With characteristic caution, however, PBS stopped short of committing itself to the project and declined to take part in funding the planning phase. Lawson and her PBS colleagues expressed enthusiasm for the Markle proposal. In its place, a newly installed program executive, Jennifer Lawson, was given the authority to make those selections herself. The time was not propitious the public network had just undergone one of its periodic reorganizations, discarding a clumsy and ineffective process of selecting programs for the national schedule by systemwide balloting. Morrisett first approached PBS in late 1989. The public network had a pioneering spirit, was not bound by commercialĬonsiderations of audience size, and had the airtime to do what the others would not. According to the study, contestants evaded issues and media handlers manipulated a compliant press, resulting in the public being "cheated." Those findings prompted Markle to work on plans to harness television's acknowledged potential for voter education for the 1992 campaign. The foundation's study of the 1988 presidential election had found "widespread disquiet" over the campaign. To understand why PBS turned down The Voters' Channel, it is necessary to know that the idea for the project was born outside the blankets, so to speak-not in the precincts of the public system itself but in the offices of the Markle Foundation and its president, Lloyd D. Its rejection of Markle's plan for The Voters' Channel underscores both the strengths and weaknesses of a system whose bright promise has thus far exceeded its less-than-bright performance. Unlike its counterparts in other industrial democracies, America's public system has failed in forty years to become an important part of the lives of most viewers. For more than four decades, the public broadcasting system of this country has remained on the periphery of the playing field, its mission clouded in a vaguely defined concept of "education," its structure balkanized into more than a hundred competing flefdoms, its financial needs grossly undermet, and its Ioosely joined elements neither having nor wanting strong national leadership. Why and how PBS turned aside The Voters' Channel and the opportunity to render a unique service-and thus to further define the singular role of public television in a confusing jumble of competing images-is the story of a medium whose place in American television broadcasting has been purposely marginalized by public policy and whose potential has been limited by its own cramped vision. The voters of this country were the losers they deserved better. Was left to cover the election year on a severely limited scale with its own funds, and Markle's proffered $5 million, or a substantial part of it, went to the more amenable CNN to permit the commercial cable network to beef up its own planned coverage of the campaign. Seeing no show of will or commitment on the part of the PBS brass, Markle withdrew its $5 million offer, PBS PBS suddenly and inexplicably dropped consideration of The Voters' Channel, plumping instead for a more modest but relatively risk-free version of its own. Walter Cronkite, the reigning dean of news anchors, hailed The Voters' Channel as "an absolutely vital service to educate the public in the issues and personalities involved in the presidential election process." īut then something happened on the way to the polls. The Voters' Channel-that's what Markle called their plan-included free airtime for national candidates, special shows to air voters' concerns and opinions, expert analysis and criticism to "decode" the campaign's political messages, and informative programs to look at the national problems that the candidates chose to ignore and at the probable options to solve them. By its offer of a $5 million grant, the John and Mary Markle Foundation proposed to put PBS in a position to use the politician's most influential medium in the service of an informed electorate. And the difference would be PBS, public television's national programming arm. The presidential campaign of 1992 would be different. Not the 1988 Bush-Dukakis affair with its scruffy baggage of eight-second sound bites sloganizing complex issues, photo-ops conveying their own brand of distorted imagery, candidate debates that weren't debates at all, and those cleverly crafted commercials that hid far more than they revealed. It was to be a different kind of presidential election campaign.
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