‘South Africa Now’ Sends Out SOS for Funds : Television: The financially strapped show, which has just overcome KCET’s threat to cancel it amid allegations of bias, asks supporters for help.

“South Africa Now” may have won its battle to remain on the air at KCET Channel 28, but now the weekly newsmagazine faces a life-threatening struggle of a different sort.

The 2 1/2-year-old program, which airs Sundays at 9 a.m. on KCET, is facing a financial crisis so acute that the producers have begun sending letters to viewers asking for contributions.

The program nearly lost its spot in the KCET lineup when station executives announced two weeks ago that they were planning to drop it because they believed it to be biased in favor of the African National Congress. After protests from community groups and an appeal from public-television station WNET in New York, the station agreed Friday to reinstate the program for at least six weeks.

“South Africa Now” producers have sent letters to organizations and individuals who supported the program during its tussle with KCET asking point-blank for financial aid, even noting that such contributions would be tax deductible.

“We barely have the funding in place for the next 13 weeks,” producers Danny Schechter and Rory O’Connor wrote. “After that we will be forced off the air, not by political extremists or conservative programmers, but because of our inability to find sustaining support from foundations and corporations.”

Schechter, in a telephone interview from his office in New York, said that it costs about $20,000 per week to produce “South Africa Now,” not counting an additional $5,000 in studio costs and services that are provided by supporters within the TV industry.

That’s a shoestring budget by television standards, but he said that it is difficult to raise even that much for a program that is often skeptical of the U.S. and the South African governments and that has questioned the activities of major corporations with regard to South Africa.

“We are going now on grants we have received from the Rockefeller and Ford foundations,” Schechter said. “That money is going to run out.”

“We try to help them as much as we can, but we have no money here,” said Fred Noriega, head of public-affairs programming for public-station WNET, which sponsors “South Africa Now” within the Public Broadcasting Service. “They are struggling for survival.”

Noriega said that keeping “South Africa Now” in production was of major importance to WNET, where programmers view it as one of the few regular sources of information about not only South Africa, but also the entire southern part of the African continent.

In a telephone interview, Noriega also disputed statements by executives at KCET that “South Africa Now” had been biased and then was changed in an apparent attempt to accommodate the Los Angeles station’s concerns. KCET station manager Stephen Kulczycki and president William Kobin said last week that they were returning “South Africa Now” to the Sunday morning lineup because the program that aired last Sunday had contained “substantive changes” that rendered it fair and balanced.

KCET had also said Friday that it was reversing its position because WNET, as the presenting station, had promised to begin screening “South Africa Now” every week to make sure it was not biased. Noriega said that he had always screened the program and that he never felt it was biased.

“My reputation for being a straight-shooting journalist is clean as a whistle, and even before I came (to WNET), I viewed that broadcast as an opportunity for me to get information from a region that we don’t get a lot of reporting on,’ Noriega said.

Schechter said that the program that KCET believed was changed had been in the works long before the station management voiced its complaints. By the time Kulczycki and Kobin viewed it on the satellite feed Friday, Schechter said, it had already aired twice in New York.

Kobin said Wednesday that it didn’t matter whether the producers acted as a direct response to KCET’s concern. “The latest program was very different from earlier programs in its presentation of differing views on the issues involved in the stories covered,” he said. “This, and the written communication and telephone calls with WNET, were taken as an indication that our concerns are being addressed. This is not a quarrel with WNET. Our goal is simply the production and broadcasting of a quality series. We hope that we’re on the right course to achieving that.”