PTV LEADERS WARY OF PROPOSALS ON HILL TO INCREASE POWERS OF CPB

“I don’t think the board or staff of CPB should be critiquing. We should be setting policy. I don’t think we should be going in and saying we don’t like that episode so take it away and change it,” Courtney, pres. of La. Public Bcstg., told us. At the same confirmation hearing, the other nominee, Cheryl Halpern, told Lott that the CPB lacked authority to deal effectively with shows such as Now With Bill Moyers. Halpern, who also was confirmed by the Senate, said she agreed that Moyers lacked some objectivity, but said the CPB was prohibited by statute from interfering in editorial content and in locally produced shows. Committee Chmn. McCain (R-Ariz.), who apparently was frustrated by the CPB board’s lack of authority, asked: “If there’s no control, what’s the point in having a board?”

Courtney said she believed in objectivity and balance in public TV shows, but she would be more comfortable with responsibility at the local level. CPB contributes only a small percentage of the money for programs and should help “review things and see we are on track,” she said, but she didn’t see the need for more CPB authority to “yank programs or things like that.” Courtney said she had “never understood the sense of objectivity and balance or fair and balanced across the schedule. In terms of a news program, I think it has to be objective and balanced within the program.” At Pres. Pat Mitchell’s initiative, PBS’s program committee was undertaking a review, Courtney said: “I congratulate PBS for taking out all the materials and looking at it now.” With new technologies, especially the Web, policy changes may be needed, she said. For example, she said, the question arose whether links on a station’s or the PBS Web site were to be provided to one or multiples sides of an issue. “We didn’t even envision all of this new technology.”

“The CPB certainly has a statutory mandate [to oversee objectivity] in the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act that was strengthened in the last reauthorization in 1992,” Assn. of Public TV Stations (APTS) Pres. John Lawson said. The CPB has a role in ensuring objectivity and balance and “I think they have played that role effectively,” he said: “But I don’t think our members [stations] would be interested in CPB’s board being given even greater authority than they may have now.” The CPB has a “fairly defined process” of soliciting public opinion through calls, e-mails and viewer surveys, Lawson said. Besides, the corporation controls $30 million in production money, some of it jointly with PBS. So though the CPB, which provides 15-16% of total funding for the public broadcasting system, doesn’t make program decisions, it does have influence, he said: “I believe that they have been exercising that authority or influence effectively.”

The issue of localism, brought to the fore by the FCC’s decision to lower the ownership cap for commercial broadcasters, also is expected to figure in the reauthorization hearings and the current review by the General Accounting Office (GAO) of the ways the CPB distributes federally appropriated funds. The appropriateness of much of the CPB’s programming funds going to a handful of producing stations, and its impact on local production, has been raised on Capitol Hill. Localism distinguishes public broadcasters and “I'm very supportive of that,” Courtney said. However, she said she wasn’t prepared to say “we shouldn’t be doing national things together. I'm willing to aggregate funds to produce quality national shows. I think you can have both, but your emphasis needs to shift to more to local services. We can’t just be a program service from national [PBS].”

To deflect criticisms from Congress and elsewhere, Courtney suggested that stations use all taxpayer dollars -- federal or state -- for hardware or formal education and raise money for programs from voluntary contributions, underwriting and other sources, as she had done at La. Public Bcstg. “I think that gives you clearer lines. Then you are saying to [congressional critics] I'm sorry you don’t fund our picture, the viewers in our area do.” Saying the practice worked for her stations, Courtney said it needed to be tested in the public broadcasting system.

Pointing out that localism in public broadcasting was being addressed directly by the GAO study, Lawson said he knew from discussions with the GAO that the “funding split between national and local will be part of their report.” The message public broadcasters need to communicate to policymakers, he said, is that “most of the money already goes to local stations and that the stations voluntarily reaggregate funds at PBS to purchase national programming that there is a compelling economic model for doing it that way.” That way stations can have access to the “highest quality” national programming while spreading the cost over the entire base of PBS stations. Policymakers also must understand that aggregating resources for local programming and local services often depends on a “successful national schedule” because stations raise their money around national programming, Lawson said: “Often, national programming is the engine that’s pulling the train for all of the stations’ activities, including local programming.”

Public TV is on the verge of a resurgence of local production, Lawson said. PTV stations are moving beyond the transmission phase in digital conversion, he said, and stations are developing plans to ramp up production. The need for funding for transmission and towers is tapering off and “we are seeing a big demand from stations for buying high-definition cameras, for studio upgrades and stations are becoming more aggressive raising money locally for content.” PTV stations already have raised $1 billion for capital conversion, Lawson said: “Now I'm hopeful they will take that momentum and use it to raise funds for content. So, I don’t think it’s necessary for Congress to weigh in on this debate.” Greater emphasis on local services and local production already is taking shape at stations, he said.