Public Television Stations Research Articles

The Impact of Casino Gambling on Charitable Contributions: The Willingness to Contribute to a Local Public Television Station

This study examines factors that influence Las Vegas residents’ willingness to pay (WTP) to maintain public television programming locally. Though previous research has investigated WTP for public television, this study is unique in that it examines the impact of casino gambling on giving. A mail survey with two follow-ups yielded 1,054 surveys-880 surveys provided complete information on the variables used in two analyses, 557 in a third. Statistically significant effects were found in models estimated with Tobit models; however, we failed to find a significant reduction in contributions to public television with higher levels of gambling behavior.

Southwest Home Horticulture: Using Video and the Internet in the Instruction of Nonmajors

A distance learning course called Southwest Home Horticulture was developed and implemented at Arizona State University using video and Internet technologies to give nonhorticulture students an overview of urban horticulture in the southwestern United States. Fourteen, one-half-hour video programs about topics in southwestern residential landscaping, plants materials and landscape best-management practices were produced in ≈800 working hours. The video programs are now telecast weekly, each academic semester, on the regional public television station and the educational channel of several cable television systems. We found that students who enrolled in the course were most likely to tape the programs on a video cassette recorder and watch them at their own convenience, one to three times. A World Wide Web (Web) site on the Internet was developed as a supplement to the video programs. The Web site was organized into a modular format giving students quick access to auxiliary course-related information and helpful resources. When asked, ≈90% of the students indicated that the Web site was a helpful supplement to the video programs. Use of video and Internet technologies in tandem has enabled nonhorticulture major students to learn about home horticulture in an asynchronous or location and time independent fashion.

Princes and Paupers: Network Ties and Financial Contributions Among Nonprofit Arts Organizations

ABSTRACT In the United States, nonprofit organizations are the primary vehicle through which wealthy patrons nurture arts and culture. They provide support for theatres, orchestras, operas, and ballet troupes of all sizes, as well as museums, galleries, zoos, and public radio and television stations. The survival of this subsector is dependent on the ability of individuals and foundations to raise and funnel money to the almost 7,000 nonprofit arts and cultural organizations in the United States. Nonprofit arts organizations have historically fared well during periods of financial constraint, in part because they have not depended heavily upon government subsidies. But another explanation for this stable funding picture may be the networks of overlapping board member and interpersonal ties of collegiality and friendship which characterizes the world of nonprofit arts organizations. We began our research with the idea that network position, particularly as measured by network centrality, is an important resource for nonprofit arts organizations. We hypothesized that the more central an arts organization is in the entire network of for-profit and nonprofit arts organizations in the community, the greater will be the level of support it can generate from local donors. We also hypothesized that the more wealthy a nonprofit arts organization, the more central it is likely to be in the entire network of for-profit and nonprofit organizations. Using an extensive database of almost 3,000 directors in the Louisville, Kentucky area, and special computer-based network analysis software packages, we were able to calculate the precise centralities of local arts organizations within a network of 149 organizations, corporations, and umbrella funding agencies. In order to determine the local financial support, we collected the 1990 IRS (Internal Revenue Service) Form 990 returns for nineteen of the twenty-five organizations (76%) we identified as active in the Louisville area. After determining organizational centrality, we did a bi-variate analysis between the centrality of an individual arts organization and total organizational wealth. What we found was that centrality is strongly associated with level of contributions and weakly associated with overall wealth. We believe that nonprofit arts organizations can take deliberate steps to maximize this resource by being aware of the other organizational (and social) ties of prospective directors.

Access to and participation in television in Spain

The aim of this paper is to describe the terms by which access practices are currently being carried out in Spain as a primary form of interaction between viewers and stations, and to determine the maximum level of audience participation in the management, programme production and/or programme planning of television stations. Because of the dictatorship in which it originated and developed, Spain constitutes a singular case in Western Europe as far as the regulation and practices of access to television are concerned. Analysis of the Spanish model on the one hand illustrates the role of local communication media as vehicles for civic access and participation, and in particular, an especially charismatic medium such as local television in the context of political democratic transition. On the other hand it shows that in a situation of "democratic normalcy", access to and participation in television increasingly has become more a legally-recognized right than an active and direct practice on the part of the citizens. The fierce competition within Spanish television has without a doubt prompted public television stations to place quantitative aims in the foreground, offering few concessions to those "public service" responsibilities such as access and participation on the part of the citizens that might mean a drop in ratings.

