Word: pbs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...least two years the Public Broadcasting Service has searched for a way to use a hidden portion of its television signal for a moneymaking purpose so that it could compensate for dwindling financial support from the Government. Last week PBS announced a venture that could provide a vital source of income. The broadcasting service plans to join with IBM and Merrill Lynch to send out stock quotations and financial news that customers can view on IBM-compatible personal computers. IBM and Merrill Lynch will pay the start-up costs of the service...
...When PBS adapted three John Cheever stories for TV in 1979, Playwright A.R. Gurney Jr. (The Dining Room, Scenes from American Life) seemed ideally suited to write one of the scripts. Gurney has been for the stage what Cheever was for fiction: the foremost chronicler of the foibles and angst of the Wasp upper middle class. The adaptation succeeded. But it also pointed up a significant difference between Cheever's striving suburbia and Gurney's blue- blood Buffa- lo: while many of Cheever's bedeviled characters are avidly accumulating, almost all of Gurney's etiolated aristocrats are watching the family...
...football should return. The tiny audience the games attracted doesn't exactly suggest that America has been waiting all these years to get a glimpse of Big Green football. Public television, however, doesn't exist solefy for big ratings--that's the job of ABC, CBS, and NBC, if PBS can serve a public need defined other than by the number of people who want to watch a given program, then by all means it should do so. That's how we end up with driver education programs, and documentaries on harp seals, and even "Monty Python's Flying Circus...
...almost no audience demand for Ivy football, it has no exceptional educational merit, and there's a superabundance of football of all kinds on the commercial stations. Why do the public broadcasters seem so interested in having it? No station spokesman would give an answer beyond the need for PBS to have a "sports presence," or the way Ivy football players brought "perspective" back to winning and losing (tell that to the Crimson squad downed 30-27 by the Yalies last November). Producer Harney in fact, could "make no case for why we do these things. WNET's Iselin slied...
...doubt there're a few Ivy alumni in this group. PBS is, like its corporate" underwriters, pandering to the people who keep it afloat. That's too bad, but in a sense you can't really blame program directors and station-presidents--who decide to air a Dartmouth-Penn game instead of something else. Ivy games are certainly no criminal offense against PBS's mandate, and the public stations need all the good will they can get. Public broadcasting executives should start to ask themselves, though, how far they can go in sacrificing their programming and policy orientation as they...