Two Cultures: Is Public Television Part of the New Media?
Ernest Wilson, Dean of the Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Southern California, is a member of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Board. He, too, wants public broadcasting to tell a better story, but he points out that, at the moment, there are two separate stories—the conventional, traditional argument for public broadcasting, which appeals to the older, grayer part of the population, and the very different, much more exciting, much more optimistic message of the new media generation. One is “ ‘woe is me, we’re dead, I’m losing my job, I can’t find funding,’ yet at the same time you have another community of people who are brimming with excitement. I don’t understand why these two communities are not talking to one another,” Wilson says.

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	Patricia Harrison

“We’ve got to tell a better story, one that people can remember in an elevator, and part of that story is getting the traditional public service media together with the new public service media, the bloggers and the people who are doing stuff online, and then perhaps we can convince our communities that we are really worth paying for.” Wilson points out that “the paradigm under which all of us operate is changing radically and none of us is really sure where it will go.” Then he makes a passionate call to action: “What concerns me most of all, both as a dean and as a member of the [CPB] board, is the debate going on in the country about this digital transformation, the information revolution, and I just do not see public broadcasting at the center of that debate. It seems to me that every time you open a newspaper, and every time you turn on a television set, and every time you go to a community meeting, public service media should be right there at the middle of the debate.” There is a sense of urgency in that debate, and it’s that sense of urgency Wilson wants to remind us of.

Alberto Ibargüen of the Knight Foundation reinforces the point: “We’ve been a longtime supporter of PBS and NPR. What we’re doing now, though, is really trying to shift all of our clients, all of our grantees, to working with new media. ... The focus needs to be on reach and on how this digital stuff actually gets used.”

Although not everyone speaks out, it’s clear that some around the table aren’t quite as all-embracing in their attitudes to the new media. Public television, like news departments of commercial networks, has built its reputation on the premise that it is trustworthy, truthful and accurate—in a word, authoritative. Vartan Gregorian articulates something that many people at the table seem to feel. “Everything is ‘lite’ in America now,” he says. “Why don’t we have something heavy, authoritative? It’s an important issue: as we develop all these things, we’re trying to educate, not just to entertain, not just to please, but to elevate by providing a national vocabulary, national standards so that as the ephemera passes, people will always return to what is best in our culture. We should not apologize for quality.”

Ernest Wilson will certainly not apologize for quality, but he is concerned that there are two cultures headed in two different directions. “There is a group that should not be underestimated, and that is younger people who do new digital stuff,” he says. “They don’t get First Amendment as much as we do, and they don’t get public ownership of the airways, but they really do get ‘open source’ and ‘multiple voices,’ and I think they really want to have a stake and participation in this discussion. But it’s two cultures right now—the traditional culture that we’re all involved in and this weird new media culture. There should be a way, it seems to me, to bring them together.”

The Local Context: Community Partners
Prior to attending the meeting, participants received a briefing paper suggesting that public television’s most persistent and pressing problem is the business plan on which it is based. According to the paper this plan is built around localism, the sovereignty of the local stations, to such an extent that the health of the system as a whole, particularly of PBS and the National Program Service, is dependent on the financial health of the stations. As a result:

The briefing paper* argues that the business plan needs to be changed or, at any rate, augmented, and it suggests that the new digital and broadband technologies provide the stations with a means of doing this, provided they are prepared to rethink and (to an extent) reinvent themselves as “public service media organizations.” The key to this will be a willingness to partner with other community institutions, thereby opening up new revenue streams and giving the stations an entirely new status within their communities.

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	Ernest Wilson DeAnne Hamilton and Paula Kerger

Not everyone would agree completely with this assessment, but the five local stations represented at the meeting were chosen because they have all developed new forms of partnership with their communities. The Cleveland station, known as ideastream, is probably the best example. Created in 2001 out of the merger of two public broadcasters, WVIZ-TV and WCPN-FM, the station labeled itself from the beginning a “multiple media public service organization” whose intention was to share its resources with the community. “People in Cleveland were very excited about the arsenal of media that we would have to address education and public service needs,” explains Jerry Wareham, ideastream’s president, “but they quite politely and quite sincerely asked ‘just what the hell are you going to do with it, what are you going to address?’ Our response was something called the Listening Project. ... The conversation is focused on the community, not on public broadcasting. We don’t talk, we listen. And it is a transformative experience. ... People are asking not only that we provide information with journalistic integrity, but also that we partner with community organizations, that we convene community in order to address issues and problems and that we facilitate a process of identifying and implementing solutions in the community.