PBS Filling Network Void With News Documentaries

From matters of war and peace in the nuclear age to the scourge of AIDS, from an examination of “secret intelligence” and American spying to the state of learning in the nation’s schools, from an inside look at the “real” Ronald Reagan and a Congress about to celebrate its 200th birthday to questions of public and personal ethics, the coming months on public television promise a heavy dose of news documentaries.

“This is the strongest season in that area since I’ve been here,” said Bruce Christensen, president and chief executive officer of the 324-station Public Broadcasting Service. Christensen, president of PBS since 1984, has been with public television for nearly two decades.

During a three-day press tour at Universal City promoting public TV’s winter-spring season, PBS officials and even commercial TV correspondents participating in the event pointed out that public television was filling a documentary gap left by the commercial networks.

“I don’t know that we set about changing the nature of public television to be the news and public affairs arena for the nation,” Christensen said on Friday, “but it’s clear that that’s a strength we have. And we’ll continue to build on (that).”

“There’s no question,” said Barry Chase, PBS’ vice president for news and public affairs, that news and public affairs programming “appears to be the area where our greatest opportunities and greatest possibilities of service exist. The commercial services have yet to find a way of making that particular kind of programming fit.”

Chase added that network “abandonment” of such programming has been “more extreme in that area than any other.”

Indeed, in announcing its $10-million challenge fund program grants for 1989, PBS gave its highest award of $2.2 million to Bill Moyers to produce five documentaries or specials in 1989-1991. Moyers, who did not attend the PBS tour, said the programs will be on “topics which throw a light on currents running below the surface of American life.”

“Moyers and public television are a nice marriage, and we need to keep it going,” Chase said.

The challenge grants are jointly funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the nonprofit corporation that distributes federal funds to public TV.

Boston’s WGBH-TV received $2.1 million for a five-part series on the building of a New York skyscraper as well as a four-part “Inside Gorbachev’s USSR” being produced by Martin Smith (who also did “The Real Life of Ronald Reagan” for “Frontline”) and reported by Hedrick Smith. A former Moscow correspondent and author of “The Russians,” Hedrick Smith is also the author of the book “The Power Game” about Washington, which became a four-part series on PBS.

The question about the changing nature of network TV was also put to former “CBS Morning News” host Bill Kurtis, now an anchor at WBBM-TV in Chicago.

Kurtis narrates “Secret Intelligence,” a four-part series beginning Jan. 23 and produced by Los Angeles’ KCET. The series traces the controversial and turbulent history of American espionage starting with the Office of Strategic Services during World War II to the Central Intelligence Agency--its covert operations during the Cold War, its “excesses” of the 1960s and 1970s and culminating with the Iran-Contra scandal.

Asked whether “Secret Intelligence” was the kind of program that might once have been done by the networks but now has no place in the world of “20/20s” and “48 Hours,” Kurtis laughed: “Yes, that sums it up nicely. . . . Networks have closed up the large documentary units and opted for the magazine format. PBS is the only place you will see this.”

In a year in which “tabloid television has become dominant,” Kurtis added, a program like “Secret Intelligence” “should stand out like the Washington Monument.”

Even such a stately old dramatic PBS warhorse like “Masterpiece Theatre” brings a current twist, with “A Very British Coup,” winner of the 1988 International Emmy for best drama. “Coup,” which airs Sunday and next Monday nights, is a political thriller set in the 1990s, about an attempt to destabilize an elected British government. It features Ray McAnally as Harry Perkins, an ex-steel workingman from Sheffield who becomes prime minister.

Other dramas on PBS include a three-hour production of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” on Feb. 1 featuring Esther Rolle and Danny Glover, and in May PBS viewers can see the play, “A Walk in the Woods,” about the growing friendship between a Soviet disarmament negotiator (Robert Prosky) and his American counterpart (Sam Waterston). Both are on “American Playhouse.”

Not without a touch of glitz, PBS brings Twiggy on a “Wonderworks” production of “Young Charlie Chaplin”--she plays his mother, who goes insane--airing Feb. 11 and 18. Former Beatle Ringo Starr is a featured player on “Shining Time Station,” a new children’s television series, beginning Jan. 28. “While you’re doing your trip,” he told the PBS tour, “you learn a lot about the smaller nation (of children) that we live with.”

The late William Casey, Reagan’s embattled CIA director, gave his last TV interview on “Secret Intelligence.” He was interviewed in the early fall of 1986, according to Blaine Baggett, executive producer. However, Baggett said that Casey agreed to the interview on the condition “that we’d only talk about his OSS days. But I tried to couch the questions in such a way that I tried to relate them to today. But you have to remember (the story of) Iran-Contra had not (yet) come out.”

