Leading the Public Broadcasting System

I want to talk about your proposals for thinking about how we enter the digital age. But before I do that, I would like to touch on your later career in television news. You became president of NBC News. How did that come about?

That was also a very peculiar term. I had been president of PBS after I left NBC, in charge of advertising. I thought that network television had crossed the frontier and was not going to do anything terribly exciting, and I had an idea to open a company that would concentrate doing the kinds of things that I knew about -- promotion, advertising, commercials, productions for public affairs and for politics, and for media clients, which was very different from the packaged-goods advertising that ad agencies specialized in. One of my clients, one of the first people who called me, was Fred Friendly, the former president of CBS News, who used to turn me down regularly when I was a kid. He had gone to the Ford Foundation, and he was pushing the whole new idea of public television.

He had left CBS because of a conflict over televising the Vietnam hearings, right?

That's right. He had left CBS because there were hearings about Vietnam, and CBS chose to rerun I Love Lucy, and he thought that was a terrible mistake. He had a big fight with Bill Paley, and ended up leaving. He went to the Ford Foundation. And in those days public television was just starting -- in the late sixties. The Carnegie Commission had advocated public television, which had been educational television, and Ford was the chief backer. There were no sources or money to support it, and so I was brought in as an advertising/promotion guy and as a consultant both to put public television, PBS, on the map, and to figure out new ways of raising money for it. I worked with them for a number of years, and the next thing I knew, somebody called and asked if I would want to come and save PBS, which was in big trouble. It was a very peculiar choice because I had grown up in commercial broadcasting and network television in New York, and PBS was very different, and there was a big rebellion inside the system. But I stayed there for eight years, and then I got a call from the then and wonderful president of NBC, Grant Tinker, to save NBC, which was in big trouble. We had done a lot of public affairs programming on PBS -- Frontline, MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour began; it was a half-hour and turned to an hour. And he asked if I would come to NBC News to run it.

Before we go to NBC News, let's talk a little about this PBS experience. What were those years?

I was at PBS from '76 to '84.

In your book, there was an interesting story about how one of your first decisions was a choice about putting in place the first satellite network. And initially you were reluctant. So here you were in your own history having to confront a new technology. What did you decide and why?

Well, that was a great lesson. As soon as I came to PBS, the chief engineer said, "We want to move to satellite distribution, and it's going to cost $40 million." And I said, "That's the dumbest thing I ever heard of. First of all, the idea of sending a picture through the air to a thing up in the atmosphere over which you have no control sounds very risky to me. If God meant pictures to fly, you know, he would have organized things differently!" And, secondly, I said, "If we have $40 million ... we have no programs. What's the point of having the greatest superhighway for distribution when we have no automobiles to put on it? If we have that kind of money, let's invest it in programming."

This was in the early days of public television. I had come in during the Ford administration; President Carter got elected. I said, "The way to show public television's potential is to open up the Senate hearings on the new Cabinet ministers, so the public can see who their new leaders will be." And we went and broke precedent, and got permission to televise the Senate confirmation hearings. The stations were up in arms because most of them are licensed to school boards and educational institutions, with contracts to carry Sesame Street and Mister Rogers and so on, and we were preempting that with the public hearings. And I ran back to our chief engineer and I said, "Didn't you say that the satellite could feed more than one program at a time so stations could choose?" And then I became a great convert.

So it was to save my job, and not from any great foresight and long-term perspective that we became the first to use satellite distribution in broadcasting.

What was the greatest difficulty in managing a public entity like PBS? Was it the lack of resources? Is it a confederal structure that one has to preside over?

Yes, it was really set up as a counterpoint to network-dominated television. So it is the stations that the focus is on, and they control PBS. It's much like the Articles of Confederation versus a federal government: you need consensus. It's very hard to get new things going, to get untested and untried frontier stuff going. Many of the stations are licensed to school boards that are afraid of, understandably, controversy, so that if there is any marginally questionable program, it creates a lot of problems. It's dealing with the ultimate democracy. Plus, the lack of funding.

Plus, a third major element, which is one of the curses to this day of public television, and that is, that everybody views it with a different set of priorities. To some, it's an educational medium, to some it's a cultural medium, to some it should be an expression of minority unheard interest, to some it should be a news and information medium. And obviously it can't satisfy everybody, and there's no unanimity of view as to what its major purposes should be.

What is the secret to success of leadership in such an enterprise?

The secret to success of leadership is having a goal and being able to articulate it and persuade others that that's the way to go with it. We set a goal -- we had no news and public affairs programming because under the Nixon era, he had stripped public television of that. And I said we should be the first to have a half-hour nightly news analysis program, which was the MacNeil-Lehrer, and then we should be the first to go for an hour in the evening. We should also do documentaries, because all of the networks were dropping documentaries, and that started Frontline. And we should move into fields that are not covered in commercial broadcasting -- science -- and do original American plays. Unfortunately, that last is no longer in existence in public television. So it's a matter of having a sense of what the priority should be, and getting out there and trying to sell it.

What was the source of your vision, the sense that all of this can and should be done?

Well, in a funny way, it probably came in great part from my commercial experience, that said you have to have a focus on where you want to go; that public television had a responsibility to provide what commercial television was not providing; and that there was a danger of raising money by having too much repeat programming -- Lawrence Welk and so on, which happened to raise a lot of money for the station through memberships, but was hardly fulfilling a mission of an alternative quality broadcast service.

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