Public Television Pbs Encyclopedia Com

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Dec 28, 2025, 7:45 AM

With its dedication to the high ideals of presenting the finest in drama, music, children's programs, and political debate, the U.S. public television system has proved a significant cultural force in a nation where broadcasting is largely driven by commercial considerations, often to the detriment of quality. Public television was at least partially born in reaction to Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman Newton Minnow's now famous comment that by 1961 American commercial television had become "a vast waste-land." (In 1978 Minnow... From its 1950s roots in educational television, public (or non-commercial) television has grown, not without problems, internal conflicts, political opposition, and funding setbacks, to enjoy some considerable popular successes as a formidable, if vulnerable,... Public and educational television dates back to the first public radio broadcasts from universities and scientific laboratories. The first radio broadcast of any kind originated from an educational venue, the University of Wisconsin, in 1919, and in the ensuing decade other universities followed suit, forming electronic extension services, though mostly for...

While the first television programs were broadcast in the late 1930s, World War II curtailed the industry's development. By 1945, however, the FCC had set aside 13 channels for commercial television, and by 1949 one million television receivers were in use across the United States. It was during the FCC's four-year freeze on station licenses (1948-1952) that a movement began among educators for channels that would be non-commercial and dedicated to education. In 1952, after its historic Sixth Report and Order, the FCC reserved 242 channels for non-commercial TV, and the Educational Television and Radio Center (ETRC) was established in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on a grant... The center secured and distributed programs for the emerging system, as well as renting them out to schools and other public institutions. In 1958 the Center moved to New York where it became National Educational Television (NET), again chiefly supported by the Ford Foundation.

NET soon revised the limited classroom approach to educational TV, and shifted to providing a broader range of cultural, public affairs, documentary, and children's programming. It laid the groundwork both for expansion into network status, and for Educational TV's eventual re-designation as Public TV. NET lives on in the spirit and call letters of WNET, New York City's Channel 13 public television station, which is still active in producing original programming for public television. Public television thus evolved directly out of educational television, a difficult rite of passage due to the fact that ETV originally began as a collection of autonomous stations, each serving in various and sundry... PBS's non-commercial status was another stumbling block, totally financed as it is by federal and state funding and, increasingly, by voluntary contributions from local viewers and grants from foundations and corporations. The fact that public TV was born after commercial network television had been firmly entrenched in the American mind was another obstacle to its initial development.

This is an accepted version of this page The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is an American public broadcaster and non-commercial,[1][2][3][4][5] free-to-air television network based in Arlington, Virginia.[6][7][8][9] PBS is a nonprofit organization and the most prominent provider of educational programs to public... PBS is funded by a combination of member station dues, pledge drives, corporate sponsorships, and donations from both private foundations and individual citizens. From its founding in 1969 up until 2025, it also received funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.[16] All proposed funding for programming is subject to a set of standards to ensure the program... PBS was established on November 3, 1969, by Hartford N. Gunn Jr.

(president of WGBH), John Macy (president of CPB), James Day (last president of National Educational Television), and Kenneth A. Christiansen (chairman of the department of broadcasting at the University of Florida).[19] Fred Friendly was an integral figure in negotiations about the interconnection that would lead to the 1969 creation of the Public Broadcasting... It began operations on October 5, 1970, taking over many of the functions of its predecessor, National Educational Television (NET), which later merged with Newark, New Jersey station WNDT to form WNET. In 1973, it merged with Educational Television Stations.[21][22][23] Around the same time, the groups started out the National Public Affairs Broadcast Center (later National Public Affairs Center for Television), which offered news and national... Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), private, nonprofit American corporation whose members are the public television stations of the United States and its unincorporated territories.

