A People's Dividend

In one of the most princely benefactions in all history, the Ford Foundation has given U.S. educational television more than $100 million since 1952, is still pouring more than $10 million annually into ETV. Yet to what even the foundation concedes is a "depressing" degree, this philanthropy has been good money after bad. Most of the nation's 115 educational stations barely scrape along. The average channel puts less money into a whole year of programming than ABC budgets for Batman every week. What is more, the so-called educational TV network is not a network at all. Since it can't afford the costly cable linkups that would enable it to telecast nationwide simultaneously, its taped programming is distributed by chain mail, is often run weeks late by the farthest-flung affiliates.

Last week the Ford Foundation's new president, McGeorge Bundy, and his television consultant Fred Friendly produced a germinal scheme that would simultaneously transform ETV into a true network and double its broadcasting budget. The plan sounded like so much pie-in-the-sky, and it did indeed involve pie in space; the projected domestic version of the Early Bird satellite system. The foundation proposed that the FCC award the domestic franchise to a corporation called Broadcasters' Non-Profit Satellite Service (BNS), which would provide free services to ETV. At the same time, the commercial networks would lease BNS facilities at a considerable saving over present linkups. This would produce a profit for BNS of about $30 million, which would be passed on to ETV as a subsidy.

"Vexatious Problem." As Ford spelled it all out in a two-volume study for the FCC, BNS would launch four 22,300-mi.-high satellites into synchronous orbit, one hovering over each of the continental time zones. Network transmitters would then bounce their programs off the satellites and back to earth, where local stations would rebroadcast them to home receivers. Each satellite would service twelve channels: six would be allotted to commercial broadcasters, one to the educational network, four to instructional TV (three for primary-secondary levels, one for university), with one channel held in reserve.

As Bundy stressed in his covering letter to the FCC, the proposal presents only a model for discussion. "We are sure," he wrote, "that it can be improved." The networks have reacted favorably. CBS "welcomed" what it called "an imaginative approach to a very vexatious problem." ABC, which last May proposed its own satellite system to be leased to its commercial rivals and to provide free facilities to ETV, promised "serious consideration" of the foundation alternative. NBC declared its "hearty support in principle."

This left the Communications Satellite Corp. (COMSAT) and its major stockholder, A. T. & T., as the most vigorous opponent. COMSAT contends that the 1962 legislation establishing its exclusive jurisdiction over Early Bird pertains to domestic satellites as well, although Bundy's lawyers produced a persuasive 35-page rebuttal to the effect that Congress did not foreclose the possibility that the national interest might demand other systems. To charges that the nonprofit BNS would be unfair to A. T. & T. stockholders, Bundy pointed out that the telecommunications revenue "at issue ($65 million) is less than 1% of a business which grows by more than that in every season of every year." As one foundation staffer added, "192 million American people are shareholders in America's space capability. Subsidizing educational television would be, as Bundy said, 'a people's dividend.' " In any event, A. T. & T.'s cables would not go unused, since they could be diverted to ordinary commercial communications once the satellites were in operation.

Frequency Interference. The foundation proposition is on weaker ground, however, in other areas. It overturns the principle that private industry operates public utilities at rates that are the same for all customers, commercial and non-profit alike. Moreover, a proliferation of communications satellites might well raise insurmountable technological problems arising from frequency interference. There is also some doubt about whether centralized instructional and ETV organs should be emphasized at the expense of state and local ones.

Among those studying the plight and future of ETV is a blue-ribbon commission financed by the Carnegie Corp. and headed by M.I.T. Chairman James R. Killian Jr. Bundy, with respectful deference to the exhaustive efforts of this other philanthropic foundation, urged the FCC to "avoid major decisions affecting the future of educational television until we have the benefit of the Carnegie report," which is expected at the end of this year. "We do not claim," said Bundy, "that our way of doing it is the best. We do believe the best way must be found." Certainly, the proposals of the Ford Foundation last week helped to dramatize that belief and the desperate need, as Bundy phrased it, to "make the desert bloom for whole new areas of television."

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