The vanishing vision

the long version

In this fascinating, first-ever history of public television, James Day, a founder of San Francisco's KQED and a past president of New York's WNET, offers an insider's account of its topsy-turvy, forty-year odyssey. Taking the reader from public TV's inauspicious roots in the 1950s to its strong - and fiercely debated - presence in contemporary culture, Day chronicles the evolution of public television from the nadir of Nixon's efforts to control or kill it to the triumph of the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour as television's first hour-long, prime-time news show. Along the way, Day identifies the particular forcespolitical and economic - that have shaped public television. The result, in his view, is a Byzantine bureaucracy kept on a leash by an untrusting Congress, with a fragmented leadership that lacks a clearly defined mission in today's multimedia environment. Public television's "democratic" structure of three-hundred-plus stations stifles boldness and innovation while absorbing money needed for national programming. Day shows how American public television's uneven record of using the medium creatively contrasts starkly with the impressive achievement of the state-supported BBC in the United Kingdom. Day calls for a bold new rethinking of public television's mission, advocating a system that is adequately funded, independent of government, and capable of counterbalancing the common-denominator programming of private television and cable with a full range of substantive programs, comedy as well as culture, entertainment as well as information. Richly anecdotal and forcefully argued, The Vanishing Vision is a must-read for anyone who has been moved by a documentary like The Civil War, transfixed by Bill Moyers, or charmed by Big Bird and his friends.