Must the Tedium be the Message?

Twenty years ago, a television-station operator had to beg sports promoters for the chance to include wrestling and the roller derby in a local program schedule. Hollywood film producers disdainfully eyed television with disparaging disinterest, while radio newscasters regarded their televised counterparts as second-class citizens. And non-commercial television did not even exist.

In the two decades since, television has passed through an aggressive childhood and adolescence to become our dominant communications medium. Now, more American homes have television sets than have bathtubs. American children spend more time with television than with a teacher--and, in many homes, children spend more time with television than with their parents.

With this enormous impact, it is easy to understand why commercial television has lacked humility. To paraphrase Fred Allen's classic, all the humility in commercial television wouldn't fill a flea's navel; there would still be enough room for a caraway seed--and an agent's heart.

Meanwhile, its poor cousin, noncommercial television, smothered itself with too much humility. For good reason, one's mental image of educational television (ETV) was a gray professor presenting an interminable lecture on the history of the four-wheeled shopping cart before a background of sagging draperies. But there are harbingers of significant change. Noncommercial television, for example, has a new name--public television (PTV)--and it holds promise for new dimensions of service of fundamental value to the nation.

I do not minimize the public-service contributions of commercial television. Commercial television often brilliantly meets certain national needs for information, especially in the spotnews area, carrying instant, living history into our homes and demonstrating the tremendous capacity of television for enlightenment. Through television, Americans learned more about the Middle East crisis last year than through all other media put together. Through CBS, Americans learned more about the Warren Report than through any other means. ABC's coverage of the Winter Olympics was extraordinary. NBC's in-depth programs on the civil rights revolution warned a nation of impending crisis. All of television's coverage of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s tragic death gave millions of Americans a new compassionate understanding of the meaning of violence and nonviolence.

But it remains basically true that commercial television operates under severe structural limitations. When commercial television burst upon the public scene after World War Two, it quickly followed the pattern previously set by radio. It won support from advertisers as a most effective national marketing device. While this provided economic strength, it also necessarily imposed corresponding restrictions. Being advertiser-supported and owned by a shareholding public, commercial television must direct the bulk of its time and attention, its talent and its funds to attracting and holding the mass audience. This is inherent in the very nature of any mass medium. As a mass medium, commercial television has limited opportunity to offer programs appealing to small audiences or to that side in the mass audience that occasionally yearns for something different. The economics of the system tend to discourage experimentation. Risk taking is so expensive as to be demoralizing both to creative programmers and management alike.

Fortunately, as television reaches chronological adulthood, there is reason to believe that it is on the verge of a major break-through that will result in an increased diversity of programing and renewed emphasis on experimentation. The groundwork has been laid by the 140 noncommercial educational stations operating around the country.

Some of these are restrictively tied to universities, state boards of education and other organizations and are mainly responsible for the unflattering notions that the words "educational television" usually bring to mind. (Father John Culkin, brilliant director of Fordham University's Communications Center, once said that when it comes to educational television, "The tedium is the message.")

The largest number of ETV stations serve metropolitan areas; and because these stations obtain most of their funds from voluntary contributions, they are inclined to be aggressive, innovative and controversial. Stations such as those in Boston, San Francisco, Chicago and Pittsburgh have learned a very important lesson--that it is not necessary for any one program to be all things to all men, but that television can be successful when it diversifies enough to serve the minority audience as well as the overindulged, mass-market majority. That minority audience runs into big numbers; throughout the nation, from 700,000 to 1,000,000 viewers are tuned into their local educational station during any given weekday evening hour.

At this moment, most of the educational stations are affiliated with National Educational Television (NET), which supplies five hours of new programs each week to its members. Operating under a $6,000,000 annual grant from the Ford Foundation, NET has done an outstanding job in public-affairs (NET Journal) and cultural (NET Playhouse) programing. NET Journal has provided some top-notch documentaries, such as "The Poor Pay More," "A Time for Burning" and "Home Front 1967." NET Playhouse provided memorable productions of An Enemy of the People and Uncle Vanya.

But NET has a limited budget--$6,000,000 goes a very short way in television. A NET hour costs about $20,000, as opposed to commercial television's $125,000-per-hour costs--so NET purchases programs from Canada, England, Germany and elsewhere, as well as doing its own production. The cost of land lines and microwave relay is too prohibitive for simultaneous transmission of NET programs, so their tapes are "bicycled" from station to station, which puts (continued on page 199) Tedium: The Message? (continued from page 117) NET at a competitive disadvantage, as it can rarely afford to cover "live" events.