PBS provides its member stations with programming in cultural, educational, and scientific areas, in children’s fare, and in news and public affairs but does not itself produce programs; the programs are produced by the... PBS headquarters are in Alexandria, Virginia, outside Washington, D.C. The early years of public television in the United States were dominated by National Educational Television (NET; founded in 1952 as the Educational Television and Radio Center), which relied primarily on funding from the... Following the creation of the Public Broadcasting Act (1967), the government-funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) was established, and in 1969 it founded the Public Broadcasting Service as a successor to NET. The PBS broadcast network debuted in 1970. In its initial years, PBS featured such acclaimed programming as the children’s shows Sesame Street (begun 1969) and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (1968–2001; with Fred Rogers), the performing-arts series Evening at Pops (1970–2005) and Great...

Viewers were also drawn to the instructional The French Chef (1963–73), with Julia Child; the political talk show Firing Line (1966–99), hosted by William F. Buckley, Jr.; and the drama anthology Masterpiece Theatre (begun 1971; later Masterpiece), presided over for many years by Alistair Cooke. Throughout the network’s history, many of its other series achieved considerable renown, including The MacNeil/Lehrer Report (begun 1975 with news presenters Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer; now PBS NewsHour), Live from Lincoln Center (begun... (begun 1980; later subsumed into Masterpiece), Nature (begun 1982), American Playhouse (1982–93), Frontline (begun 1983), The Frugal Gourmet (1983–95; with Jeff Smith), Smithsonian World (1984–91), Adam Smith’s Money World (1984–97), American Masters (begun 1986),... Eponymously titled talk shows hosted by Charlie Rose and Tavis Smiley began in 1993 and 2004, respectively. In addition, PBS aired numerous documentary films (including several prominent works by Ken Burns), as well as a variety of series originally produced for British television.

As a corporate entity, PBS is governed by a board of directors, consisting of the company president, general directors from outside the organization, and representatives from some of its hundreds of noncommercial member stations. Member stations are licensed variously by community organizations, universities, state authorities, or local educational or municipal authorities. Funding for PBS is derived from various sources, including the U.S. federal government (through the CPB and other departments and agencies), state governments, member stations’ dues, corporations and foundations, and the contributions of viewers. The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is a non-profit public broadcasting television service in the United States, with some member stations available by cable in Canada. While the term broadcast also covers radio, PBS only covers television; for radio the United States has National Public Radio (NPR), American Public Media, and Public Radio International.

The goal of PBS is to make educational and informative programming available to the public. PBS does not accept advertising and is paid for through special congressional funding to assure the independence of the content, as well as station pledge drives. The role of public broadcasting has been questioned as has the execution of its broadcasts. Questions of bias and slanted coverage have been raised and remain to be addressed by policymakers and public alike. Nonetheless, PBS has offered a viable alternative to commercial television, as evidenced by public support both financially and in terms of viewing audiences. The continuation of this role depends on the ability of PBS to keep abreast both with external developments in technology and with changes in values and ethics that reflect the internal dimension of human...

Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) was founded in 1969, at which time it took over many of the functions of its predecessor, National Educational Television (NET). It commenced broadcasting itself on October 5, 1970. In 1973, it merged with Educational Television Stations. Since its founding in 1969, PBS has grown to include 354 stations which cover all 50 states of the United States. The unique method of having each station pay for programming has facilitated organic and easy growth around the country. The purpose of public broadcasting is to provide universal access to high quality programming.

This programming is to enlighten, inform and entertain the viewing audience. Specifically, this programming often addresses topics that would go unnoticed in commercial markets.[1] The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967[2] required a "strict adherence to objectivity and balance in all programs or series of programs of a controversial nature." It also prohibited the federal government from interfering or... This set up an obvious tension where the government that created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) would not be able to do anything about a perceived failure to meet its obligation for objectivity... At a more basic and problematic level is how and who should determine what constitutes objectivity and balance when there are massive disagreements over what that would be. There seems to be no consensus or even attempts at forming a consensus to resolve this dilemma.

