EDUCATIONAL TV: STILL YOUNG, STILL TRYING

...NET provides five hours a week to each of its affiliates at the bargain price of $100 a year, with old programs available from its library for the trifling sum of five dollars per half hour...

...logue applied to educational television, the quip is slightly exaggerated...

...Peak viewing times are almost exclusively devoted to the equivalent of fun and games...

...It is these community stations, thirty-one of them, that are most in need of financial reinforcement...

...CTV's bill, in contrast, averages about $50,000 for a half-hour program...

...The 1964 television budget of the medium's top advertiser—Procter & Gamble's $140,736,000—could have supported three ETV station-network complexes with $20 million left over for mad money...

...It would be enough to finance the 100 ETV stations and the program-producing National Educational Television (NET) network, sometimes called "the bicycle network" because it is not interconnected electronically as the commercial network stations are...

...In a medium overwhelmingly devoted to entertainment, ETV deals with education, enrichment, and enlightenment...

...The loose confederacy nevertheless has yielded good, even great programs, especially those produced for NET by WGBH-TV, Boston, operated by the WGBH Educational Foundation...

...In other ways, too, ETV is relatively inconsequential...

...Other notable WGBH-TV programs recently include a revealing two-part documentary on South Africa produced by Henry Morgenthau III, and "Dear Liar," the dramatized correspondence of Bernard Shaw and Mrs...

...Spelling out the Committee's criteria for democratic programming in the public service, he said: "Such broadcasting requires the broadcasters to put on in prime time a fair range of variety of programs, varied in both subjects and moods (rather than to cater for people almost wholly conceived as a relaxed mass...

...At NET, he could have named his own creative ticket...

...In the materialistic jeweler's eye of modern affluent America, nothing...

...The CTV industry— three national networks and 575 stations—reported $1.8 billion in total broadcast revenues last year and $415.6 million in pre-tax profits...

...The sum spent by television's fiftieth largest sponsor—Royal Crown Cola's $8,001,000—was almost exactly equal to the 1964 budget of NET, the central production facility of educational television...

...Patrick Campbell, brilliantly acted by Jerome Kilty and Cavada Humphrey...

...Nearly 100 stations bring ETV programs within the reach of an estimated fifty million Americans...

...He was speaking, of course, about CTV...

...As it is, commercial broadcasting does offer superb coverage of news events such as the space shots, which non-commercial television may never be able to afford, and many fine documentaries and cultural programs...

...raising funds...

...But it has often shot to the heady heights of half a million and more for network extravaganzas such as "Hedda Gabler," starring Ingrid Bergman, and "My Name is Barbra," the 1965 Bar-bra Streisand special...

...Educational television is America's only hope for a second broadcasting chance, a chance to raise the quality of television at least a few notches above the level of comic books...

...It is not true that no one is listening to and looking at ETV...

...A bitter critic of selected sampling and the broadcasting industry's uses of the technique, Allen fired off many such barbs...

...He was involved for five years in the writing and production of Edward R. Murrow's "Person to Person" television series...

...The Pilkington report, issued in 1962, challenged the principle behind the main argument employed by American commercial broadcasters to defend their light-entertainment glut— that they give the public what the majority wants...

...Nobody listens to your program, but one guy out in Albuquerque goes around knocking it...

...The minorities that broadcasters should think of are not just minorities in the usual intellectual and 'cultivated' senses, but minorities actual or potential in the great body of people...

...In the NET cultural area, a wide variance of quality persists, with far too many embarrassing examples of amateurism and pretension getting on the air...

...ETV is a marvel of perversity and a triumph of sheer survival...

...The first ETV station, KUHT, Houston, went on the air on May 12, 1963...

...Such enterprise on "crucial subjects" has not been exhibited since...

...The most glamorous of the lot, WNDT, New York, began with a bang and a whopping $3 million annual budget three years ago, ran out of cash early this year, dumped personnel and new programming, resorted to program reruns from January to October, and finally was bailed out by the Ford Foundation...

...The foundation is a partnership of Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Boston Symphony, and the Lowell Institute, a century-old pioneer in adult education...

...Program production costs are just as ludicrously disparate...

...WNDT, New York, put on the 1964 Emmy-winning series, "The Art of Film," for a total of $150 a week in out-of-pocket expense, which included a modest honorarium for the host, Stanley Kauff-mann, film critic for The New Republic...

...The Foundation has earmarked $10 million more to provide, over the next four years, matching grants to the public-supported community ETV stations as a stimulus to their own fund-raising efforts...

...Actually, the principal accolade for the far-sighted concept of ETV's potential should go to Frieda Hennock, the thoughtful, liberal FCC commissioner who alone, in July, 1949, during the FCC "freeze" of station construction while priorities were studied, proposed the reservation of certain television channels for education...

...The unevenness of NET's output betrays dispersion of responsibility among diverse sources...

