Getting the Story Across
Forty years ago, there was no real doubt about public television’s mission and purpose. The Carnegie Commission concisely summed it up in a sentence: public television should “include all that is of human interest and importance that is not at the moment appropriate or available for support by advertising.” But that statement was made in the days when there were three commercial networks and very little else on the dial, and cable TV was in its infancy. Now the situation seems very different to Richard Wald, who teaches journalism at Columbia University and whose distinguished career in network television news has covered the whole lifespan of public television. “What is the mission? I have 500 channels at home, God help me, and I can see things that used to be on Masterpiece Theatre on A&E or Bravo ... I get BBC America and all kinds of stuff from National Geographic and other channels that once upon a time had a home on public television. ...” Wald wants to know, does this still leave room for a mission for public television?

Not surprisingly, public television professionals are quick to respond. Welcome to A&E (the Arts & Education Network), Paula Kerger says, which tonight, and most nights, will be showing CSI and The Sopranos reruns! Where is Bravo’s performing arts programming? Compare the National Geographic Channel’s bland daily diet with the vastly superior specials it produces for public television. And so on. “The profound difference between what public television continues to create and what everyone else creates,” Kerger explains, “is that we’re not accountable to a stockholder, we’re not trying to sell an audience something. ... You’re going to make different editorial decisions if you’re really worried about what you’re going to be delivering toward the year-end profit.”

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	Richard Wald		Jim Pagliarini

Jim Pagliarini, CEO of Twin Cities Public Television in Minnesota, doesn’t think the fundamental mission has changed at all. “The way we characterize our mission is ‘to use the power of media for the public good,’ and that is consistent ... but we have to stop playing the tapes of the case that we’ve made for the last forty years. We need to freshen it up.” In common with most of the station representatives at the meeting, Pagliarini wants to highlight the really important work that PBS does on national issues and that individual stations do in community partnership and development, and to separate them out from the incidental, more trivial output, which tends to get played up by critics at Congressional hearings: This Old House, the how-to programs, the British comedies. Pagliarini wants to reframe the conversation about public television’s problems and its future. Not simply a financial problem, “it’s a value proposition,” he insists. “We need to talk about our value.” His definition of value is expressed in strikingly different terms from those used by Larry Grossman and others speaking about national programming. Great dance programs and the performing arts may be part of the value, but he sees its true worth more in terms of the local stations’ providing public services for their own communities; it’s the station manager’s down-to-earth view as opposed to the PBS-centered view most outsiders seem to have.

Several people around the table suggest that public radio may be more successful than public television, especially in matters of reach and funding. Sharon Rockefeller, whose station has both radio and television licenses, is quick to set the record straight: public radio was certainly doing very well four or five years ago, but that’s no longer true,” she argues. “The audience has plateaued and is declining, and membership is declining with it. Moreover, Pagliarini points out, “two of three people watch public TV. Two out of three people will never listen to public radio. They are serving a much narrower niche of the population; they do it extraordinarily well, but there is fatigue in that system, which we’re starting to see.”

Pat Harrison, the president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), is involved with both radio and television. In broad terms, she says, the mission is evergreen, but “are we fulfilling the mission with programs that differentiate us from whatever is on commercial TV? That’s our mission—and especially now, with the new audiences, we’ve moved far beyond the idea of public TV as something that is just defined by Masterpiece Theatre and a nice glass of Chablis.” She differentiates public television children’s programming from commercial children’s programming “where there is no safe place for children to watch television without being sold something.” Even in popular programs like SpongeBob SquarePants, the humor is really geared to parents, forty and up—“it’s caustic, it’s sarcastic,” she says. How about politics, where you can’t really turn on the set and find a safe place to debate except a NewsHour or a Charlie Rose, where you have a chance of being treated as if you have a brain instead of being shown yet another drive-by shooting? It’s for this reason, Harrison says, that CPB is launching a Public Awareness Initiative, “to remind the American public what they have, very much like the Statue of Liberty. You don’t want it to go away; it’s there as a resource for you and your family.”