Beyond Big Bird

Wither PBS?

Charles Oliver from the June 1991 issue

“One of the strengths of KCET is that when I turn it on, it isn’t always something that I want to see,” said one volunteer during the PBS station’s March pledge drive. He summed up the attitude of many public television’s most devout supporters: It isn’t always enjoyable, but dammit, PBS is important.

In fact, PBS has looked pretty important over the last 10 months. In September, the network’s series on the Civil War drew an incredible (by PBS standards) 12 percent of the national television audience. In October, PBS kicked off a $2-million ad campaign to promote the new season, including its first-ever ads on commercial television stations. And in November, the PBS board of directors took control of programming away from member stations and placed it in the hands of PBS Vice President Jennifer Lawson. The move promised to streamline an ’ unwieldy system in which several different committees decided which programs were funded.

But beneath the surface successes, PBS appears to be in trouble. It isn’t mortally ill, not by a long shot. But it is declining in importance. Indeed, long term trends are at work that could spell the end of public television.

Before PBS, there was educational television. In 1949, the Federal Communications Commission reserved 242 channels for noncommercial instructional television. The next year, KUHT-TV in Houston went on the air as the nation’s first educational station. By the early 1960s, there were 75 educational television stations on the air.

Educational television was pretty low-rent stuff. With little money to spend on programming, most stations relied on talking-head discussion shows, chalkboard-and pointer instructional programs, and the occasional nature documentary.

PBS was supposed to counter all of this. In the preface to the 1967 Carnegie Corp. report that first proposed a public television system, E.B. White wrote that this system should be “the visual counterpart of the literary essay, should arouse our dreams, satisfy our hunger for beauty, take us on journeys, enable us to participate in events, present great drama and music, explore the sea and the sky and the woods and the hills.’’

In 1968 Lyndon Johnson created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which would pump money into public television and radio to create White’s “visual counterpart of the literary essay.” One year later, CPB and public television stations formed PBS to jointly produce and program new shows.

PBS was in many ways a model Great Society program: originated by ivory tower intellectuals, intended to achieve lofty goals, and given generous federal funds. And like many Great Society programs, PBS never quite lived up to its promise The talking heads of educational television were simply interrupted every now and then by Cookie Monster or Julia Child.

The audience for it all was small. By the late 1970s, PBS usually averaged about 4.5 percent of the prime-time viewing audience. At the time, the lowest-rated of the three commercial networks could easily draw 15 percent.

Over the years, PBS’s audience didn’t grow, but public television itself did. The number of stations jumped from about 100 when the system began to about 300 in 1990. Today, public television is a $1-billion-a-year business. WNET, the member station in New York City, alone has an annual budget of more than $100 million. Perhaps most emblematic of the changes at PBS is the Washington, D.C., station, WETA. WETA started out in the home of one of its supporters, but now it has a $40- million annual budget, a skylighted complex in Arlington, Virginia, and Sharon Rockefeller (wife of Sen. Jay Rockefeller) as its president.

And as public television grew, the bureaucracy became more complex. An amalgam of alphabet organizations-CPB, PBS, NAPTS, EETN, PMN, and SECA being the most prominent- came together to fund programs and coordinate the actions of public television stations. Programming was particularly complicated. PBS itself could put shows into development through the PBS-CPB Program Challenge Fund. But programs were typically developed at a handful of large member stations-WGBH in Boston, WETA in Washington, D.C., and WNET in New York City being the most important. These stations drew their money from a variety of sources: the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, other stations through the Programming Cooperative, viewers, foundations, and corporations.

This complicated arrangement shielded the system from accountability. “The public television bureaucracy is certainly confusing to outsiders,” notes conservative journalist David Horowitz, who is writing a book on PBS. “It seems designed so that everybody involved can avoid the responsibility for the programs. If you have some criticism of one of their shows, and you want to find out who is responsible for it, the response is always ‘Well, funding was approved by this committee. And this group placed it on the schedule.’ Or, ‘It was produced by WGBH or by the BBC.’ Everyone can pass the buck to someone else.”

At least in the early days, there was arguably a need for public television. When PBS was formed, most households-except in a few big cities could receive only the three networks. There was little variety in TV programming. The commercial stations stuck to sitcoms, shoot ’em ups, and game shows. High culture and public affairs were almost nonexistent.

But even as the PBS bureaucracy was growing fat, changes in technology and in the marketplace were occurring that would challenge PBS’s need to exist. The growth of independent commercial stations and the success of the VCR and compact disks gave people a greater choice in home entertainment. But the biggest problem for PBS is cable.

Thanks to those little boxes on top of their TVs, most people now have a large variety of channels to watch. The average viewer can choose from 30 channels, and that number will probably double by the end of the decade. As a result, PBS’s share of the prime-time audience has declined by about 12 percent over the last decade, from its high of 4.5 percent to 4 percent in 1990. As cable channels develop, PBS’s decline seems likely to continue, perhaps even to accelerate.