Opportunities for Change

That ragged orphan, public television,* has got a new pair of shoes. The Ford Foundation went on camera this week with the Public Broadcast Laboratory (PBL), a $10 million, two-hour Sunday-night experimental series aimed at proving that noncommercial television can be worth watching. And in Washington, President Johnson had on his desk, ready for signature, the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. It provides the first federal subsidy for TV programming, to be administered by a 15-man Public Television Corporation.

It is too much to expect that either event will soon revolutionize television, but together they constitute important opportunities for change.

The purpose of PBL, says Executive Director Av Westin, is "to stir things up, to challenge the status quo of both commercial and educational television."

Westin had his stir even before the first program went on the air, chiefly be cause PBL had not yet resolved its most fundamental internal problem: point of view. If PBL hopes to provide an alternative to much of the pap that fills the commercial channels, it will have to be provocative. But the concern of some of PBL's advisers was that PBL's programming might confuse sensationalism, or at least irresponsibility, with healthy iconoclasm.

Muckraking Ache. When the non commercial station managers were in formed that PBL had prepared pocket documentaries on the campaigns of Louise Day Hicks in Boston and Negro Mayoralty Candidates Carl Stokes and Richard Hatcher in Cleveland and Gary, Ind., they began worrying about whether they would have to make room for opposing points of view. Similarly, PBL's plans for "anti-commercials" on smoking and the relatively high prices of name-brand aspirin were bound to excite complaints from offended business interests. The problem for PBL staffers who ache to do some muckraking is not how to avoid offending but how to do it fairly and responsibly.

The new Public Broadcasting Act, while satisfactory in most respects, is ambiguous in others. A restrictive House amendment requires that public-TV programming be "objective and balanced." That catch phrase is scarcely helpful; taken to an extreme, it could be downright silly, Says Hartford Gunn, manager of Boston's WGBH, the nation's outstanding public-TV channel: "If we have a program saying pollution is bad, does this mean we have to do a program saying pollution is good?"

Another concern is money. The Carnegie Commission report on television, which led to the creation of the Public Broadcasting Act, calculated that the corporation would need $56 million annually during its founding years, that by 1980 the whole public-TV system would cost $270 million a year. The Public Broadcasting Act apportions only $9,000,000 in "seed money" for the corporation, and the actual appropriation may be even less.

Worse, to Carnegie thinking, the $9,000,000 is a one-shot grant rather than part of a permanent annual endowment that would insulate the Public Television Corporation from yearly budget screening and perhaps meddling censorship attempts by Congress. Says Edward P. Morgan, the veteran ABC newscaster who is chief correspondent of PBL: "No self-respecting journalist can go hat in hand to Congress every year, saying, 'We'll treat you better next year if you give us $100 million now.' "

What counts more right now, however, is what public TV will do with the money it gets. There is no danger that it will put commercial television out of business. But there is enough viewer weariness with standard TV to suggest that the noncommercial brand should find a receptive audience. And it may even come to pass that competition from successful public TV will force the commercial networks to improve their product.

* The now accepted term for noncommercial television, encompassing educational TV but excluding academic programming.

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