...Anything less is deprivation.'" It is idle to speculate what American commercial broadcasters would do —or would not do—in the way of quality programming if they were not required by law, and regulated by the Federal Communications Commission, to operate in the public interest, convenience, and necessity...

...Museum Open House," a warmly appreciative and casually informative art series conducted by Russell Connor, and "The French Chef," a charming cooking series featuring Julia Child, are both creations of the Boston station...

...The controversy over escalation of the war in Vietnam, demonstrated by a rising- tide of protest in the United States, was the big story of 1964...

...to give the public what it wants' is a misleading phrase," the report continued, "because it appears to appeal to democratic principle but does not...

...Baldwin's impassioned speech was telecast May 28...

...getting them on the air and keeping them there...

...The trouble with television is that it is rusting in the scabbard during a battle for survival...

...It will never wallow in the kind of wealth to which CTV has grown accustomed...

...Coverage of the civil rights story of 1963 remains NET's high-water mark, the time it came closest to its stated objective: "To provide a national program service that tangibly contributes (1) to the knowledge and wisdom of the American people on subjects crucial to their freedom and welfare, and (2) to the continuing cultural growth and renewal that are vital in any healthy society...

...If there is a sense in which the phrase may be used it is this: '. . . what the public wants and what it has the right to get is the freedom to choose from the widest possible range of program matter...

...ETV's informational and cultural programming during prime evening hours offers American viewers a choice, an alternative to the rampant commercialism, standardized comedy, violence, and superficiality that dominate CTV...

...Although television, in the words of advertising executives, is the greatest sales medium devised by man's genius, ETV sells no commercial product...

...It's possible to get a minus rating," the comedian said...

...James Baldwin, who was present, went to a studio within a few hours to tape a WGBH-TV interview...

...For a choice is only free if the field of choice is not unnecessarily restricted...

...A key event took place after a group of Negroes met in New York City in May, 1963, with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who represented President John F. Kennedy...

...A major pioneering contribution of WGBH-TV and of NET was the station's coverage, for the network, of the American Negro's civil rights struggle of 1963...

...Programming is the heart of broadcasting, and a critical survey of NET programs reveals that educational television's vital organ has leaky valves, fatty tissue, and an erratic beat...

...A recent interview with Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society, came close to being more publicity than expose, a result NET did not intend...

...For the bulk of its evening programming, however, WNDT now relies on NET, as do most of the other ETV stations...

...One hundred ETV stations have now been established...

...Although its excellent series of the past—"The Art of Film," "The City," "The Comers," "Artists of New Jersey," "Profiles in Thought,"—have become history, WNDT, with its budget halved, appears to have made a new if limited beginning last fall with a biweekly drama series, "The New York Television Theater...

...Being non-commercial, ETV is happy to break even...

...They will supply a beneficial complement to commercial telecasting...

...Prodding the commercial networks was an achievement, but more import-tant was influencing national policy on civil rights...

...Back in the United States last fall, he signed with NBC instead of NET...

...Strong leadership, minimum standards, and definite direction are yet to be established...

...ETV tapes and films are shipped and shared...

...Just what is it that makes it something of value...

...The growth of educational television was understandably slow...

...ETV has had its own battle for survival...

...Previously he was a "back of the book" writer and editor for Newsweek magazine, a radio and television critic for Variety and The New York Star, and a publicity manager for news and public affairs television programs for the Columbia Broadcasting System...

...The spirit of ETV is perhaps best described by Richard Hoggart, British critic and a member of England's Pilk-ington Committee on Broadcasting...

...Television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us," Edward R. Murrow said in a 1958 speech that still rings true...

...Providing for a greater diversity in television programming, they will be particularly attractive to the many specialized and minority interests in the community, cultural as well as educational, which tend to be bypassed by commercial broadcasters thinking in terms of mass audiences...

...ETV stations can keep their costs extremely low...

...NET muffed or dodged it, except for the telecast of a Washington, D.C., teach-in...

...Educational TV stations, when established, will do more than furnish a uniquely valuable teaching aid for in-school and home use...

...ETV's promise is a continuing quest for quality programs of substance and human value unhampered by market considerations...

...At the times when most people watch, their CTV choice is held down to virtually one level—that of the comic book-—with their range of choice limited to westerns, soap operas, situation comedies, spy stories, and variety shows...

...Typical of one ETV problem is the rapid rise and loss to commercial television of George Page, a talented thirty-year-old WGBH-TV producer-writer-director...

...In fact, the slogan is 'patronizing and arrogant' in that it claims to know what the public is, but defines it as no more than the mass audience...

...ETV has a long way to go to equal the artistic achievements of such CTV programs as "Victory at Sea" and the NBC Opera...

...a great many people are highbrows, specialists, or enthusiasts in something, whether in carpentry or music or gardening...

...The eloquent forty-minute television plea—that the future of the Negro and of America "is entirely up to the American people, whether or not they are going to face and deal with and embrace the stranger whom they maligned so long"—persuaded the Kennedys, as the abortive meeting had not, and was a factor leading to President Kennedy's moral commitment of America to equality for all in his speech of June 10...