The Ford Foundation's support of NET led this past year to the creation of a Sunday-evening experiment called Public Broadcast Laboratory. Supported by a separate grant, PBL was not wholly successful, but it was certainly not the failure that many periodicals--most notably, Newsweek and Variety--called it. In fact, PBL was often provocatively experimental. Michael J. Arlen, writing in The New Yorker, called PBL "the most consistently interesting and substantial public-affairs program right now in American broadcasting." And with the first and hardest year under its belt, one can expect even more from PBL's second season.

The Ford Foundation has also been active in dramatizing the need for live network interconnection by proposing a plan to use communication satellites for educational television. While there are many questionable points in the Ford proposal, it did stir visions of an exciting future. My own judgment is that the Ford group and PBL have been overly enthusiastic about television as journalism, to the neglect of television's potential as adult entertainment. But Ford's efforts do give life to the kinds of communications technology and ideas that will provide enormous growth to noncommercial broadcasting.

Another significant thrust in the TV revolution has come from a searching and comprehensive report issued by the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television. Headed by Dr. James Killian of MIT, the Commission proposed that the Government establish and support an independent corporation, removed from politics, to encourage and underwrite programs.

The Commission also made an important distinction between educational and public television. The former are programs intended as direct supplements to academic studies. Public television is everything else, and the Commission intentionally disregarded the temptation to specify program content. Its goal is that public television might instruct, tickle, awe or appall the viewer so long as it never fears to do any of these. In summation, the Commission members wrote: "What we recommend is freedom. We seek freedom from the constraints, however necessary in their context, of commercial television. We seek for educational television freedom from the pressures of inadequate funds. We seek for the artist, the technician, the journalist, the scholar and the public servant freedom to create, freedom to innovate, freedom to be heard in this most far-reaching medium. We seek for the citizen freedom to view, to see programs that the present system, by its incompleteness, denies him."

The proposals of the Commission were, with modifications, made law by Congress and the President last year, and the members of the Public Television Corporation have been selected. President Johnson named Frank Pace, Jr., as chairman of the board of directors. Although the Carnegie Commission's request for a $100,000,000 fund was replaced by a request for a $4,000,000 "seed" grant, there is reason to hope that the corporation will be functioning independently and bravely this year.

I think it is obvious that the increased activity that has begun in public television will entice the young and the daring to both create for it and provide a new television audience. Because we are still on the threshold of public television's future, with no fixed patterns or rigid formulas as yet, this is a good time to speculate about the kinds of new services and programs that PTV can provide for the American people.

First, I would recommend that PTV not try to do too much, not overextend itself and be trapped in the commercial bind of doing a different program every hour of the day. PTV should reflect on a depressing fact of television life: 50 hours of viewing time would suffice to show all of the films in which W. C. Fields starred or all of the tragedies written by William Shakespeare. Therefore, PTV should be selective, do a few programs superbly and then broadcast and repeat them frequently. Each presentation would get the widest possible exposure by building an audience through critical acclaim and word of mouth, rather than going for broke on one showing. The technique was used effectively by the Xerox Corporation when it presented a compelling documentary by Theodore H. White--China: the Roots of Madness--on three different days last year. The program received the attention it deserved by being available often enough so that if one missed the first showing, he could still see it later. Frequent repeats would give television critics a chance to affect and directly influence their readers. As it is now, one critic describes his job as advising the audience "not to watch that lousy show that was on last night."

PTV should create masterpieces and run them often--six times in two weeks would be justified exposure for an outstanding show. PTV must be wise enough to not want people spending all their time before its particular tube. Instead, it should instruct the viewer: Some of the time, you should be reading a book or a magazine, or listening to the Beatles, or being with your family, or viewing commercial television--or even meditating.

Public television should show us unexpected and neglected "reality," live where possible but untampered with when filmed. There is drama and often humor in events such as business conventions, intercollegiate debates, sandlot sports events and theater rehearsals. PTV should go to the colleges for everything from laser demonstrations to experimental theater. Learning experiences do not have to boggle the mind--millions are instructed each night by Huntley and Brinkley or by Cronkite without being bored--and PTV should find ways to instruct us with the same painlessness.

Speaking of the evening news, PTV should not compete with commercial television in those areas where the latter excels. Commercial television does a splendid job in its news coverage; but there is a need for in-depth analysis of the causes of events. Commercial television is often delinquent in coverage comparable with the back-of-the-book sections of Time and Newsweek. PTV should focus on science, medicine, education, art, the press--even television itself--always exploring the four fifths of the iceberg that lies below the surface.

