Word: pbl
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
That ragged orphan, public television,* has got a new pair of shoes. The Ford Foundation went on camera this week with the Public Broadcast Laboratory (PBL), a $10 million, two-hour Sunday-night experimental series aimed at proving that noncommercial television can be worth watching. And in Washington, President Johnson had on his desk, ready for signature, the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. It provides the first federal subsidy for TV programming, to be administered by a 15-man Public Television Corporation...
...purpose of PBL, says Executive Director Av Westin, is "to stir things up, to challenge the status quo of both commercial and educational television...
Westin had his stir even before the first program went on the air, chiefly be cause PBL had not yet resolved its most fundamental internal problem: point of view. If PBL hopes to provide an alternative to much of the pap that fills the commercial channels, it will have to be provocative. But the concern of some of PBL's advisers was that PBL's programming might confuse sensationalism, or at least irresponsibility, with healthy iconoclasm...
Muckraking Ache. When the non commercial station managers were in formed that PBL had prepared pocket documentaries on the campaigns of Louise Day Hicks in Boston and Negro Mayoralty Candidates Carl Stokes and Richard Hatcher in Cleveland and Gary, Ind., they began worrying about whether they would have to make room for opposing points of view. Similarly, PBL's plans for "anti-commercials" on smoking and the relatively high prices of name-brand aspirin were bound to excite complaints from offended business interests. The problem for PBL staffers who ache to do some muckraking is not how to avoid...