Public television is your only locally owned, locally programmed source of broadcast information. That’s the mandate and mantra PBS outlets repeat across the nation, whether raising money in Denver or defending their turf in St. Louis.
So what local programs back that lofty claim?
From the Rocky Mountains to the Mississippi to Northern California, the answer can be discouragingly uniform: static discussions of public affairs. Magazine shows highlighting breezy travelogue. A half-hour here, a half-hour there, squeezed between national programming and donation pleas. Good TV costs big bucks – money local viewers are usually unwilling to spend on news from their own backyard.
“Local stations can’t afford to create the ‘wow’ factor,” said Laurie Cirivello, who runs a large community-access TV center in Santa Rosa, Calif. “The cost of creating local programming that meets the expectations of mass viewers is prohibitive.”
The existence of so many public-TV outlets offers great potential for public affairs programming and community involvement, and a counterbalance to the news on commercial stations that often focuses on crime and fluff. But too often precious airtime and local resources are burned up in broadcasting carbon-copy national programs, critics say.
“The public, in any real sense, is rarely invoked by executives and programmers, except during pledge week,” wrote American University professor Patricia Afderheide in a critical history of the PBS structure.
Critics deride the lack of local content, and urge rapid change before public-TV stations fade further from favor. Public-station managers defend their work as a vital service unmatched by commercial TV, and say they are changing as fast as limited donations allow. They say judging their efforts from counting only one hour of local news in a weekly TV guide ignores hundreds of hours of election coverage, or thousands of hours of educational TV beamed to classrooms.
“We believe we are at least meeting the mandate, and probably surpassing it,” said Wick Rowland of Denver’s KBDI-Channel 12, who says his station produces five to six hours a week of locally produced shows, well ahead of local public broadcasting rival KRMA-Channel 6. “We are overwhelmingly committed to local programming.”
“People say, ‘There are 300 cable channels. Why do we need you?”‘ said Greg Giczi, who oversees KAET public TV in Phoenix, the 15th-largest U.S. TV market. “We operate at a higher standard because we can.”
Lacking funds and viewers
Market realities create an unbridgeable gap between expensive creativity and bankably familiar programs, and none of the regional markets surveyed by The Denver Post appear to have crafted a solution.
Comparing Denver, the 18th-largest TV market, with four similar-size cities reveals a local programming pattern remarkable for its uniformity, given the public-TV ideals of diversity and community control. Minneapolis, touted as a model for a large public-TV market, manages less than three hours of fresh local programming each week; much of the Twin Cities programming money is tied up in “Almanac,” a magazine show with high production values but a 20-year-old format. (See the accompanying story.)
Even in Minnesota, a state that pats itself on the back for civic involvement and higher education, a nightly news show on Twin Cities Public Television died in 2001, after five years, for lack of donor support.
Sacramento, Calif.’s KVIE, with the 19th-largest TV market, manages a weekly half-hour called “California Connected,” but the public affairs show needs the support of stations in San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego to survive. An attempt in the mid-1990s to launch a daily news program called “Express” lasted two years. KVIE president David Hosley said the show was killed for lack of funding and low viewership.
“The old public-affairs show, the talk show, people over 50 don’t want to see them,” Hosley said. “Boomers are not as reliable for support as the World War II generation.”
Most regional station managers shun programming that might be considered edgy, and they frankly dismiss the possibility of adding investigative or provocative elements to their local public-affairs shows. KETC in St. Louis produces an award-winning half-hour magazine three evenings a week that “focuses on the best of what is happening in the region,” said station manager James Baum. More local production money goes into documentaries, including one on the man who discovered no two snowflakes are alike, and another on the 40th anniversary of the famous Gateway Arch.
Even the largest PBS stations fill their schedules with national and international programming produced elsewhere. The “big three” PBS stations in New York, Los Angeles and Boston produced 60 percent of the programming seen on all public TV stations, noted a 1999 study conducted by Aufderheide.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which distributes the federal funding that provides a small percentage of local stations’ budgets, estimated in 1997 that “only 4 percent of all public TV programming is local,” said Aufderheide, a number that likely hasn’t risen since.