PTV should try to rerun superior programs that were produced, shown and then field away by the commercial networks. A show such as the Bell Telephone Hour's adventure with George Plimpton playing with the New York Philharmonic might reach a solid audience of 5,000,000 or 10,000,000 who would be gratified at a chance to see a superb program they missed. Many of commercial television's finest hours have not been seen by millions of viewers. The same is true of noncommercial television's best efforts. PTV can offer a second--or a third--chance to the viewer.

Public television should not be afraid to actively promote its wares; the elegant, cultivated understatement of the past is no way to complete with commercial TV, night clubs, movies and the bowling alley. The marginal viewer must be informed through good public relations and advertising that PTV is alive and well--and exciting.

That last quality is most important. To be truly exciting, PTV will have to avoid the temptation in any publicly supported medium to play it safe, to make culture uniform and to strengthen majority consensus. PTV will not simply have to make space for the radicals and dissenters (of any persuasion), it will have to actively seek them out. Effective debates, documentaries, even news analyses, should occasionally outrage the audience, force people to reconsider their prejudices and perhaps realize that an accepted fact is, in reality, a myth. NET has already demonstrated this by some powerful programs on the race crisis--and by having the courage to show a controversial film produced in North Vietnam. By doing even more, PTV will be doing its job.

Finally, I suggest a major project for public television, one requiring an enormous investment of resources and talent. If successful, it would provide a lasting contribution to the viewing public. It would be a course in American history comprising a series of one-hour dramatic productions portraying America's past--the most definitive, honest history ever produced. Using the best writers, historians, directors and film crews, it would deserve more money for production than has ever been spent on a television series. The objective of the series would be to have a record that would stand the ravages of time and be played and replayed year after year, with occasional additions as history is made by each succeeding generation.

If this series were as good as it should be, then every high school student viewing these programs would take away more knowledge and understanding of this country than he would from the reading of a dozen textbooks. I would propose matching, in a controlled test, two senior classes of equal competence--one to study exclusively from current textbooks, the other to attend the series. Both groups would have teachers for related classroom discussion. I will wager that the TV-exposed class outperforms the textbooks group on a standard, objective examination.

The series would be historically impeccable, dramatically vibrant and broadcast often. We cannot afford the possibility of a viewer's being out one evening because of a pressing engagement and missing the Civil War. It should be made available to foreign countries--there are now more television sets in the rest of the world than there are in the United States--and its impact abroad might be more valuable than our conventional USIS broadcasts.

The series would be expensive, perhaps costing $5,000,000 to produce. But Procter & Gamble now spends that on television every ten days.

I suggest that the American-history course should be run on all of the public-television stations not once but five times a week at different hours in the evening; e.g., eight P.M. Monday, nine P.M. Tuesday, ten P.M. Wednesday, eight P.M. Thursday and nine P. M. Friday. This quintuple exposure would offer the viewer the easiest possible option, so that he could pick his own competition for his time, rather than have it selected for him.

In advance of each showing, the program should be built up with as much promotion as possible. The first program might well be launched from the White House, the seat of history. Perhaps President Johnson would invite Presidents Eisenhower and Truman to participate in the "premiere." Future programs could be launched by those public men filling roles today that were filled so nobly, or ignobly, by past Secretaries of State ... or governors ... or generals.

Some academic credit could be offered to students willing to take an examination. There are ample precedents for this in other programs that have formerly been sponsored by the Ford Foundation. Perhaps a special certificate of accomplishment should be provided those who do not want to pursue formal training but who nevertheless would appreciate some incentive to continue their dedication to the project. The course could be at the senior-high or freshman-college level and schools could urge students to participate, perhaps working out their own examinations and waiving the American-history requirement of those who pass with high marks.

This kind of public television would be a worthy alternative to commercial programing. It would stimulate contributions from many creative and talented individuals who are not presently inclined to think of television as a lively medium, as well as draw from an as-yet-untapped and disenchanted audience.

It might lead to giving the television viewer an unprecedented choice of diversified presentations, including possibilities for entertainment and information that we cannot imagine right now. And television will once again really turn us on. If it does, it could become that most congenial spot glimpsed by E. B. White, who wrote these exceptional words in a letter to the Carnegie Commission: "I think television 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. It should be our Lyceum, our Chautauqua., our Minsky's and our Camelot. It should restate and clarify the social dilemma and the political pickle. Once in a while, it does, and you get a quick glimpse of its potential."