“In four hours of an historical perspective, you see us repeating the same mistakes,” noted Kurtis. “The intelligence is there. But getting that intelligence to the people who really can use it is where we fall down. Pearl Harbor--we had three chances to know that the attack was imminent. The Beirut barracks--we had the intelligence two days (before) that there would be an attack. Probably we can even make the argument for the PanAm (103) flight. . . .”

Such is the nature of PBS programming that it presented the kind of season where program guests seemed intertwined with actual news events.

There was William E. Colby, CIA director from 1973-1976 and who appears in the third episode of “Secret Intelligence,” being asked whether he favors assassinating Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi. No, he does not, but he would have “cheerfully helped carry the bomb into Hitler’s bunker” because that was “a wartime situation.”

Colby also indicated he would have no trouble destroying the Libyan chemical plant, “if the thing gets serious enough. You conduct such operations as you can to frustrate those (terrorist) activities.”

And does he think Ollie North is a hero? “No,” Colby replied, but “I must confess I’d rather deal with one with that kind of (enormous) drive than the ones without drive because it’s easier to hold somebody back than it is to kick them forward.”

Michael Deaver, former Reagan deputy chief of staff who is appealing his perjury conviction, showed up to promote the “Frontline” series opener, “The Real Life of Ronald Reagan,” which airs Jan. 18 and in which Deaver appears.

According to “Frontline” executive producer David Fanning, “The Real Life of Ronald Reagan” is an “unsentimental” look at the 40th President. The 90-minute program, which goes back to Reagan’s Illinois boyhood, makes much of the notion that he is the quintessential “performer.” Garry Wills, co-author of “Reagan’s America,” is the narrator.

Yet when a reporter suggested to Fanning that a lot of “Real Reagan” appeared to have a sentimental touch, Fanning grinned: “He slips through the net, doesn’t he?”

Fanning said “Frontline” is also gathering material on George Bush.

Soviet Armed Forces Gen. Gely Batenin, who was to have been on the same platform with Gen. Russell Dougherty, former commander-in-chief of the Strategic Air Command, to discuss the mammoth “War and Peace in the Nuclear Age,” was denied security clearance by the FBI. Both generals, however, appear in the series discussing nuclear missiles.

In 13 hourly segments, “War and Peace in the Nuclear Age” beginning Jan. 23 and running through mid-April, is clearly the season’s blockbuster. The WGBH production deals with four decades of history from the dawn of the nuclear age at 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945, when the first atom bomb was exploded in the New Mexico desert, all the way through glasnost , Star Wars and the Reagan-Gorbachev Intermediate Nuclear Forces agreement.

Executive producer Zvi Dor-Ner, interviewed Batenin in Moscow in December, 1987. “I liked him. He was like a character out of Chekhov,” said Dor-Ner.

Despite the denial of admittance to Batenin, Dor-Ner said there is still “a very good chance” that the program will eventually be aired in the Soviet Union. Negotiations are under way between Soviet authorities and PBS.

In other programs:

--ABC anchor Peter Jennings will host the first installment of a new PBS quarterly series on AIDS, beginning Feb. 28. Jennings was “always our first choice,” noted Renata Simone of WGBH, executive producer of the series. “He was impressed with the fact that AIDS is an opportunity to talk about, to look at in depth, a lot of issues that are covered under other public affairs series”--issues, she said, such as discrimination, illiteracy and homelessness.

--Roger Mudd, special correspondent on “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour,” hosts a five-part series on American education premiering March 27. The programs look at the educational system in relation to the nation’s economy, and contrast American and Japanese education. They also look at issues of equality in urban and rural, ghetto and suburban schools, as well as at teacher burnout.

--A 90-minute special on “The Congress” in honor of its bicentennial airs March 20. “I think it’s possible,” said producer-director and co-author Ken Burns, “to lift up the rug of history and sweep out some of the dirt that has been swept conveniently under it . . . and sift it and still at the same time not come away with a completely cynical view.”

--Fred Friendly hosts a 10-part series on “Ethics in America” probing issues of ethics and values in government, law, the military, the press and business. Panelists deal with such questions as: Should lawyers defend people whom they know to be guilty? How far can medical researchers go in their quest for a cure? What do we owe our neighbors and is it ethical to intervene in their lives? Are there limits to the public’s right to know about the private lives of presidential candidates? The series begins Jan. 31.