ELECTRONIC MEDIA June 2000
Aaron Barnhardt

Those of you still recovering from your network's affiliates meeting may have felt a pang of envy upon reading reports of the recent PBS love-in -- I mean, national meeting -- in Nashville. There, public TV station managers cheered the new PBS president, Pat Mitchell, as she announced the first rejiggering of the network's lineup in 20 years and unveiled a rousing set of promos with the new PBS slogan, "Stay Curious."

Mitchell is exactly the kind of president stations wanted: a successful programmer. She's walked the talk. And so when she said, "We have to be bold, to take risks, to work together," those in attendance responded as though she actually meant it. Hence the upbeat mood of many of those who departed Nashville. But beneath the surface, it was clear that the meeting only began to address the one issue that troubles local stations more than any other. It's the same issue that's worrying most of you on the commercial side: localism.

With all the attention focused on PBS, it's easy to forget that public broadcasting is a locally-owned, community service. Yet as with the network affiliates, public stations have an identity crisis. In the eyes of too many viewers, they are little more than extensions of the single national provider that fills most of their schedules. And that's a real problem, at a time when several of PBS's classic franchises -- nature, science and British entertainment -- have been completely co-opted by cable.

Witness last week's annual EquiTrend report that found the PBS brand now ranked behind nearly every cable channel that has sucked its blood over the years. Discovery led the list, followed by TLC, History and A&E. Even as Mitchell is promising innovation, she surely knows that PBS can no longer hold onto any original idea for long. The most popular program on PBS, "Antiques Roadshow," has already inspired a flurry of knockoffs on Pax, HGTV and even VH1.

What PBS needs is ideas commercial broadcasters can't steal so easily. To do that, it must expand the distribution pipe and start taking ideas from its members -- all of its members, not just the handful of stations that have dominated PBS prime time for decades. I was reminded of that during a recent visit to nearby Topeka, Kan., and the PBS member station there, KTWU.

"There's been a top-down philosophy," said KTWU's general manager, Eugene Williams. "Stations like WGBH see themselves as providers of content, and the small stations have seen themselves as the receivers of that content. The truth is, we're all providers of content. "I've worked in all markets -- small, medium and large. There's no difference in the stories we tell, though the flavor might be different."

So how do you get good ideas to percolate up within a system that knows only how to drip down? That's the dilemma of public TV, and it's exemplified by the story of "Mental Engineering." This freewheeling half-hour panel show out of the Twin Cities is rapidly catching on in public-TV circles (WNET just picked it up). It dares to violate one of TV's last taboos: the sanctity of commercials.

The show's creator and moderator, John Forde, doesn't simply rate a TV spot's entertainment value. With the help of four funny, provocative panelists, he pries out the moral and societal values clenched within ads -- like the Honda ad that plays on liberal guilt by making fun of an old Volkswagen bus, or the old guy in a Tide ad who absolutely must have his shirts whiter than white (one panelist pegs him as a "walking superego"). You can't come up with a concept better suited to non-commercial TV.

Yet "Mental Engineering" is being picked up by PBS stations nationwide only because Forde, who launched his show on cable access two years ago, sunk his $50,000 life savings into the venture and pitched station managers directly. KTCA, the station where "Mental Engineering" is taped, is not officially presenting the show to PBS, according to Forde. "KTCA told us we were better off without (a presenting station) because, if Cargill (a major underwriter) objected to one of our shows, they could pick up the phone and put pressure on the station," Forde said in an interview last week. "Now that we've been picked up by WNET, the largest public television station in the country, things are falling into place nicely."

Good for him. But "Mental Engineering" underscores a serious dilemma for public TV. Local underwriters are often happy to pay for nostalgic, feel-good shows, but they grow skittish when current affairs and controversy are raised. Yet those are precisely the shows that can help set local public stations apart.

Another problem: Some of the best local program ideas don't have an aftermarket. No pledge potential, no home videos, no PBS pickup. "It's very costly to do that kind of work on a unique single-market basis," admitted Wick Rowland, general manager of KBDI in Boulder, Colo., and a former dean of the journalism school at the University of Colorado. "A good example of that, something that's lurked in the breast of every good public television maker over the years, is local performance theatre work. Why don't we do it? Because it is very costly."

The only way to scale these two hurdles, the managers I interviewed said, is the creation of independent programming fund that isn't controlled by Congress. It's a worthy idea, worthily advanced by activist Jerry Starr in his new book, "Air Wars: The Fight to Reclaim Public Broadcasting." Starr has been dismissed by some as a left-wing crank. But I've read a number of critiques of public TV from both liberal and conservative critics. "Air Wars" is more than that. It's a compelling story about a group of citizens, including Starr, who waged a spirited, and ultimately successful, campaign to hold Pittsburgh's WQED accountable to its original mission.

Starr now heads up Citizens for Independent Public Broadcasting. Its advisory board is stocked with veteran producers and executives of public television. The only L-word that unifies them, said Starr, is localism, and that means returning public TV stations to their roots. "When you think about how public broadcasting is supposed to survive in a multichannel universe, it has to do the things those cable networks can't do," said Starr. "Be local. Be connected to the issues. Be connected to their communities. Those are the things the Discovery Channels and A&E won't do because they don't make money. But if public broadcasting just tries to make a better 'Biography' or better travelogues or better nature shows, they will eventually be seen as superfluous."




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