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The Don't Quote Me archive

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Tradition & tumult

Public broadcasting's tone may be tweedy, but the internal politics can be treacherous

by Dan Kennedy

The WGBH Educational Foundation has been defined by opposing impulses from the start. It's a universally admired center of excellence for national programming. But it's long been accused of cheapness and high-handedness when it comes to serving the local community.

WGBH-TV and WGBH Radio were founded in the 1950s by Ralph Lowell (of the Lowells), with the help of Greater Boston's universities and cultural institutions. In the mid 1960s, Lowell proposed that President Johnson create a panel to study new models for public broadcasting. The result -- the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television -- was stocked with WGBH officials and friends.

The Carnegie Commission recommended the creation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which was to fund public stations, and which was supposed to be insulated from political pressures. Unfortunately, a proposal to raise money for the CPB with a two percent tax on television sets went nowhere, and the commission opted instead for direct congressional funding, the source of so many problems over the intervening two-plus decades.

Legislation recommended by the commission also created the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) and, following some furious last-minute lobbying by the managers of educational radio stations, National Public Radio (NPR).

The CPB and PBS were both dominated by WGBH alumni, and WGBH itself became a programming machine, bringing everything from Julia Child to BBC dramas to This Old House to the nation's viewers. To this day, WGBH provides a third of PBS's prime-time line-up, and it has developed sidelines that are the envy of other public stations: closed-captioning services for the hearing-impaired, audio enhancements for the blind, CD-ROMs, and commercial spinoffs such as its association with the Learningsmith stores.

At the same time, though, WGBH developed something of a mercenary reputation. The focus, critics say, has long been on producing national rather than local programs, and on producing shows that pay for themselves through corporate underwriting.

"If someone came along with a half-million dollars and said, `Hey, let's do a documentary on "The Phillips Screwdriver, a Tool for Our Time" ' -- well, it just became interesting," snipes an independent producer who's worked with 'GBH.

This atmosphere has long affected WGBH's relationship with the community it serves.

In his book Public Radio and Television in America: A Political History (Sage, 1996), Long Island University journalism professor Ralph Engelman reports that American Playhouse, produced by WGBH, once canceled a $400,000 grant to make a show on union organizing in 19th-century Lowell. The chairman of 'GBH at the time: James Lowell, a descendant of the city's founders.

In 1980, the Committee To Make Public Broadcasting Public filed a complaint with the US Commission on Civil Rights, charging that 'GBH was violating equal-opportunity laws and ignoring local programming so that it could pursue national glory. The complaint went nowhere.

Throughout this time, WGBH offered various forms of local news that were often praised, generally thoughtful, and rarely watched. The late Louis Lyons read the news from 1955 to '73 without benefit of any graphics or filmed reports -- which was just the way he liked it. From 1970 to '73, WGBH broadcast The Reporters, which focused on neighborhood, local, and state issues; The Ten O'Clock News made its debut in 1976.

The story surrounding the demise of the News remains so fresh and painful for those involved that few are willing to speak about it -- including its former co-anchor and driving force, Christopher Lydon, whose bitterness toward WGBH is well known but who declined numerous requests to be interviewed for this article.

Suffice to say that Lydon, an eccentric, energetic former reporter for the Boston Globe and the New York Times, was responsible for most of what was good about the News -- principally his sharp interviews, including a famous 1990 sitdown in which he asked BU president and gubernatorial candidate John Silber whether he'd ever thought of himself as a Public Enemy rap song. Then, too, Lydon also must take the blame for what was bad: weak production standards that undermined its strong explanatory pieces, its obsession with arcana, and a preciousness that led to the show's being mocked as "The Brattle Street Alert."

Starting in the late 1980s, insiders say, station officials began making plans to get rid of Lydon, and to replace the News -- whose low ratings weren't helped by the rise of local 10 p.m. commercial newscasts -- with a show very much like Greater Boston.

The idea, according to Lydon critics, was to sweep away the principal obstacle to upgrading the show's production values and to encourage more team effort, which was anathema to the notoriously control-obsessed Lydon.

Lydon's defenders say the machinations were considerably more malevolent: some officials were just sick and tired of Lydon's stirring up controversy. Among other things, Lydon was hugely interested in whether Silber had improperly enriched himself as BU president -- and Silber was a member of the 'GBH board. Lydon and company were also in hot pursuit of then-State Senate president Bill Bulger, Silber's chief political patron.

The execution, in May 1991, took place as scheduled. But a funny thing happened on the way to the resurrection. Station officials lost their nerve, giving Lydon an interview show and getting rid of the planned magazine-style show. The person who was supposed to be fired kept his job. The News staffers who were supposed to be brought back ended up unemployed.

We were supposed to get Greater Boston. Instead, we got The Group.

Until now.

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The Don't Quote Me archive

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Dan Kennedy's work can also be accessed from his Web site: http://www1.shore.net/~dkennedy/

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Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com

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