WHAT MAKES PUBLIC TV PUBLIC?

...He raised millions of dollars from private funders, but he has not yet won the battle to get his work a guaranteed prime-time slot on public stations...

...And so it's a ready victim when political and financial crises hit...

...Consider business shows on public TV— Adam Smith's Money World (funders: Metropolitan Life, E.F...

...Stations weren't going to adjust their schedules either...

...We'd all argue with the product, and complain about bias...

...Don't look to CPB for new directions, either...

...You can see it in the recent resort to commercial reruns like Lassie, intended as sugar-coating on more demanding public programming...

...This season's The Health Century is funded by the American Home Products Corporation, Bristol-Myers, CIBA-GEIGY, Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Squibb, and other pharmaceutical corporations...

...Bill Moy-ers left commercial television in despair, thinking public television would provide a vehicle for thoughtful public-affairs programs...

...Public broadcasting is, in the words of one Congressional staffer, a "good guy" in the eyes of constituents...

...It gets harder and harder to tell BY PAT AUFDERHEIDE As you tune in to Lassie or Star Trek, The Honeymooners or The Wild World of Animals, check your dial...

...And they have to share an investment in the creation of a politically sheltered body whose mandate it is to raise questions of public importance unasked by commercial television...

...Or whether heavy subsidies for organ-transplant research take money and research focus away from public-health programs...

...The problem goes back to the question Senator Hollings raised in November: Who out there is ready to fight for a better public-television system...

...But he is up against such public-television leaders as Raymond Ho, president of Maryland Public Broadcasting, who simply doesn't see the difference between commercial and public television...

...You need a real reason to try to fix something many voters think ain't broke...

...One of Richter's targets was mega-corporation Gulf + Western, whose Chairman Martin S. Davis denounced the show as "virulently anti-business" to then-president John Jay Iselin of New York station WNET and then withdrew G+W's support for WNET...

...What corporate underwriter would pay for that...

...Even "safely splendid" programming does have a mission, of course: a mission to avoid the controversial, a mission to entertain without stooping to vulgarity, and to inform without confronting the assumptions that keep us from knowing the obvious...

...Legislators created a new body, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), to "improve the facilities and program quality of the Nation's educational broadcasting stations so that this natural resource [the public airwaves] may be used to its fullest for the betterment of individual and community life...

...The most vocal interest group poking at public television today, the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers, has yet to take a lead in seeking out such allies...

...And that would be a healthy exercise of public debate in a democratic society...

...PBS refused to broadcast Sun City, a video by Steve Van Zandt on the making of a music video by Artists United Against Apartheid...

...News and documentaries typically get low ratings— and no wonder, since public television has never systematically cultivated an audience...

...But it was cheap...

...This one was expensive...

...Consider The Infinite Voyage, a twelve-part series on scientific discovery funded by the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC...

...Political bias is a bedeviling problem...

...CPB's budget now floats a huge bureaucracy, but it hasn't much to celebrate on its twentieth birthday...

...It isn't even that the agency has been shaken by the politicization so typical of the Reagan era...

...Congress has held two oversight hearings in honor of CPB's twentieth anniversary, and Senator Ernest Holl-ings, South Carolina Democrat, may have asked the most searching question...

...Her coverage of the subject won her Project Censored's Investigative Journalism Award in 1979...

...Worse yet, his success hasn't made fund-raising for the sequel series much easier...

...They are on the air not to fill a slot in any news or public-affairs editor's idea of responsible coverage, but because of corporate interest in funding business shows...

...Long before Reagan arrived in Washington, public television was a headless horseman...

...But that doesn't have to make you blind to the fact that, within public television, there is no desk where the buck stops for setting a public-affairs agenda...

...Public officials do agonize over conflict of interest when large institutions are eager to fund programming...

...And no one on the panel was there—from organized labor, community groups, supporters of children's television, issue-oriented groups, or the educational community—to say that public television mattered to them one way or the other...

...Instead, the specter of lost corporate funding and of alienating Congress and highly visible lobbies haunts public-television officials...

...A proposal that promises to give public television a distinctive purpose—and, therefore, a chance to survive competition from cable, pay television, and videocas-settes—also has a good chance of support from commercial broadcasters...

...For more than a decade, local educational television had sputtered dispiritedly without catching fire...

...But if you really want to look at the empty space at the center of public television, look at public-affairs programming...

...It was a steady drumbeat of hostility from the Right, outraged by the airing of such programs as Nicaragua . .. From the Ashes, that led to the airing of the anti-Sandinista film Nicaragua Was Our Home, which was funded by an organization linked to the Reverend Sun Myung Moon...

...Moyers is one of the few people left in public television who argues that the service should respond to the needs of a democratic society, not merely a consumer market...

...Don't tune in to The Health Century to hear about the controversy over commo-ditization of health services...

...But in politics, "somebody" isn't enough...

...His proposal was being beaten up by the National Association of Broadcasters, which was heavily lobbying the Administration...