Perils of a national stage
Why the dearth of local efforts? For all the technological changes that have put a documentary camera seemingly in every citizen’s hands, high-quality production costs big money, say PBS supporters and critics alike.
Cirivello, who runs community-access programs in Northern California, said viewers expect watchable video from their public-TV station, whereas she can get away with an amateur taping a couple of people playing bocce ball and explaining the rules. (Community-access channels were created from funds required in cities’ monopoly agreements with cable providers, and don’t rely on public donations.)
Cirivello said she recently saw a “Nova” science show on PBS, and was “blown away” by how good the nationally distributed program was. “There’s no chance a local station could approach that,” she said. “People have been conditioned to expect high production values.”
Local programming simply doesn’t pay for itself, and public-TV stations should be applauded for any amount of money-losing community affairs shows they manage to produce, many managers say. KBDI in Denver has an overall budget of $3 million, far less than KRMA’s $10 million, yet airs eight or nine locally produced shows each week, Rowland said.
“There’s an art to the programming of a station like this,” he said. “Much of our audience is interested in international and national programming. I think we all wish it were otherwise. I wish we could have success pledging on local programs.” Rowland said his first priority is not to expand local programs, but to shore up the always precarious funding for the ones KBDI is already doing.
Still, Rowland and other managers want to do more.
If he could find a reliable source of extra cash, Rowland said he would produce a local show on the arts scene, detailing events at everything from the Swallow Hill folk music center to El Centro Su Teatro. Noting there no longer appears to be a single commercial TV reporter dedicated to covering the state Capitol, he also would like to produce a regular news show on politics and social issues. Third on his list is a local music showcase, perhaps a “Rocky Mountain City Limits.”
Station managers are mixed in their approach to taking local programs national, an attractive but expensive ideal. Public-TV leaders in major regional cities would like nothing more than to loosen their dependence on national programming from “the big three” on the coasts. But they point to debacles in Seattle and other cities where managers launched national shows without securing funding to keep them going.
“We have decided not to enter into the national production area, simply because there are not many people making money, and a lot of people losing money,” said James Morgese, president and general manager of KRMA/Rocky Mountain PBS.
KBDI has two programs in national syndication, “The 11th Hour” and “The Latin View.” But Rowland says it’s no accident KBDI and other stations buy a lot of international programming from nations such as Britain, where public tax support outpaces that in the U.S., on a per capita basis, by about 100 to 1.
“They have lots and lots of production units, and they’re making programs all the time,” Rowland said. “They can afford to take chances.”
Sacramento’s KVIE is about to take an 8-year-old show, “California Heartland,” into national syndication with PBS by transforming it into “America’s Heartland.” But viewers should not expect the food-centric program to revolutionize the information business.
“It’s a program that celebrates people’s relationship with the land,” said David Hosley, president and general manager of KVIE. “For example, how do we make little carrots out of the big carrots? Agri-tourism, recipes, biotech, organic farming. It’s not intended to be investigative reporting.”
Regional managers also are split in their reactions to fast-improving video technology, which will give them more digital channels to run PBS programs but that also turns hobbyists into potential filmmakers.
“We’re going to have to give digital cameras to teenagers and senior citizens to tell stories about how they’re living their lives,” said Sacramento’s Hosley.
KRMA’s Morgese is not sure such democratization will improve what people see on the air. “The definition of ‘local’ is going to get very strange,” he said. “Quality is going to go down because there are no longer barriers to producing local content. We will be competing against a lower and lower quality level. Everyone will be into local production, with their own camera.”
Staff writer Michael Booth can be reached at 303-82-1686 or mbooth@denverpost.com.
Staff writer Dick Kreck can be reached at 303-820-1456 or dkreck@denverpost.com.
TV critic Joanne Ostrow can be reached at 303-820-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com.
