Word: pbl
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Flickering Flame. Birth and Death, as the film is titled, this week provided a powerful start for the Public Broadcast Laboratory's second and possibly last season. A $12,5 million, two-year experiment of the Ford Foundation, PBL was founded to prove that public TV, if adequately financed, could light candles of culture and significance amid the darkness of commercial TV. But during its first year, the flame of PBL flickered disappointingly...
...beginning, the lab's 96 staffers were infused with a save-the-world fervor. "PBL," promised a national ad campaign, "will use television as it's never been used before." But 25 Sunday-night telecasts later, PBL Executive Director Av Westin confessed despondently: "We took some deserved lumps for our brash we'll-show-you attitude. The year had its successes and failures, but it was not totally satisfactory from anybody's point of view...
...society. There were bitter confrontations between militant blacks and self-righteous whites, stark views of ghetto living conditions, including one film shot and narrated by Gordon Parks, and cutting satire, such as a Negro-slanted aptitude test (sample question: "How long do you cook chitlins?"), By chance, PBL's camera crews tracked Martin Luther King throughout the last three months of his life; the result was a stunning obituary that last summer was voted the best TV documentary at the Venice Film Festival...
Flatulent View, Since each program was padded to fill at least a two-hour magazine format, the arresting segments were buried among too many soporific ones. PBL wasted time too often duplicating the spot news and standard documentary coverage that the commercial networks already were doing thoroughly and more lavishly. There was too much controversy for controversy's sake. And the PBL chief correspondent, Edward P. Morgan, unburdened himself of weekly editorials (always winding up with the line, "That is the shape of this observer's point of view") so flatulent that dial switchers probably thought they were...
Despite bright expectations that PBL could avoid bickering and office politics, the lab became embroiled in the same sort of power struggles so notorious at the commercial networks. Executive Director Westin, a 39-year-old former CBS producer, was the hapless mediator. His staff members were fractious because they did not feel they had freedom enough to experiment. The managers of many of the 130-odd public TV stations that carry PBL protested, on the contrary, that the programming was too avant-garde for their audiences. As the lab seemed to flounder, the Editorial Policy Board, a group of outsiders...