The very organizing logic of network television in the United States-that it act for Americans in the public interest, operates under government regulation, and defines itself economically by the "mainstream"-has meant that television encourages a consensual cultural "inside" and a marginalized "outside." By delegating to television the authority to provide a balanced view of the world and to serve the mass audience, many individual and cultural voices have been underrepresented. While intellectual and artistic cultures, in postures of voluntary cultural exclusion, have demeaned television's mass mentality from the medium's start, it was the civil rights crisis in the 1960s, by contrast, that highlighted television's involuntary forms of ethnic, racial, and gender bias. Even as underground filmmakers, newsreel activists, and video artists at the time forged the notion of "independent" media as an alternative to the networks, a more public crisis over television's exclusionary practices challenged the government to recast its relationship to broadcasting. The formation of National Educational Television (NET); its successor, the Public Broadcasting Service; and the funding arm, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) were all attempts to correct the narrow interests that democratically minded critics saw at the foundation of network television. Public television's mandate was to open up and diversify television in both an aesthetic and a social sense. Different types of stories and perspectives on American culture were to emerge, even as the very notion of an independent perspective would be part of the PBS niche that followed.

     Yet, by the late 1980s, many liberal critics com­plained that PBS had failed in its mission to diversify television and to give voice to those without one. The presence of advertising spots in major PBS affiliate stations, Fortune 500 corporate sponsorship of programs, and the generic monotony that came from a limited diet of nature documentaries, high-culture performing, and British imports proved to such critics that, far from fulfilling its function, PBS represented rigid class interests of the most limited type-that this was in fact corporate, rather than independent, television. A direct result of this organized critique was the formation of ITVS.

With advocacy from the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers and its publication The Independent, a coalition of independent producers from major cities across the United States publicly criticized contradictions at the root of public broadcasting's "failure": administrative overheads at PBS and CPB consumed the lion's share of public subsidies from the government; panels that awarded program development and production funds were ingrown networks; and PBS affiliate stations, along with a select group of insider companies, now fulfilled the role of "independents." Apart from token programming ghettos (such as the TV "labs" and new artists "workshops" at WNET and WGBH, segment-producing spots on Frontline, and half-hour anthologies of experimental work on affiliates WTTW, WNED, and KQED), independent work that engaged radical political, racial, or sexual politics was essentially absent from public television. PBS seems unresponsive to such issues, and ITVS organizers took their critique directly to the source of PBS subsidies: Congress. 

The resulting federal mandate required that CPB negotiate directly with the National Coalition of Independent Public Broadcasting Producers (NCIPBP) to develop programs through ITVS. ITVS's $6 million yearly budget was to be allocated without oversight or interference by any existing funding entity, including CPB and PBS. However, the independence guaranteed by direct-to-producer subsidies also brought with it a lasting complication for ITVS: freed of PBS/CPB intrusions into program development, ITVS also lost any guarantee of final broadcast on PBS stations. While public broadcasters protested that federal funds would now go to programs that had little chance of carriage on the stations that they controlled, ITVS countered that up-front development money, not carriage, had al­ways been the historic problem for independents.

     By May 1990, complications arose on both sides. Spun  as an "overhead-versus-production funding struggle, CPB complained of NCIPBP's unrealistic assumptions about support; ITVS criticized CPB's refusal to cover basic post production, packaging, and promotion costs. Many others noted that very little television had actually been developed by ITVS-and none broadcast.

     From St. Paul, Minnesota, ITVS aimed to develop "innovative" series and single programs. Topics were identified, professional panels constituted, and "requests for proposals" announced. Open calls received as many as 2,000 submissions; focused topics were as few as 75. By 1993-94, numerous series were finally in production or distribution. Declarations college video essays around ITVS's charter notion of free speech; TV Families serialized family diversity as an antidote to network television's one-dimensional paradigm; Stolen Moments tackled AIDS in the context of urban street culture, hip-hop, and jazz; and The United States of Poetry and Animated Women brought their artistic subcultures to after-prime PBS affiliate audiences.

     While some ITVS programs were picked up by many PBS stations, others were less successful. ITVS's quarterly Buzzwords, however, defended the organization's uneven successes by pointing to the critical acclaim given some individual works, such as Marlon Riggs's Black ls ... Black Ain't at the Berlin, San Francisco, and Sundance film festivals.

     Two complications built into ITVS from the start continue to dog the organization's future: carriage and overhead. Despite a new rhetoric of "audience-driven programming," ITVS remains weakest in its ability to deliver programming to a national audience. Second, although ITVS was designed to prevent the overhead and administrative skimming that characterized CPB/PBS, many independents by 1995 began to question the ability of ITVS to deal with such problems as the "identity politics" that skewed awards, or the "insiders" that comprised funding panels. The criticism that ITVS is simply a re-emergent bureaucracy that constrains independence is exacerbated by the fact that its $7 million yearly budget for program development is minuscule by commercial industry standards.

     Statistically and economically, then, ITVS cannot possibly represent the thousands of independents that were publicly linked to it by NCIPBP and Congress. Dissension and broadcaster resistance alike may pale, however, before political threats to ITVS funding. ITVS has been resilient in responding to its critics and has continued to refine its effectiveness in several ways: first, by redefining its mission as an attempt to "reach minority filmmaking communities"; second, by establishing its "LinCS" program to co-produce minority independents with local PBS stations; third, by marketing itself as a "service" or "bridge" (that provides "comprehensive" development, marketing, educational outreach, and ancillary Internet activities) rather than as a broadcaster; and, finally, by providing extensive materials that teach the funding-and­ development process to new producers and ITVS applicants.

     By 2002 approximately two-thirds of ITVS-funded shows went to stations through PBS subscription services such as NPS, PBS Plus, POV, or Frontline, and producers maintain (with CPB oversight) many ancillary rights for subsequent markets and distribution. The creative history of ITVS during the previous decade shows the difficulties and challenges inherent in attempts to fulfill with limited funding and lack of governmental will the Carnegie Commission's defining notions of independence and diversity.