Page 423 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

0 | Publ c Broadcast ng Serv ce

man Newton Minow and political columnist Walter Lippmann. In 1966, the
philanthropic Carnegie Corporation of New York assembled a high-powered
team of Ivy League intellectuals, renowned artists, university presidents, cor-
porate executives, and other high-profile individuals to “look into” the issue;
their report recommended “immediate federal action.” The Public Broadcasting
Act was swiftly passed by Congress and signed into law by President Lyndon
Johnson in 1967, and programs carrying the PBS logo began to appear in late
1969. Defined as a “Chance for Better Television,” PBS claimed a redemptive
cultural identity and cultivated an aesthetic based more on pre-electronic media
such as live drama and the printed word than on contemporary TV formats.
Because PBS had been created to solve a range of perceived cultural problems
without fundamentally altering the economic landscape of commercial televi-
sion, it could not compete for the hearts and minds of TV viewers and maintain
its legitimacy.
The purpose of public television was sufficiently ambiguous to allow for alter-
native interpretations, however. While most bureaucrats, politicians, and sup-
porters saw the new channel as a noncompetitive and altogether nonthreatening
cultural forum for quality and “enlightenment,” others saw an opportunity to
bring racial diversity, political debate, and countercultural values to television.
In New York and other large cities in the contentious late 1960s and early 1970s,
a small amount of provocative programming that challenged the social, political,
and cultural status quo was produced under public television’s auspices. While
this alternative material comprised but a small part of the overall PBS schedule,
it was offensive to conservative politicians who sought to tame PBS’s nascent
political bite. In 1971, President Richard Nixon vetoed public television’s federal
funding and set into motion the rhetorical basis of a conservative assault on PBS
that continues to this day.

PBs and Children

Children’s programming is much more popular than adult PBS genres—largely because
of Sesame Street. In 1969, Children’s Television Workshop (CTW), the creators of Sesame
Street, appropriated the look and style of popular television—including TV commercials—to
“sell” cognitive and social skills to children. Contrary to prime-time PBS, which focused on
small and usually upscale audiences, the goal was to reach as many kids as possible. CTW
was concerned with poverty issues and Sesame Street received some of its funding from
the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to operate as a televised Head Start
program for poor preschool children, which provided an impetus to bring “disadvantaged”
child viewers, in particular, into the public television audience. Producers cleverly fused fast-
paced visuals, humor, irony, storytelling, and celebrity guest stars to educational lessons,
creating a brand of television “edutainment” that was spun off into The Electric Company,
Zoom, and other shows. Children’s programming continues to attract a cross-class, multicul-
tural presence to PBS—but now as before, most kids tend to “drop out” of the public TV
audience when they become adults.