North Dakota: Connectivity and cooperation

North Dakota has in place a telecommunications infrastructure that is advanced and active, given the state's rural nature and large pockets of low population communities. The state is criss‐crossed by fiber‐optic cables that link the majority of telephone central offices to each other and connect clusters of high schools with interactive video networking. Public television stations are available in most communities of the state. State government is among the leaders in the state in the rapid deployment of frame relay services. The frame relay network represents the newest generation of data communication facilities in North Dakota, replacing a statewide network of dedicated leased data circuits and X.25 packet switches. The frame relay system provides each user group on the network with a Virtual Private Network (VPN) for data communications, which is transparent to other users on the network.

Walk-on Parts and Speaking Subjects: Screen Representations of Black Gay Men

Various cultural-political developments of the past five years or so make it possible to correlate a widely perceived crisis in the arts with the emergence of the black gay man as both subject and object. Continuing challenges from members of Congress to the National Endowment for the Arts reached a peak in 1989 with Senator Jesse Helms' attacks on Robert Mapplethorpe's retrospective exhibition, The Perfect Moment, whose controversial nature stemmed largely from the intensely conflicted issues of race, power, and sexuality raised by the photographer's aestheticized images of black male faces, bodies, and genitalia. In the ensuing months, numerous public television stations across the country refused to air the edition of PBS' POV, which featured Marlon Riggs' video Tongues Untied, citing the graphic sexual images that interrogate a range of experiences undergone by black gay men in the United States.' In a somewhat different vein, participants in New York City's black and latino drag ball circuit featured in Jennie Livingston's Paris Is Burning (1991) brought suit against the filmmaker for unlawful use of services, raising critical questions about the status and position of the subjects of documentary film.2 Given the notoriety of these examples, it would be easy to conclude that homosexuality among black men is not just a highly social and politically charged phenomenon, but that its representation in U.S. culture became crucial only at the turn of the present decade, amid a general preoccupation with racial and sexual difference, multiculturalism, and political correctness that seems destined to characterize the period. As is becoming increasingly clear, however, from critical work undertaken in a range of fields since the 1970s, the social categories that seem essentially to exemplify the condition of marginality have in fact long been key components of the cultural mainstream, insofar as they have served to define and delimit the recognized center of the social structure.3 While the black gay man seems recently to have become a key figure for crises that, at present, threaten the very foundations of institutionalized culture in the United States, this should not be taken to mean that his representations have not functioned to buttress (often specifically by challenging) normative conceptions of race, sexuality, and gender identity since at least the Black Power era of the late 1960s.

PBS, Satellites, and Digital Video Compression

The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) established American television's first satellite program distribution system in 1978. PBS presently uses one C-band transponder and six Ku-band transponders on the AT&T Telstar 401 satellite to distribute television program material to the approximately 200 satellite receiving earth stations that serve some 346 public television stations. The replacement satellite system now being implemented to take public television well into the 21st century includes digital video compression. This paper provides the details on the implementation of digital video compression within the framework of the public television satellite replacement project

Controversy and the Newspaper's Public: The Case of Tongues Untied

Newspaper coverage of a controversy over public television stations' carriage of the African American gay video poem Tongues Untied provides the material for analysis of how print journalists — ostensibly serving the public's need to know about issues of public importance — address issues in which “the public” is itself a contested notion. Reviews, columns, and articles from newspapers nationwide are analyzed. Typically the journalism acknowledged individual speech rights and abided by professional reporting conventions, but did not acknowledge that the very definition of the public and of public television's obligations was in contest.

