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, but it has also pioneered new televisual technologies. 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 programming, and community-affairs programming all contribute to the tapestry of public TV. 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 more or less match those of the nation as a whole. 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, and, in part, it demonstrated an interest in communications technology by the nation’s military-industrial strategists. 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 see America whole, in all its diversity,” and “help us know what it is to be many in one, to have growing maturity in our sense of ourselves as a people.” Many legislators and conservatives, however, openly feared the specter of a fourth network dominated by eastern liberals. Commercial broadcasters did not want real rivals, although they supported the notion of a service that could complement theirs and relieve their public-interest burden.

The service was thus deliberately created as the “lemon socialism” of mass media, providing what commercial broadcasters did not want to offer. The only definition of “public” was “noncommercial.” Token start-up funds were provided, and the system was not merely decentralized but balkanized. The current complex organization of public TV reflects its origins. The station, the basic unit of U.S. public TV, operates through a nonprofit entity, most commonly a nonprofit community organization, through the state’s government (which provides mininetworks for all stations in a state), or through a university. Of the approximately 1,660 stations in the United States, there are about 350 public TV stations, although less than 200 independently program for their communities (the others mostly retransmit signals). Almost everyone in the United States can receive a public TV signal. About two-thirds of the public TV stations are UHF, still a significant limiting factor in reception. At the turn of the 21st century, about 40 stations also broadcast on digital channels, as a result of the requirement of the 1996 Telecommunications Act to use new spectrum given to each station for digital transmission.

Stations are fiercely independent, cultivating useful relationships with local elites, although the stations often form consortia for program production and delivery and to shape more general policy for public TV as a whole. A handful of wealthy, powerful producing stations contrasts with a great majority of small stations that produce no programming. In most major markets, there are several stations, with much duplication of PBS programming, but occasionally “overlap” stations establish some distinctive services catering to minorities and showcasing independent or experimental productions.

The 1967 Public Broadcasting Act also created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) as a private entity, to provide support to the stations. The governing board of the CPB is politically appointed and balanced along partisan lines, and it is funded by tax dollars. The CPB was designed to assist stations with research, policy direction, grants to upgrade equipment and services, and, eventually, a small programming fund. However, the CPB was specifically banned from distributing programs. This was designed to inhibit the creation of a national network. Over the years, the corporation has acted as the lightning rod for congressional discontent, since the CPB is a funnel for federal tax dollars. Congress has usually removed the board’s discretionary authority over funds rather than cut its budget. As a result, most of CPB’s funds are now set up to flow directly to local stations.

Despite governmental intent to keep public broadcasting local, centralized programming services of several kinds quickly sprang up. Public-affairs services centered, just as political conservatives had feared, on the eastern seaboard. Resulting programs enraged President Richard Nixon, who tried to abolish the service and did succeed in weakening it.

Out of this conflict grew, by 1973, today’s Public Broadcasting Service, the first and still premier national programming service for public TV. Shaped in part by station owners who, like Nixon, disliked eastern liberals, PBS is a membership organization of television stations. Member stations pay dues to receive up to three hours of prime-time programming at night, several hours of children’s programming during the day, and other recommended programs. Since 1990 stations have accepted a programming schedule designed by a PBS executive. This policy replaced a previous system in which programs were selected through a system driven by majority vote. Stations were persuaded to cede power because overall ratings for public TV were declining. Although not obliged to honor the prime-time schedule, stations are urged to do so, and they are increasingly constrained by contract conditions to devote larger sections of their programming to a common national schedule. This version of a common schedule assists in enlarging the audience and enables stations to benefit from national advertising. Other programming services abound, both regionally and nationally, but none has the imprimatur of PBS.

CPB and PBS both provide funds for the development and purchase of programming, but they do not make most programs. Producing television stations, especially in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., have historically produced the bulk of programming. Public TV also depends heavily on a few production houses, both commercial and noncommercial. Canadian production houses have risen in importance, with favorable exchange rates lowering production costs there, and smaller stations are increasingly producing individual programs and series, and working in producing consortia. Smaller television and film producers, historically frozen out of commercial broadcast television and typically constrained within formats on cable, chronically complain that public TV—their last resort and the only venue for authorial filmmaking—slights them. They argue that their work exemplifies the diversity of viewpoints and perspectives celebrated in the Constitution’s First Amendment. Their complaints, coordinated over a decade, finally convinced Congress in 1988 to create the Independent Television Service, as a wing of the CPB, with the specific mission to fund innovative work for underserved audiences.

Public TV’s funds come from a variety of sources, each of which comes with its own set of strings. Funding sources include (for fiscal year 1999) the federal government (15 percent), state and local governments (17 percent), public and private universities (11 percent), and private funders: subscribers (26 percent) and corporations (15 percent). The federal appropriation brings controversy virtually on an annual basis. Even so, the CPB’s budget has, with few exceptions (notably, during the first Reagan presidency, and in 1995, when a new Republican congressional majority took office), been regularly increased to keep its total amount roughly steady with 1976 levels measured in 1972 dollars. The content of public-affairs programming has consistently been the target of Republican and conservative legislators’ ire, and such anger has caused public TV to be hypercautious about such programs. This may explain why public TV has not developed an institutional equivalent of National Public Radio’s around-the-clock news reporting.

