The National Perspective
Paula Kerger has been president of the Public Broadcasting Service since March 2006. PBS is the membership organization jointly owned by the 168 licensees who operate the nation’s 355 public television stations, so the President of PBS may truly be described as public television’s leader. The position gives her enormous responsibility, including the charge that she deliver a national program service that is excellent, distinctive and competitive—although, to do this, she is provided a sum of money that is paltry by the standards of commercial television. In the financial year that ended June 30 2007, published accounts show that PBS spent a total of $368 million on all its programming responsibilities, approximately 3,700 hours in all. The biggest part of this—2,500 hours—is known as the National Program Service (NPS). It includes all the prime-time programming as well as the preschool children’s programming, and is what the stations rely on most; some say they would be nothing without it (that public television would be nothing without it).

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	Paula Kerger

In the commercial world, at a very conservative estimate, such programming might be valued anywhere between $1 billion and $3 billion. Yet the total amount that PBS’s 168 member stations are able to subscribe to it is $135 million, and even that amount is a stretch for them. The rest of the $368 million has to be scraped together from sponsors and grantmakers (an endangered species where public television is concerned), and there are frequent, increasingly desperate resorts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) for federal money to replace missing sponsors. CPB, however, by law, has to send 89 percent of its $400 million allocation from Congress directly to public radio and television stations in the form of Community Service Grants, which doesn’t leave much for its educational services, its mandate to promote diversity and its essential research and development projects, let alone for mainstream programming.

Sharon Rockefeller knows this all too well. She runs WETA in Washington, D.C., one of the system’s three national producing stations. “I worry about the adequacy of our national program content, and the funding of it,” she says. What we need is much more inspiring content, much more audacious content. And the two sources of funding that are drying up, and terrifyingly so, are corporate and foundation funding. Each has gone in a different direction from public television; the order of magnitude of their separation and loss is shocking.”

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	Lawrence Grossman

One of Paula Kerger’s predecessors, Larry Grossman, is also at the table. He ran PBS in its heyday in the late 1970s, before he went off to become president of NBC News, and he echoes Sharon Rockefeller’s worries about prime-time programming. “We’re still talking about the same mainstay programs we were twenty, thirty, even forty years ago. It’s time to move on, to regenerate a sense of public excitement by saying ‘here are the programs, the specific programs, we would like to produce,’ the great canon of American drama, the great dance programs, and so on,” says Grossman. “And then we’ll figure out how to fund it, and how to promote it, and how to excite people about it.”