FORTY YEARS AFTER THE REPORT OF THE CARNEGIE COMMISSION ON EDUCATIONAL TELEVISION

Public television might never have come into existence in the United States had it not been for the intervention of two powerful foundations: the Ford Foundation and Carnegie Corporation. In 1951, eleven years and a world war after the introduction of regular television broadcasting (all of it commercial), the Ford Foundation began an ambitious program to help finance educational television (ETV), as it was known at the time. The first ETV station, KUHT, was founded at the University of Houston in 1953. By the time Ford finally ended its program—more than twenty-five years and $300 million later—280 stations were in operation and they were known as public television stations. Carnegie Corporation, the second foundation to intervene, was also very influential in the development of public TV. In the three-year period between 1965 and 1968, the Corporation launched two initiatives, the first, the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television (1965 to 1967), paved the way for public broadcasting to be given formal existence and status as well as proper philosophical and structural foundations; the second, Carnegie Corporation’s major contribution to the creation of the Children’s Television Workshop, led to the launch of Sesame Street and the beginning of public television’s hard-earned reputation for quality programming in areas not properly served by commercial television. Preschool programming was the first, and arguably the most important, of these endeavors.

	Alberto Ibargüen and Vartan Gregorian

The Public Broadcasting Act was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson on November 7, 1967. The law was clearly based on the Carnegie Commission report but differed from it in crucially important details—it called for no excise tax on television sets with which to finance public broadcasting and no independent members of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (instead, all nine were to be named by the president of the United States, not more than five from each party). As a result, public television’s forty-year odyssey has been characterized by a number of highs, a number of lows and a good deal of angst. The highs have been programming successes, most notably a raft of fresh new series in the early days, which did exactly what public television had been invented to do—fill some of the gaps in what was then, for most people, a four- or five-channel marketplace. There have been other, more recent, high points, among them Ken Burns’ The Civil War and Henry Hampton’s Eyes on the Prize, but these have come less frequently and with much greater effort as the marketplace has grown at breakneck speed to the 100-plus channels most Americans now enjoy. The lows have almost all resulted from public television’s inevitable treatment as a political football, which is the penance to be paid for receiving part of its funding (about 16 percent) from the federal trough. The angst has almost always been financial, caused by public television’s chronic underfunding compounded by a business plan that may once have been adequate but does not work in a cable and satellite world, let alone a digital one.

So it might not be altogether surprising, forty years and one week after the signing of the Public Broadcasting Act, to find Carnegie Corporation hosting another meeting about public broadcasting. According to Susan King, Carnegie Corporation vice president of external affairs, this meeting is not prompted by nostalgia or the need to create a congratulatory moment, nor is it driven by an urge to hold an investigation or an inquiry. Rather, it is founded in the knowledge that public television is on the threshold of a new age—the digital age—in which broadcasters will be part of a much larger, less exclusive, more participatory media environment. This environment is largely made up of broadband carriers, of which broadcasting is one, but no longer the most powerful one, and it is a media environment to which every person in every country will one day have access.

If this is the obvious reason for convening the meeting, then there may also be another more speculative reason—the notion that the digital world may be just the sort of place in which public television can come into its own, fulfilling the prophecy of President Lyndon Johnson who, as he signed the Act, anticipated a future in which public broadcasting would play an important role in building “a great network for knowledge.”

I believe the time has come to enlist the computer and the satellite, as well as television and radio, and to enlist them in the cause of education. ...
So I think we must consider new ways to build a great network for
knowledge—not just a broadcast system, but one that employs every means of sending and storing information that the individual can use.

So, forty years on, Carnegie Corporation has invited some of the critical thinkers and actors in public television’s transition to the digital age—national leaders from the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and a bevy of station managers—as well as a group of “informed outsiders” with practical knowledge of public television over many years. The meeting is held under the auspices of the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education, so the list of attendees also includes deans from some of the nation’s leading journalism schools.

“This great public force dedicated to public service” is how Vartan Gregorian, President of Carnegie Corporation, refers to public broadcasting in his opening remarks. And he should know: During 1992 and 1993, when he was president of Brown University, Gregorian dedicated a lot of time and effort to chairing the Twentieth Century Fund’s Task Force on Public Television. His influence can clearly be seen in its radical and reasoned report.¹ Indeed, the report was far too radical for public television at the time, calling for major restructuring so that far more of the available resources, including all federal monies, would be put into national programming rather than station upkeep, and recommending that federal funding be dramatically increased by giving public broadcasting a share of the proceeds of spectrum auctions or spectrum usage fees. It was then (and it remains) a passionately argued case for strengthening public television and, where necessary, for rethinking and refashioning it in preparation for the digital revolution already on the horizon. “Now is the defining moment,” read the epilogue to the report; “public television stations cannot afford to be merely passive and reactive, as has sometimes been the case in the past. The nation has made an investment in them, and it has a right to know that that investment will yield rich dividends in the future. Local communities have also made investments: they, too, must know what services their local public television stations will render them.” In its final paragraph the Task Force report quoted Newton Minow’s 1991 address at Columbia University on the thirtieth anniversary of the speech in which, as FCC chairman, he had described American commercial television as a “vast wasteland.” Those two words were what the speech was remembered for, but the two words he had wanted remembered, Minow said, were public interest. “To me, the public interest meant, and still means, that we should constantly ask: What can television do for our country? For the common good? For the American people?”

It is that idea to which Gregorian returns, fifteen years later, in his opening remarks to the digital challenge meeting—the importance, and the undervaluing of the public interest and the public sector in American life. Seventy-five to eighty percent of the nation’s talent, he points out, comes from, or through, the public sector, yet we take the sector for granted and, in so doing, we imperil it. Public broadcasting is a good example: 110 million Americans make use of its radio and television together, Gregorian has been told, compared to the 60 to 70 million served by the private-sector cable industry. Yet in national communications policy and legislation, cable has a gigantic voice, and a very influential one, while public broadcasting has almost none, except when fighting for its life. “Why are you acting as defendants? Or mendicants? ... You are a big force: act accordingly.”

Gregorian and his meeting co-chair, Alberto Ibargüen, president of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and former chairman of the PBS Board, encourage attendees to speak candidly and directly. “It’s not a funding day, so don’t make pitches. Give us sound analysis so we—and all other foundations and government authorities—can see how we can help to preserve public television.”

1 Quality Time? The Report of the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on Public Television
(The Twentieth Century Fund Press, New York: 1993).