Alternating Currents: Alternative Television inside and outside of the Academy

An American television consumer, perusing the array of viewing choices on a particular evening a few years ago, might have chanced upon an NBC program entitled Television: Revolution in a Box. In this special, Ted Koppel brought an emerging aspect of contemporary culture to view-the revolution, initiated by consumer investment in inexpensive, lightweight video recorders and players. While Koppel enlightened the about the uses of home video, a click of the remote control would have transported a wayward viewer to any one of many programs airing at the same time on other commercial, public, and cable television stations. In fact, tuning into any one of the thousands of channels designated to public use across the nation, much more unusual fare than that which Koppel presented might have been sampled. Manhattan Cable, for example, airs a weekly program titled Living with AIDS, which provides health care information unavailable from other sources. Safer sex practices are explained and even demonstrated. Paper Tiger Television, a series on many access cable channels across the country, provides critical readings from dominant media culture-from the New York Times to biker magazines. Another click might land you on the Deep Dish TV Network series, Beyond Censorship: The Assault on Civil Liberties, eight hours of programming from various parts of the country examining the controversies behind censorship and control.

The Fragility of Paper: Can Our Historical Record Be Saved?

ACID. The harshness of the word underscores its negative properties, suggesting burning sensations or blistering skin. Yet paper, harmless and everyday useful, contains enough acid literally to burn itself up. This is the message of Slow Fires, a documentary film that aired on public television stations in the United States in 1987, and more recently of Turning to Dust, a Canadian film broadcast in March 1990 as part of a series called The Nature of Things. This was also the message delivered to the United States Congress on March 3, 1987, helping to pave the way for large increments of federal funding to begin to solve the problem. And this was the message I received when I stumbled onto the Smithsonian Institution Libraries' 1,800-volume collection of nineteenth-century world's fair publications. The yellowed, brittle text of President Ulysses S. Grant's Message to Congress about the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition bore no resemblance to the flexible, white paper that carried St6phen FlachetMony's fine line drawings of furniture, silver, and glass displayed at the 1834 Exposition des produits de l'industrie francaise in Paris. Because it contains high levels of acid, the paper used after 1850 in books, journals, newspapers, and other printed materials sitting in the stacks of research libraries, along with the manuscripts, records, and other documents housed in archives, is slowly drying out, turning brown, cracking, and crumbling. The process has been hastened by the effects of poor storage conditions and decades of environmental pollution, espe-

Public television efficiency versus diversity

This article examines public television (PTV) stations' revenue and prgramming data in markets where multiple PTV stations operate. The authors find that smaller, poorer, secondary PTV stations in these markets offer more diverse programming than the primary stations in the markets.

Near Death — In the Moment of Decision

ON January 21, public television stations across the country will air "Near Death," a documentary on decisions about life-sustaining treatment. This six-hour film, the latest work of Frederick Wiseman, is an immersion in the daily life of the medical intensive care unit at Boston's Beth Israel Hospital. It performs a great service, revealing a reality many laypeople and doctors are sure to face. The film provides no overarching commentary, however, to put into perspective the practices it depicts. It falls to the viewer to deduce the strengths and weaknesses of those practices and to glean the lessons of "Near Death." . . .

Lee v. Dong-A Ilbo

In 1985 two intelligence agencies of the South Korean Government announced that they had successfully disrupted a North Korean spy ring operating in the United States. Their press release, which was widely publicized in the Korean press, named Chang-Sin Lee as a North Korean agent associated with a spy ring at Western Illinois University, where Lee had been a student. The story was picked up and reported in the United States by six Korean-American newspapers and a public television station. When Lee sued for libel, the defendants relied upon the official report privilege, which gives absolute protection to the accurate republication of official government reports. The district court, holding that the privilege applied and that Lee had not overcome it by showing malice, dismissed the case. Plaintiff appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which in a two to one decision reversed (per Ervin, J.) and held: that the official report privilege does not apply to the republication of official reports of foreign governments. Judge Kaufman, sitting by designation, dissented from the majority’s reversal of the district court’s grant of summary judgment.

Grants and Outcomes

Grants and Outcomes

United States Public Television Station Finational Issues since 1980

United States Public Television Station Finational Issues since 1980

More About “Planet Earth”

Seven programs, each 1 hour in length, form the centerpiece of Planet Earth: The Living Machine, The Blue Planet, The Climate Puzzle, Tales from Other Worlds, Gifts from the Earth, The Solar Sea, Fate of the EarthMost public television stations will broadcast the series on Wednesday evenings; check local listings for the correct time and station.

