Wait Till Next Week?

Arriving at Manhattan's NBC news studios, leased for the premiere of the Public Broadcast Laboratory (TIME, Nov. 10), Executive Director Av Westin last week found a note left by the regular occupants. "The moneymen of Huntley-Brinkley," the message read, "hope you do-gooders do good. Good luck!" PBL will need some luck; it didn't do so good.

For a project that promised "to use television as it has never been used before," the 21-hour program seemed rather familiar. Correspondents skipped breathlessly across the mayoralty-campaign battlegrounds of Gary, Cleveland and Boston, concentrating on the racist atmosphere. The commercial networks had been there before, and about as thoroughly. A raw one-act satire about racial attitudes in the south--Day of Absence, by Negro Dramatist Douglas Turner Ward--was allowed to run from here to eternity: 60 minutes.

PBL came most powerfully to life during a "confrontation"--a free-for-all discussion of racial antagonisms in which "someone in that crowd represents you." A group of 100 unrehearsed whites and Negroes gathered in a Chicago studio to blast away at one another. A Negro evangelical preacher reported that "our program is to try to solve the problem with love." "When he says Christian love," snorted Black Revolutionary Russ Meek, "he means Uncle Tomism! You're a disgrace to the race!" A Negro adolescent follower of Meek said: "I'm for violence, because we have pleaded for the last 400 years!" A Negro woman snapped: "I've been integrated all I need to be integrated! I've got these freckles and this red hair as a result of the rape that took place on my great-grandmother in Mississippi! I don't need any more integration!"

Notwithstanding its fiery moments, the debate was curiously lopsided; whether by accident or design, there was no white adversary present who could summon the intelligence and articulation to represent a moderate point of view.

Some of the southern stations in PBL's 119-station line-up opted out of the first show in advance, presumably because they were suspicious of the tone it would take. But most of them were expected back by this week. Fred Friendly, who as TV consultant to the Ford Foundation helped get the project started, confessed that he was "very disappointed" with the first broadcast. But, he added, quite properly: "Wait till next week--that's the great thing about TV."

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