CRISIS IN CHILDREN’S TV PROBED

Brigid Sullivan scanned the faces around the long elliptical conference table here at the offices of public television station WGBH-TV, took a deep breath and began her impassioned plea.

“We don’t need better productions or ideas,” she said. “We need money for productions and promotion and more time on the air.”

As the manager for instructional and children’s programming at WGBH Educational Foundation, Sullivan has experienced first hand, and with considerable frustration, that “working in children’s television is a risky business.”

Her message was hardly new to several dozen programmers--public television along with CBS and the Disney Channel pay TV network--educators, corporate and foundation representatives and others who gathered here for two days this week to brainstorm about the future of children’s television.

But Sullivan’s concern underscores a growing crisis for those who are involved in children’s television: where to find immediate, large-scale and continuing funding to ensure the ongoing production of quality programming.

“New Initiatives in Children’s Television”was sponsored by WGBH Educational Foundation, Action for Children’s Television and the Joan Shorenstein Barone Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University.

Along with the funding issue, the symposium also explored possible federal legislation concerning children’s television, tossed about ideas like the creation of a public-private partnership of businesses, foundations and public broadcasters to create a national endowment for children’s programming, and pondered the impact and use of new technologies such as videocassette recorders and the potential to distribute quality children’s programming through the nation’s public libraries.

“Today,” said former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Newton Minow, “children spend more time with television than they do with their teachers, even their parents,”

“Only 60 or so years ago, we thought it was OK to have child labor in this country,” he said. “At some point we’re going to say no more ignorance about the responsibility to provide good programs for children on television. It may be 1990, it may the year 2000, but at some point our society is going to say no more inattention to the fact that most of our children are spending most of their time with a television set.”

Other speakers such as David Hamburg, president of the Carnegie Corp. of New York, said more should be done to explore the potential that television has to open the eyes of children to the world around them. “We are a backward country when it comes to the education of our children through television,” he said.

At the opening session, Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), who chairs the telecommunications and finance subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, charged there has been a “virtual disappearance of quality children’s television”--in large measure because of the deregulatory policies of former FCC Chairman Mark S. Fowler.

Markey said his long-term goal is to “reinstate a strong and meaningful public interest standard” for the nation’s broadcasters.

He also said it is wrong for anyone to expect that new technologies such as cable television and videocassette recorders will fill the need for more children’s programming because many of these technologies are not available to children of lower-income families.

Henry Geller, director of the Washington Center for Public Policy Research, said the real hope for more quality children’s television rests in Congress. As one possibility, he said commercial broadcasters could be required to pay 1% of their gross revenues into a fund to support public radio and television programming.

And Peggy Charren, head of Action for Children’s Television, said congressional action is needed because children’s television has become a political issue. Poll results released at the symposium found that public television viewers as well as top business leaders strongly favor better children’s programs on commercial and public TV.

The poll found that public television viewers include a disproportionately high number of adults drawn from families with children of less than 15 years of age and that “children’s programs on public television have carved out a significant niche and audience of real significance.”

Today, American children watch an average of four hours of television a day--15,000 hours by the time they reach age 18--Bruce Watkins, assistant professor of communication at the University of Michigan, said in a draft paper scheduled for publication in the Yale Law and Policy Review.

While new technology has increased adult programming, “the amount and quality of commercially broadcast informational or educational television for children has not improved, and may be at one of its lowest points since the introduction of the medium,” Watkins said. “Indeed for every gain in alternative video content, it seems as if there has been a loss in commercially broadcast content for children.”

After surveying the children’s programming market, Henry P. Becton Jr., president and general manager of WGBH, said his station concluded that the greatest need is for programming for adolescents, particular preteens and young adolescents.

“There are some top quality programs on commercial broadcast television for older children,” he said. “But there aren’t enough.”

Becton said public television should assign its best producers to children’s programming, schedule programs at times when older children watch TV, and give the highest priority to funding projects for several years.

WGBH plans to premiere several new programs this fall, Becton said, and also will commit $1 million over a two-year period to start new children’s productions.

Few symposium participants disagreed with Herbert Schmertz, vice president for public affairs at Mobil Corp., who said that “because television is such a major influence on children, we are obliged to as parents and as citizens to do what we can to ensure its quality.”

But Schmertz said private underwriters should not be blamed because they tend to sponsor programming aimed at adults. Along with other corporate representatives present, he urged public broadcasters to make better efforts to analyze the needs of the underwriters and to strive for more imaginative programming that would “help raise children’s programming on TV to such a level of excellence that corporate underwriters would have far stronger incentives to attach their names to programs.”

“What we need in public television is perhaps not so much better ideas, but a better knowledge of how to make and sell deals--to advertisers, to co-producers, to underwriters, to unions, foundations, to funding sources right and left.”

“It is a cop-out to say the only shows being funded on television for children at the moment are programs that sell them toys,” he said, adding that the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon programming are examples of a wide range of children’s programming that doesn’t depend on selling toys, weapons or even candy.

On the funding dilemma, Schmertz suggested consideration of a “license fee of substantial size for any television station” that would be allocated for improved public television programming, with a certain amount dedicated to children’s programming.

A simpler alternative, he said, might be creation of a foundation, something similar to the March of Dimes, that is dedicated to the funding of quality children’s television programming.

The Corp. for Public Broadcasting earmarks about $10 million of its $30 million programming-fund budget to children’s television for continued support of programs such as “Wonderworks,” “3-2-1 Contact,” “Reading Rainbow” and “Square One TV.”

But William Lee Hanley, a member of the CPB board of directors, said that even with these successes “escalating production costs, non-assurance of continued matching funds from foundations, endowments and other donors and the abysmal record of American corporation funding of children’s TV on public television--all combine to threaten the good that has been established.”

“Literally scores of effective, ground-breaking ideas are received by CBP children’s programming staff on a regular basis,” Hanley said. “And we can but shake our heads and throw up our hands because there is not enough money to fund them all.”

Jay Rayvid of WQED in Pittsburgh, which produces “Wonderworks,” said there needs to be a crusade for the nation’s children. “We need a parade,” he said. He suggested that commercial broadcasters offer to host a telethon to raise funds that would go to create quality children’s programming on public television.

Until the major funding issue can be resolved, one short-term solution may be more creative programming funding arrangements, such as co-productions with other companies in this country and abroad, and “windowing” arrangements such as WQED has with the Disney Channel that allows “Wonderworks” to be seen at different times on both media outlets.

“It really boils down to being able to finance the projects,” said John Cooke, president of the Disney Channel.

And in the future, there is the yet-uncharted potential for public libraries to distribute videocassettes of quality children’s programs, just as they do books today.

As Marilyn Kressel, consultant the American Library Assn.-Carnegie Video Project, says: “The videocassette may have more impact on how children view television than commercial broadcasting.”