Advisory Board Performance: Managing Ambiguity and Limited Commitment in Public Television

Citizen advisory boards are important to non-profit and governmental organiza tions, yet these boards face fundamental problems of ambiguous responsibilities and limited board member commitment. In the present paper a model of these proposi tions is developed and tested. Board performance is operationalized as productivity and board impact, and is expected to be dependent on the development of opera tional objectives and a subcommittee structure, which in turn is facilitated by the financial support of management, and impeded by a large board membership. The model is tested using path analysis on a national sample of federally-mandated Community Advisory Boards to public television stations. We find that the estab lishment of operational objectives and subcommittees is significantly associated with productivity but only weakly with the impact of the advisory board. Board size is unassociated with board performance. The findings support the assertion that successful boards must clarify their roles and develop efficient operating structures, but suggest that the advisory board-management relationship is complex.

Evaluating premium performance in on‐air fundraising at public television stations

Premium performance during fund‐raising was assessed in a survey of 50 university licensed stations, analysis of nearly 3,000 pledge records and a replicated telephone survey of subscribers. The project applied a criterion measure to pull and revenue to measure the rate of success for each premium in each festival for each station. This model provides a framework for assessing the function of premiums over time and across stations.

Two-way television: A tool for new product research

I n the 1980s, marketing research costs, including research design, fielding and analysis will steadily rise. The rapid pace of dynamic markets will require ever quicker turnaround time on consumer research projects. As firms seek to minimize risks and costs associated with the new product development process, marketing researchers will have to develop more cost-efficient research tools and techniques that will contr ibute to a shorter development period and greater forecasting accuracy. One of the promising tools in this undertaking is two-way interactive television. Two-way television shows great potential for data collection, one of the most costly and timeconsuming stages in the consumer research process. Television technology has advanced to the point that marketers and consumers can interact in a two-way process. The most commonly known technology is called two-way cable television. The feedback mechanism can be a response box on which the respondent presses but tons, or a system which utilizes a touch-tone telephone, or one which uses an intermediary as an interviewer. Since December 1, 1977, Warner Communications has been operating its QUBE (two-way cable television) system on a trial basis in Columbus, Ohio. In addition to enabling normal signals to be sent to the television viewer, the system allows the viewer to send limited responses back to the source. The two-way interactive system includes a number of channels controlled by touch but tons on a console unit about the size of an electronic calculator. The system provides the usual commercial and public television station material, premium selections such as recent movies that have not yet appeared on commercial television, and a group of channels over which viewers interact with their sets via the home console. In addition to the but tons for channel selection, the console has five response buttons. While two can be used as yes or no but tons, all five can be used to answer multiple-choice questions or to punch in number codes for selecting products displayed on the screen. Viewing in the $70-million system is monitored by a computer that can check every household at six-second intervals to record exactly which of QUBE's channels is being watched in each household) In order for QUBE to be selfsustaining, industry observers indicate that a 40 percent local penetra-

THE TEAM APPROACH TO INSTRUCTIONAL TELEVISION PRODUCTION: AN AMERICAN VIEW

ABSTRACT Instructional television (ITV) is most likely to be successful when resulting from the coordinated efforts of a team of capable specialists, but the contributions of such specialists are frequently overlooked, oversimplified or perceived too late. The team or task force assigned to the organization and development of a televised teaching project should consist of (1) a specialist in the psychology of learning, (2) a content specialist/writer, (3) a production specialist, (4) a TV engineer, and (5) a research and evaluation specialist. Each of these specialists, when properly trained and experienced, can play a unique and significant part in the creation of effective ITV materials. It is possible for some of the roles to be combined, but this can be disadvantageous. Public television stations in the United States have not made extensive use of the specialist team approach, for reasons of economy, scarcity of personnel and constraints of time and scheduling, but it is notable that the best known and apparently most effective producers of ITV programmes have used the specialist team approach. Amongst these successful users are the British Open University, the Children's Television Workshop, the Agency for Instructional Television, the University of Mid‐America and a few other large ITV consortia. Benefits to be derived from the specialist team approach should be carefully considered by all those engaged in the preparation not only of ITV programmes but also other audiovisual materials and multi‐media courses.