A Boost for Poor Brother

TELEVISION Ever since its birth in 1952, U.S. educational television has been lost somewhere between the Vast Wasteland and the Promised Land--chronically short of operating capital and always uncertain where the next grant was coming from. Concerned by ETV's continuing plight, the Carnegie Foundation in 1965 asked M.I.T. Corporation Chairman James R. Killian Jr. to head a commission charged with finding a solution.-Working with a $500,000 budget, committees and subcommittees made their recommendations, and commission members spent 28 days together agreeing on a report. Last week the foundation published Public Television: A Program for Action. Its gloomy conclusions: ETV has only half the resources necessary to meet its present goals, and the goals themselves fall far short of the needs of the nation. The Carnegie solution: "not small adjustments or patchwork changes but a new and fundamental institution in American culture." Key recommendations: > The number of educational channels should be tripled to 380, thereby increasing their potential audience from less than two-thirds to 93% of U.S. homes. -- ETV channels should be linked like commercial networks for simultaneous broadcasting.

-- New York's National Educational Television (NET), the present packager and distributor of ETV programming, should be taken over by a nongovernmental "Corporation for Public Television." The new corporation would add at least one other production center and double programming output to ten hours a week.

Such improvements would not be cheap. They would, in fact, triple the present public and private investment in ETV to an annual $ 178 million average in the first four years. To collect that kind of cash Carnegie projections look for $54 million a year from state and local governments, and private philanthropists (including the Ford Foundation, which has granted ETV a life-saving $120 million since 1952). The report also suggests a 2%-5% excise tax on TV sets, which could bring up to $100 million a year directly to the proposed Corporation for

Public Television. Finally, the commission counts on cajoling an additional $68 million-a-year dole from the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.

Automatic Subsidy. While HEW Secretary John Gardner and President Johnson were prepublication boosters of the commission study, last week's budget message requested only a $20 million appropriation for ETV. As for the excise tax, neither the Administration nor congressional committees concerned would commit themselves, and such lobby groups as the Electronics Industries Association and the National Association of Broadcasters can hardly be expected to approve it. The commission, on the other hand, argues that the excise tax would amount to an automatic annual subsidy from federal funds without any direct governmental control of ETV's day-to-day operations.

The unescapable fact is, however, that centralization is far less of a threat to ETV than starvation. Just last week, Cincinnati's WCET, the U.S.'s oldest licensed educational station, was hours away from bankruptcy when it was bailed out by a Ford grant. Fred Friendly, the foundation's TV consultant and an endorser of the Carnegie plan, says: "I'm not as worried about Big Brother as I am about Poor Brother."

* The other members: former Harvard President James B. Conant, Caltech President Lee A. DuBridge, Author Ralph Ellison, Ambassador to Switzerland John S. Hayes, University of Illinois President David D. Henry, Houston Post Chairman Oveta Culp Hobby, J. C. Kellam (manager of Lyndon Johnson's broadcasting holdings), Polaroid President Edwin H. Land, Reynolds Metals President Joseph H. McConnell, Hampshire College President Franklin Patterson, former North Carolina Governor Terry Sanford, TV Producer Robert (Omnibus) Saudek, Pianist Rudolf Serkin, and United Auto Workers' Executive Leonard Woodcock.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.