earlier article]
That was a particularly unpopular idea for a system that rests on the "bedrock of localism" as Clay Whitehead phrased it—or was it Spiro Agnew or Richard Nixon? How could one expect a system that draws from that base of local institutions to punish them? Who would vote to put themselves out of office?
People who talk about localism say there’s some value in having decisions made all over the country. It naturally results in a diversity of opinion about what should be on the air, and in programs chosen to be appropriate for the viewing area. Is there a real advantage to this diffusion of power? Or is it theoretical?
Much is made of the value of local ownership. Public television is to be distinguished amongst all the alternatives in being locally owned and operated community stations. That’s true. But one of the great advantages of being centrally directed is that you can create a kind of coherent impact, and I think that’s also true. How does public television find a way to have it both ways?
How do they create a coherent impact?
When they function as a network. They promote themselves uniformly. They create expectations that they fulfill. And they do it pretty much across the board. It’s harder for public television to do that, but isn’t it desirable?
Is it really such a good thing for public television that a local operator can decide that his audience isn’t interested in public affairs, so he runs Frontline at 11 o’clock, so that he can air Victory at Sea at 10? Or from 9 to 11?
Victory at Sea, which was made 50 years ago?
Whatever. I actually saw Victory at Sea as part of my Navy indoctrination, and I have some affection for it.
There’s a lot of talk in public TV about aiming for a younger and larger audience. Is that an attainable goal with programs that meet the quality standards public TV should be aiming for?
Younger is sometimes defined as 20s to 30s, and sometimes it’s 55 to 60. The audience self-selects for what we do in the main, because of who they are and what they care about. Maybe that’s true of every offering on television. I don’t think there’s a lot of evidence that we can find a different audience by being less true to ourselves.
How about expanding the younger end of your audience? Is that something you’re going to try to do?
I won’t argue that it is or isn’t valuable to do. But I don’t think we know how to do programming that is naturally interesting to a 20-something audience.
How about a 40-something audience?
I don’t think we know how to adjust the fuel mixture or whatever it takes to bring that skew down.
A modest rebellion
We reported on a recent coincidence when PBS planned to rerun Evolution and a lot of stations planned to use the same time period on May 14 for a documentary they bought from the British—
—on Mohammed Ali. [Earlier article] It wasn’t a coincidence. It was a modest, active rebellion against PBS by programmers. As it happened Evolution was caught in the cross-hairs. It could have been something else.
The station programmers weren’t targeting that program?
They felt they had told PBS that repeating it in May wasn’t a great idea, and their advice wasn’t heeded. Their feeling that they aren’t heeded as often as they should be—maybe Evolution was the straw that broke the camel’s back or maybe it was just there at the right time for the crystalizing of the "let’s show them" attitude.
I think they showed them. I don’t think the programmers did it in full awareness of the stakes where we were concerned. That’s not their fault and it may be our fault.
Quite possibly the programmers were right. This wasn’t an ideal time to run Evolution from a programmer’s point of view—even if it was an ideal time from some other perspectives—and that had become the struggle. What perspective is going to govern what comes across on the screen?
WGBH was hoping to coordinate this rerun with educational outreach.
That was what made its non-carriage so costly. There was $300,000 to $400,000 invested in outreach and promotion. All the teachers had been alerted. We had the blithe assumption that because PBS had designated it for common carriage it would be carried, and we had gone ahead and created the expectation that it would happen.
There was a fairly concerted effort to reduce the damage by alerting the stations. Many changed their plans based on our pleading.
Did you also hear whether Paul Allen, the funder of Evolution, was disappointed? Was he expecting and hoping for a whole additional audience for the program?
Certainly so, but we didn’t hear from Paul Allen. In this case, Richard Hutton, who had been the executive producer of Evolution, had since its broadcast gone to work for Paul Allen in charge of all his media. So Richard was on both sides of this question. On behalf of himself as the producer and Paul Allen, his now-employer, he urged a spring airing, which we urged upon PBS as well, to take advantage of the school year. It was set for May.
Overall, the Evolution project—the series, its website, outreach and teaching materials—cost more than $15 million. That was all invested not as a commercial enterprise but as educational evangelism. With the same interest that a commercial investor might have had, they wanted to see a return on investment in terms of use and impact. This is all understandable.
If it had been rescheduled for September, and maybe if we had known that the programmers had the strong feelings that they did, we would have accommodated it. What made this difficult was the fact that it came as a surprise after it was too late to retreat, and it was embarrassing for a lot of people, and painful.
Introduction
Web page posted Sept. 4, 2002
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