...In vivid contrast, the average family among the fifty-five million families who have access to the almost 600 commercial television (CTV) stations clocks the staggering total of more than five hours of viewing per day...

...Three-fourths of NET's $8 million annual operating cost is borne by the same unflagging source...

...That CTV profit could keep going the operations of all of ETV for eight years...

...Since 1951, the Ford Foundation has given a total of $96.8 million to ETV...

...In the field of mass communications, it appeals only to minority audiences...

...Educational groups that had been alerted to what was at issue, including agencies of the Ford Foundation, successfully pleaded before the FCC and won 242 channels for non-commercial educational television when the freeze was lifted in April, 1952...

...For the NET series, "America's Crises," in 1964, Page produced two stunning, touching pictorial essays on American youth and parents...

...There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance, and indifference...

...The Boston station was first on the airwaves with quality programs on the subject, programs that aired the views of Negroes and whites and of official and unofficial leaders from Roy Wilkins to Malcolm X. Following NET's spring lead on the big domestic story of the year, the commercial television networks scheduled their own programs on civil rights before the summer was over, notably NBC-TV's three-hour prime-time Labor Day special...

...It cannot, therefore, satisfy all the needs of the public," the report stated...

...In the two hours, he disclosed a sure hand, a personal style, and a genius for "writing" with a camera...

...So did commercial television until late summer, when CBS and NBC finally scheduled major documentaries whose principal contribution was a detailing of the Johnson Administration's position...

...ETV is a second chance for American broadcasting...

...To those who step to the music of a different drummer, everything...

...NET, a far more lavish spender than any of its stations, splurges up to $20,000 to produce a one-hour program...

...Both sides left the meeting frustrated and depressed, feeling they had not really understood each other...

...Offered an NET contract, Page opted for a year in Europe before settling down as a film maker...

...From the beginning, the Ford Foundation was the prime organizer, creating committees, agencies, and the Educational Television and Radio Center (which eventually became NET...

...They will permit the entire viewing public an unaccustomed freedom of choice in programming...

...As an anaJOHN HORN is television and radio ciitic for The New York Herald Tribune...

...An investment of more than $50 million in properties had to be made, and operating funds collected...

...At the commercial network, for more money, he will have comparatively minor and routine employment in the Washington office of the "Huntley-Brinkley Report...

...Introducing non-commercial objectives and activities, they will be a leavening agent raising the aim and operations of our entire broadcasting system...

...A service which caters only for majorities can never satisfy all, or even most of the needs of any individual...

...Some five million individuals watch more than one hour a week...

...We are protecting the mind of the American public from any real contact with the menacing world that squeezes in upon us...

...Muddled in execution as it is, ignored by the big audience, existing hand-to-mouth on handouts, displaying more potential than performance, and unsure of direction or survival—ETV still remains a promise of better television to come...

...But it has managed a precarious existence by proving the worth of its daytime classroom service (twothirds of the stations are supported by school systems and state universities and colleges directly, while other ETV stations earn part of their costs by serving schools), by convincing not-yet-enough groups and individuals of the community-enriching value of evening programs in the arts, sciences, and public affairs, and by having the support for both ETV objectives of the Ford Foundation, whose tenacious dedication and money made it all possible...

...The prescient Miss Hennock, who criticized the allocations only because she wanted more channels reserved for educational television, said at the time: "In view of television's extraordinary influence, which must grow rather than abate in future years, the Commission has an especial responsibility to the public—adults as well as children—to insure that this great natural resource to a substantial degree is devoted to cultural interests, to education as well as entertainment...

...But the actual audience that tuned in is highly selective, which is as ETV wants it...

...Outside firms, program underwriters, individual stations, and the NET staff are all in the producing act...

...establishing stations...

...Almost all of us do something more intensely than others, and if broadcasters do not plan their programs so as to cater to different intensities of concern, they will only hold people— although perhaps all of the time—in a kind of lukewarm bath of low-level interest...

...For every outstanding series such as "The Creative Person," a lively and imaginative look at the arts, and for every individual production such as Robert Lowell's "The Old Glory: Benito Cer-eno," picked up from the off-Broadway stage, there are twice as many NET disappointments and disasters— such series as the rambling, unfocused "Population Problem," the arty "Legacy" (of Western civilization), the dishwater "Of People and Politics," and an aimless, amateurish "Pathfinders...

...The first chance, leased to private enterprise with FCC reins held so loosely as hardly to be felt, has reached a dead end...

...He was furious that he and his friends had failed to convince the Attorney General of the urgency of the problem...

...But advertising-based CTV's main business is quantity, the attraction of the largest possible mass audience...

...No one can say he is giving the public what it wants unless the public knows the whole range of possibilities which television can offer and, from this range, chooses what it wants to see...