...Pat Aufderheide is a senior editor of In These Times and has written extensively on public television for a variety of publications...

...Davis also implied that, during the production, Iselin had encouraged G+W to refuse interviews for the controversial film, in an apparent attempt to protect a major WNET supporter...

...His investigative documentary probed the relationship between growing hunger in the Third World and the global investments of multinational corporations in export agriculture...

...As he told a Congressional oversight committee, he spent years in "a ritual dance of presentation and review" with public television and had to find forty funders outside the system...

...The Africans, one of public television's most controversial recent offerings, was originally a BBC project...

...That's why the National Coalition of Independent Broadcasting Producers has proposed Federal funding for a separate and independent program service...

...It may very well come from some other country's public-television service, one where the mandate to produce programming on the basis of its public's need to know is taken seriously...

...What's appalling is that public television has never carved out a distinctive role as an information medium and public forum...

...A service partly funded by taxpayers shouldn't be simply a showcase for partisan opinion...

...MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour, having won a hard-fought battle with local stations to extend its length to an hour, wasn't ready to give up three minutes...

...mentary series, the kind that, in Great Britain, come out of the profits of commercial channels...

...It takes viewers on a whirlwind tour of the Third World, in pursuit of its subject: international development...

...CPB fulfills that mandate with programs that function more like mental interior decoration than compensation for what's missing from advertiser-driven television...

...Recognizing that some might charge conflict of interest, the series producers decided never to mention the World Bank...

...That's the kind of coalition that came together when the Federal Communications Commission tried to revoke the Fairness Doctrine, setting off an as-yet-unresolved Congressional defense of the rule that says broadcasters can't air just one side of a controversial issue...

...That's why former CPB Program Fund official John Wicklein, now an academic, proposes a whole new institution, more closely resembling the Smithsonian Institution than the Rube Goldberg machine we now have...

...But agonizing is the least of it...

...Oil, the challenging series on the international oil business and politics, was picked up from Norwegian public television...

...We shouldn't be judging progams by the same Nielsen ratings used by the commercial networks," Moyers told The New York Times...

...PBS argued that it was biased—against apartheid...

...That's less surprising than it ought to be...

...The company didn't want to squander its investment, so the series—which was produced by WQED, Pittsburgh's public station—was resold to commercial stations for airing with DEC advertisements within the same week it played on public television...

...Labor unions have repeatedly had run-ins over conflict of interest on public television—and have been far less lucky than corporations in the outcomes...

...The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), the distribution arm of the public stations, refused to give its imprimatur to Global Links because the World Bank had coproduced it...

...That's why proposals are afloat to set up endowment-type funding for public television, which would distance the service from the political and financial buffeting that menaces any attempt to mount controversy...

...Twenty years ago, when Congress passed the Public Broadcasting Act, it firmly linked the word "educational" to "television...

...Many are reasonably interesting, especially by comparison with commercial television...

...But it has lost a mission...

...The filmmaker who dares to tackle controversy is expected to prove, and prove again, the scrupulous "balance" of his or her program...

...But the steady slide of public television down the ratings slope, along with changes in the White House in 1988, may yet spur political action among what, in the Reagan era, has come to be termed "the special interests" (a.k.a...

...That mission boldly affects the look of public-affairs programming, public television's most clearly educational work...

...Consider ambitious, expensive docuPublic-affairs programming is not designed to raise public debate, to ask questions about why our world looks and moves the way it does...

...That's like making a series on lawmaking that never mentions Congress...

...Impoverished public television can encourage, but not bankroll, an offbeat project...

...In the Reagan era, its board was cut in size and packed with ideologically oriented members who fought among themselves and then were left in limbo as Congress and the Administration argued over appointments...

...Growing a Business (funder: Computer-land...

...The proposals all show that somebody out there still cares about public television's public-affairs potential...

...We know who likes it the way it is: the huge number of people on salary within the current baroque bureaucracy...

...Congress, the only political entity that can shore up the system against its drift toward commercial priorities, shows a stunning lack of interest in picking up a club to beat public broadcasting into a different shape...

...Caught in funding contradictions, it is now stuck with an ad-hoc mandate to round up the most viewer-subscribers possible to tempt the underwriters of programming...

...The basic decisions are made when programming is matched to underwriting...

...Wall Street Week, with Louis Ru-keyser (funders: Prudential-Bache, Hanson Trust, Primerica...

...But that is effectively what happens when public-television programmers abdicate the responsibility for setting a public-affairs agenda...

...In the end, it is the questions such programs don't ask that show the emptiness at public television's center...

...So is it surprising that these shows are aimed at audiences of small investors and not at citizens living under capitalism...

...It would have to argue that public television can't, any longer, dodge its responsibility for public-affairs programming...

...Public television has found an audience, built around a "safely splendid" notion of programming...

...How many viewers would write their legislator to protest a controversial film, as opposed to how many would write in to praise one...

