Throughout the meeting, although many people make suggestions about national programming, no one helps Paula Kerger and Sharon Rockefeller to fund it. Eli Evans, who played a part in the first Carnegie Commission and was a member of the second Commission (1978–79), puts it very simply: “It’s not resources, it’s ideas that raise the money. And what’s really needed... is the great idea.” Vartan Gregorian is quick to agree, and he and Evans put forward immigration and illiteracy as two such ideas, closely related major needs that we can carry as a national challenge to the federal government, the Congress, to governors, foundations and corporations. “Corporations will be happy to [offer] support because the nation is asking for their help,” they contend. Evans argues that using digital technology and public broadcasting, with all its related platforms, to see immigration issues from both sides—the immigrants’ and the authorities’—would be a huge contribution to an issue that underlies so much of American life, the sort of big idea that is needed to give public broadcasting the place in American life it really deserves.

In the meantime, why is it that corporations and foundations have increasingly pulled away from public television? Is it because there are no “big ideas” around? On the contrary, says Sharon Rockefeller; the fact is that it’s becoming difficult to find funding even for a Ken Burns series. “Foundations have their agendas ... our programs have to match their agendas, or help them fulfill a goal.” David Haas, who is chairman of the William Penn Foundation in Philadelphia and whose family foundation is deeply involved in public broadcasting, agrees, though he thinks a big enough national issue would bring foundations out in force. Corporations, however, have a different philosophy and motivation: “they are geared toward marketing outreach; they are much more about PR,” he says. Controversy is another problem: Rockefeller and Gregorian agree that no corporation, and very few foundations, will touch subject matter that may become controversial. And there is the simple matter of turnover: a new president takes over at a corporation or foundation and wants to do something for which he (or she) can take the credit. “Corporations now commit to three months, six months, not the three years we used to have, for example, on the NewsHour,” says Rockefeller.

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	Susan King

Foundation giving is a field in which Vartan Gregorian has a great deal of experience, as both grantor and grantee. He acknowledges public television’s need to bring together a consortium of foundations (and maybe corporations, too) to address its national programming needs. He points out that very few foundations have public television as a priority, but they all have their own focuses—the environment, healthcare, community, education, and so on. Public television deals with all these concerns, Gregorian points out; it is the common link, which is why it might be possible to bring together a group of foundations with many different priorities around it. Others in the foundation business like David Haas agree, but they make it clear that such a consortium cannot be built on the basis of 20- or 30-year-old programs. The schedule must look and feel new and exciting.

Foundations are not generally willing to be long-term funders, Gregorian stresses. He likens Carnegie Corporation to “an incubator rather than an oxygen tank, because we have many things to do. We stay with you, we shepherd you, but if you’re fifteen years old we don’t want you still to be in a crib in need of milk. Get up and walk!” And, as someone who has been responsible for raising a vast endowment (at Brown University), he proposes that universities, with their huge endowments, should be challenged to make use of them to support public broadcasting. “Suppose every major university every year gives $10 million for program support, or $20 million. That’s nothing! ... Why not put it as an obligation? There are 2,300 TV stations in our colleges and universities; why not make them adjuncts to public television, make them auxiliary members?” Then, says Gregorian, they will have a stake in public television, which will be in a position to put pressure on them to use their endowments for its support.

Paula Kerger admits that “our biggest challenge is finding the financial model to sustain us,” but she points out that her first eighteen months at PBS have coincided with the most exciting developments in public television’s forty-year history—the last stages of digital transition and the early stages of harnessing digital technology to the needs and purposes of public television. This is going to be the key to public television’s future, she says, to its reach, its programming, and its funding potential. She emphasizes the importance of the local mission in ensuring that the individual stations “emerge from the final stage of this digital transition as vital and engaged partners in the communities they serve” and she communicates some of her own excitement at the opportunities that are emerging for public television to do things in new digital ways. “The barrier of entry to create content is significantly different than it has been. What we need to be willing to do is to seize that opportunity, to take risks, and to understand that to take risks you have to be willing to occasionally fail.” That’s hard in an organization where financial margins are so narrow, but the challenges of the multiplatform environment are not limited to finance. “Anyone who has worked through the issues of user-generated content recognizes that this is complicated territory,” she says. “We are focused very much on issues of editorial independence and integrity.”

This is an important area for a number of people around the table, particularly Alberto Ibargüen of the Knight Foundation, which has taken a leading role in development of new media. Speaking as “a former newspaper publisher and a former chairman of PBS, and as a control freak,” Ibargüen says, “I think a major issue is: how do you let go of editorial control? How do you equate your need to have editorial control, traditionally required to maintain those standards of objectivity, even-handedness and lack of bias that are so central to your mission,” he asks, “with the new media’s apparent requirement that you let the user have a kind of control?”