PTV EXECUTIVE ASKS STATIONS TO BREAK PBS ‘HOLD,’ BECOME TRULY INDEPENDENT

Holding up his stations -- WNVC (Ch. 56) Fairfax and WNVT (Ch. 53) Goldvein) -- as examples of independent stations that had done better financially and in audience reach than many of the PBS-affiliated stations, he said public TV could be the “greatest insurance” against media concentration in the U.S., but only if it dropped its “reliance on PBS.” “It’s [independent PTV] an amazing position to be in, there is no affiliate sort of relationship,” Thomas told us in an interview. There was no need to work through “layers of bureaucracy,” he said, and “there is a refocus on creativity because we don’t have an unlimited budget. We don’t get all that extra money from the state or federal folks.” Both his stations cater primarily to the ethnic groups in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, Thomas said.

The MHz stations dropped their PBS affiliation completely in 1999 and “stopped getting the CPB’s Community Service Grants (CSGs) 4 years ago,” Thomas said: “They changed the rules to basically make one grant per market. We lost out.” While exceptions were made in the case of other PTV stations in the market, MHz Networks wasn’t considered, he said: “The PBS stations formed a committee and decided that independent stations wouldn’t get CSG. There is not too much surprise there, I guess.” Douglass Weiss, CPB senior vp-system & station development, denies that MHz was discriminated against. The 3 base CSG grants that Commonwealth Public Bcstg., the licensee for MHz Networks, for 4 PTV stations and one public radio station that it operates in Va. was receiving was changed to a single incentive-based grant after the 1995 policy revisions, he said. However, the licensee continued to consolidate the nonfederal financial support (NFFS)of all its 5 stations that was used as a basis for computing the incentive grants, he said: “And that is a considerable amount of money… The base grant is a very small amount of money compared to the incentive grants that they receive.”

Despite the reduction in CPB funding, cuts in state funding and the economic downturn, MHz Networks was “faring pretty well,” Thomas said. That was in contrast to financial difficulties suffered by even major stations such KQED San Francisco, which recently announced cuts in jobs, salaries and work hours. With an operating budget of $4.5 million for the 2 stations, Thomas said only “some personnel trims” were made this year to “put ourselves in a better financial position. It isn’t that we were in dire straits. It wasn’t that type of a cut. But it was a type of cut that needed to be made to sort of pay for lost CSG [state] funding.” Thomas said it was better to make the cuts “when you are in a position of strength.” The personnel cuts wouldn’t have any impact on the stations’ programming because they were confined to positions in the information technology and ad departments, he said.

Thomas sought to lay the blame for the cuts in state CSGs on PBS-affiliated stations in the market, including WETA-TV Washington. Under the new formula approved by the Va. Public Bcstg. Board, MHz eventually would have lost 75% of its current $800,000 allocation, he said. The cut was 10% this year. Thomas called the action “really not much more than a grab for extra dollars by some stations that can’t and haven’t done a good job of finding alternative funding.” He contended that the efforts of WETA-TV and other PTV stations had led to the drastic reduction in state allocations for the network. “The real mystery is why WETA would be interested in state CSG money. Their budget is just monstrous. Why they need our money, I don’t know.”

WETA-TV COO Joseph Bruns said the Va. Public Bcstg. Board had adopted a new formula May 8 to divide the state CSG funding after the state legislature in 2000 included WETA as one of the stations eligible for receiving CSG. The board decided to divide the money into 5 geographic regions within the state and the allocation for northern Va. was to be split between WNVT and WETA. He said the board had directed public broadcasting organizations to come up with a new formula and MHz Network’s parent Commonwealth Public Bcstg. had signed on to the new formula.

Thomas said WNVC specialized in international programming including newscasts from more than 25 countries, as well as international films, documentaries, sports and dramas. WNVT airs local music and entertainment as well as national and international music and technology shows, he said. With such diversity in programming, it’s well positioned to take advantage of multicasting for digital broadcasts, he said, “unlike other PBS stations which are scrambling to provide multicast programming.” The multicast content would be language-specific but would be tailor-made for the Washington market, he said, with most of the content coming from international broadcasters. Being a foreign news broadcaster that provided news unedited from the source, MHz Networks also had substantial potential in ancillary and supplementary services that the FCC had permitted as part of digital offerings, Thomas said. MHz had exclusive contracts with South African Bcstg. Corp., Asian News International (ANI) and 2 other foreign broadcasting organization that he declined to name. “I am hoping that these contracts will translate to our ancillary and supplementary services as well,” he said.

With MHz a non-PBS network, Thomas doesn’t envisage problems on cable carriage of digital programming. “We haven’t got duplicative programming, so that is an advantage,” he said. APTS has accused cable operators of cherry-picking the primary station in a market and rejecting carriage of the 2nd and 3rd PTV stations. Cable operators have defended the practice on the ground that the 2nd and 3rd stations merely provided duplicative PBS programming. Thomas said MHz still was working on a “master” agreement with Comcast for digital carriage. Saying MHz had a “pretty good” relationship with Comcast, he said “we can work something out with them that actually is a benefit to both of us.”