...His series of three-minute reports on the Constitution was nearly sabotaged in a nationwide station fight over the placement of the show...

...Robert Richter, a veteran producer, is still angry about what happened with his Hungry for Profit, made through the now-defunct series Nonprofit TV...

...It doesn't even help to be a brand name in public-affairs programming...

...They could look to highly opinionated people (as the programmers at C-SPAN do) and to investigative filmmakers to sharpen debate and focus understanding of public issues...

...As a one-time White House aide who promoted the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, he has a longstanding investment in his vision...

...Henry Hampton, producer of the civil-rights series Eyes on the Prize— possibly the most impressive television documentary of the decade—beat the bushes for funders to mount the series...

...Its in-house filmmaker Jaime Martin-Escobal wrote, narrated, and directed the whole six-part series and used footage from films he had earlier made for the World Bank...

...It could support dedicated funding for public affairs, for independent productions, for special-events coverage...

...It is not designed to raise public debate, to ask questions about why our world looks and moves the way it does...

...It can deliver facts—such as The Health Century's recap of heart-disease research, such as Global Links's revelation that people are poor somewhere else in the world, such as Wall Street Week's insider analysis of the stock market...

...Officials really tear their hair out with public-affairs programs that don't match up easily with the interests of large corporate or foundation donors...

...Then we could watch a public-television service that accepts the challenge put forth in the 1967 Act, to have the public airwaves serve "the betterment of individual and community life...

...The future of a public television that's truly public—one whose priorities are set in terms of public interest rather than ratings—depends on political organizing by the groups in America least likely to be heard when corporate funders step up to pay for programming...

...No one answered him...

...What's appalling about public television today is not that programs are bad...

...It charts the medical conquest of infectious disease, approaches to heart disease such as transplants, and the ways medicine is prolonging life...

...If public-television executives recognized a mandate to create a public-affairs agenda—to raise and explain controversy—they wouldn't have to depend on program producers to be their own editors and censors...

...The idea for this bargain-basement-cheap series came from the World Bank, one of the most controversial development institutions...

...A TV Guide expose of public television's problems published last August quotes a WNET source as saying, "We did all we could to get the film sanitized...

...Spineless as public-television officials can be in the face of controversy, you have to feel sorry for them at budget time...

...Such a coalition could bond partisan groups with such mainstream groups as environmental organizations, labor unions, educational organizations, and the American Civil Liberties Union...

...You could be watching public television...

...When you see an innovative or hardhitting documentary on public television, check the source...

...Or the effect of such retailing on the skyrocketing cost of health insurance...

...The measure of the mind is not the people meter...

...Most flows to station groups, which produce series like Great Performances and American Playhouse, geared to attract upscale audiences likely to subscribe to the stations' fund appeals...

...We know what they've come to expect: a service that congratulates them on their good taste...

...Similarly, Accuracy in Media, the right-wing "media watchdog" group, managed to bully public television into broadcasting a "response" to an un-impeachably balanced series on Vietnam...

...You can see it in the whiny original series Trying Times and in the medium's staple, the nature shows...

...The conventional, the cheaply available, and big-bucks interests set the agenda instead...

...What Hollings asked the assembled public-television officials in that Senate hearing was: Where was their constituency...

...Taxpayers' money also gave the program a public-television stamp of approval...

...It would prove its case with the evidence, boldly displayed on today's screen, that if public television doesn't set that agenda, someone else will...

...And all for a four- or five-day lead on its airing on commercial television...

...Hutton, Unisys...

...Consider the series Global Links, co-produced by the World Bank and WETA, the public station in Washington, D.C...

...He envisions within it a national public-broadcasting news organization, in which professional journalists, not underwriters, would make the decisions, and independent producers would get a guaranteed chunk of the money...

...For that to happen, though, such groups need to see the empty space currently at the center of its public-affairs agenda...

...What corporate underwriter would pay for that...

...Taxpayers' money, which built up WQED's facilities and partly pays its salaries, subsidized DEC'S very own self-promotion vehicle...

...We know who among the 3 to 4 per cent of the viewing audience watches it now: disproportionately (and lusciously, for underwriters), upscale viewers...

...The Corporation spends less than a fifth of its budget directly on programming, and only a tiny portion goes to producers...

...At the moment, the blanket of prime-time public-television programming seems to smother any alternative vision...

...anybody but business...

...Such a coalition could advocate a public-affairs service on public television that looked somewhat the way National Public Radio's news shows sound...

...There's only a good show and a bad show," says Ho...

...They constitute the business group most heavily invested in public television's staying noncommercial (and thus uncompetitive with them...

...Why couldn't they fight a corporate lobby with numbers—viewers who would ring their legislators' bells to preserve and defend noncommercial programming...

...Of course it doesn't...

...He proposed a user fee on the sales of commercial stations, some of it to go to public broadcasting...

...No wonder the series ended up as a set of platitudes that avoids all the gut issues of international development...