PBS is a non-profit, private corporation with headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. It is owned collectively by its member stations.[3] This relationship means that PBS member stations have greater latitude in local scheduling than their commercial counterparts. Scheduling of PBS-distributed series may vary greatly from market to market. This can be a source of tension as stations seek to preserve their local identity and PBS strives to market a consistent national lineup. However, PBS has a policy of "common carriage" requiring most stations to clear the national prime time programs on a common schedule, so that they can be more effectively marketed on a national basis. What drug diversion looks like in downtown Seattle

Inside Seattle's opioid addiction treatment centers What Mossback hopes you learn from Season 11 Celebrating Indigenous heritage with ‘Netse Mot' Why WA voters swung left in the November election U.S. public television is a peculiar hybrid of broadcasting systems.

Neither completely a public-service system in the European tradition, nor fully supported by commercial interests as in the dominant pattern in the United States, it has elements of both. Although the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is emerging as a national image for U.S. public TV, at its base, this system consists of an ad hoc assemblage of stations united only by the fluctuating patronage of the institutions that fund them, and in the relentless grooming of various... The future of public broadcasting in the United States may in fact be assured by the range of those constituencies and by public TV’s malleable self-definition. As technologies to permit both storage and interaction with viewers expand, public TV may come to be as much an electronic public library as a broadcaster. It staked a claim to a unique role in an increasingly diversified televisual environment by its early-21st-century campaign to generate “social capital,” identified as networks of mutually rewarding social relationships in a community.

Since it became a national service in 1967 public TV has had a significant cultural impact—an especially impressive achievement given its perpetually precarious arrangements. Through its programming choices, it has not only introduced figures such as Big Bird and Julia Child into national culture, and created a home for sober celebrities such as Bill Moyers and William Buckley,... Early achievements included closed captioning and distance learning. More recently, public TV has pioneered original digital programming, particularly using high-definition technology, and led in the development of web-based extensions of television programs. U.S. public TV programming evolved to fill niches that commercial broadcasters had either abandoned or not yet discovered.

Children’s educational programming (especially for preschoolers), “how-to” programs stressing the pragmatic (e.g., cooking, home repair, and painting and drawing), public-affairs news and documentaries, science programs, upscale drama, experimental art, educationally tilted reality and docusoap... In the course of a week, half the television-viewing homes in the United States turn to a public TV program for at least 15 minutes, and, overall, the demographics describing viewers of public TV... However, based on an annual average, public TV’s prime-time rating hovers at 2 percent of the viewing audience, a rating on par with some popular cable services but far below network television ratings. Demographics for any particular program are narrowly defined; overall, they are weakest for young adults. Less heralded, but increasingly important in public TV’s rationale, is its extensive instructional programming and in formation-networking, most of which is nonbroadcast. In the critical design period of American broadcasting (1927–34), which resulted in the Communications Act of 1934, public-service broadcasting had been rejected out of hand by legislators and their corporate mentors.

A small amount of spectrum space on the more poorly received ultra-high frequency (UHF) band was set aside for educational television in 1952. This decision was modeled after the 1938 set-aside for educational (not public or public-service) radio stations, a regulation that had been implanted in response to the rampant commercialization of radio. In TV, as in radio, much of that spectrum space went unused, and most programming was low cost and local (e.g., a lecture). After World War II, “educational television” evolved into “public television,” around the concerns of cold war politics and the corporate growth of the television industry. The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 reflected, in part, the renewed emphasis placed on mass media by major foundations such as Carnegie and Ford, as well as the concern of liberal politicians and educators,... The historic 1965 Carnegie Commission on Educational Television, willed into being by President Lyndon Johnson in search of a televisual component to the Great Society program, claimed that a “Public Television” could “help us...

Public Television Pbs Encyclopedia Com

People Also Search

With Its Dedication To The High Ideals Of Presenting The

While The First Television Programs Were Broadcast In The Late

NET Soon Revised The Limited Classroom Approach To Educational TV,

This Is An Accepted Version Of This Page The Public

(president Of WGBH), John Macy (president Of CPB), James Day