About half the funds for public TV come from the private sector. Viewers are the single largest source of funding; their contributions come, effectively, without strings and so are especially valuable. These funds are often raised during “pledge drives” in which special, highly popular programming is presented in conjunction with heartfelt pleas for funds from station staff, prominent local supporters, and other celebrities. Programs aired during pledge drives (shows hosted by self-help celebrities, operas sung by stars such as Placido Domingo, a Harry Potter–themed program) reflect the genteel image of the service. Stations have also found some success with Internet pledging, another indication of the upscale tilt of public TV and its viewers. These pledge drives are supplemented, in many markets, with other fund-raising efforts, such as auctions or special performances. The 10 percent of all public TV viewers who become donors tend to be culturally and politically cautious, and the need to cultivate them skews public TV programming to what venerable broadcast historian Erik Barnouw called the “safely splendid.”

Business contributes about a sixth of the funding, but its contributions have disproportionate weight in shaping programming decisions, because business dollars are usually given in association with a particular program. Public broadcasters openly market their audience to corporations as an upscale demographic, one that businesses are eager to capture in what is known as “ambush marketing”: catching the attention of a listener or viewer who usually resists advertising. The hallmark PBS series Masterpiece Theatre was designed, from logo to host, by a Mobil Oil Corporation executive looking to create an image for Mobil as “the thinking man’s gasoline.” Conflict-of-interest issues ensue from corporate underwriting, as do questions about allowing corporations to set programming and production priorities. (If stations had not aired Doing Business in Asia, a series sponsored by Northwest Airlines, which has Asian routes, what else might they have been able to do with their time and money?)

These pressures have combined to make the service vulnerable to political attack from both the left and right as elitist. After Nixon accused the service of being dangerously liberal, many broadcasters scanted public affairs and presented “safe” cultural programming, only to be accused by the Reagan administration in 1981 of providing “entertainment for a select few.” Reagan’s attempt to cut funds also failed, although the administration succeeded in rescinding advance funding that had been designed as a political “heat shield” after Nixon’s attack. In 1992 Republican Senator Bob Dole of Kansas threatened to hold up funding for public broadcasting on charges that it was too liberal, and he succeeded in making broadcasters nervous and forcing CPB to spend $1 million on surveys and studies that changed nothing. In 1994, following on the Republican victory in Congress, both Dole and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich of Georgia targeted the CPB for rescission, on grounds that it was both elitist and liberal.

At the same time, the variety of funding sources, along with the decentralized structure of public TV, militated against mission-focused planning, in the prolonged industry turmoil that marked the last years of the 20th century. Multichannel, satellite, and cable television successfully eroded much of public TV’s traditional niche, although public TV continued to hold as a unique audience the 30 percent of the population that does not receive pay television. Commercial investors, hungry for content, increasingly invested in public TV, and public TV entities have searched out commercial partners. New technologies posed hypothetical opportunities while requiring extensive experiment and innovation. Stations were forced to invest in digital technology without business plans or public subsidies for programming, as a result of a push largely by commercial broadcasters for expanded spectrum. In 2001 the Federal Communications Commission permitted stations to carry advertising on, and make money from, ancillary (nonbroadcast) services on digital channels, such as voice messaging and data transmission.

At the beginning of the 21st century, economic, political, and technological forces finally converged to refocus public TV’s role. PBS attained a clearer agenda-setting role within the diffuse bureaucracies involved in public TV, effectively controlling the national schedule and radically revising its prime-time lineup for the first time in two decades. It aggressively branded the public TV environment as “PBS” by such measures as creating websites for all programs but refusing to cite competing websites on air; carrying the PBS “bug” on channel feeds; outreach and educational campaigns and materials; and public relations with opinion makers. The ascension of Pat Mitchell, a veteran of commercial cable TV, as PBS president in 2000, brought crisper decision making and more direct competition for programs with commercial channels, as well as the “social capital” campaign. Producers within and for public TV more frequently entered into international coproductions, with both public-service and commercial partners, and worked harder to retain intellectual property rights. The challenge of developing and programming digital channels has created new financial pressures and new business plans. At the same time, stations have individually experimented with local partners, with extended educational services (including distance learning), and with becoming nodes of community networks.

The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States proved a test of the role of public TV in national culture, and it demonstrated public TV’s strengths and weaknesses. In the immediate aftermath, the service demonstrated its inability to cover news thoroughly, since few stations had any ability to cover events live. However, in the days that followed, public TV turned out to be the place to go for thoughtful, well-researched documentaries about topics related to the terrorism, with some of this programming being rerun to high ratings, after low-rated debuts. The teams that produced these documentaries demonstrated the value of deep investment in the subject matter and were able to draw on contacts and outtakes to produce more public affairs quickly. PBS created an information-rich website with a page for storytelling that expanded quickly and many links to local stations’ websites, where users could contribute to charities and support organizations. Thus, the service’s functions as high-quality programmer, educational resource, and community network node were showcased.

An improbable, many-headed creature, public TV is unlikely to disappear even under political assault. It is also unlikely suddenly to become a service that a plurality of Americans would expect to turn to on any given evening. It is likely to become more commercial in its broadcast services and more entrenched (and defensible as taxpayer-funded) in its infrastructure and instructional services.