CNN Gets $3.5 Million From Foundation : Television: After withdrawing a grant to PBS, the John and Mary Markle Foundation is giving money to help the cable network finance its 1992 election coverage.

Four months after withdrawing a planned grant to PBS for covering the presidential campaign next year, the nonprofit John and Mary R. Markle Foundation has given $3.5 million to Cable News Network for its election coverage.

Executives of the foundation, which has studied the effect of campaign coverage on the political process, said that they were giving the money to CNN to help remedy what a recent Markle-funded study on media and the electorate called “the dangerous disconnect between voters and their own electoral process.”

CNN will use the money to augment what it already had been planning to do with a variety of special programs, ranging from analyses of campaign strategies to live, call-in forums and documentary-style reports featuring ordinary citizens discussing the political issues that they consider important.

Earlier this year the Markle Foundation had been planning to give $5 million to PBS to create an ambitious slate of citizen-centered programs for the 1992 campaign. Called “The Voters’ Channel” and then “The Election Project,” the PBS plan was the result of nearly two years of study by Markle, PBS and other participants and had been heralded last year at the annual meeting of PBS affiliates.

PBS recently announced its own slate of campaign programming, including a new series by Bill Moyers and a joint venture between NBC News and PBS’ “MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” to cover the presidential nominating conventions. But “The Election Project” is apparently dead, now that the Markle money has gone instead to CNN. (As a profit-making entity, CNN will receive the Markle money through a contract for its services, not through a grant, the way foundations and corporations donate to non-commercial PBS.)

“It was a disappointing experience,” Lloyd Morrisett, president of the Markle Foundation, said this week of the PBS project. “After a year-and-a-half’s work, we found when we presented our plan to PBS in June that that there still didn’t seem to be an agreed-upon programming plan. There was no policy commitment from PBS. They were sitting back as judges of our proposals, not part of them. PBS has organizational problems; it’s hard to get all the fiefdoms of 350 stations together to do something. And, finally, we found ourselves without sufficient funds for the programming we wanted to do.”

Morrisett said that, in its final presentation, “The Election Project” was budgeted at $12.7 million, with the foundation contributing $5 million, PBS and the Corp. for Public Broadcasting contributing a total of $3 million, and the rest to be raised from other sources.

Jennifer Lawson, executive vice president in charge of programming at PBS, said that the network found that it simply could not raise the necessary funds.

“The experience was disappointing for us all,” Lawson said. “We felt that a viable project might be designed for $8 million, and we were surprised to find that the project was satisfactory to Markle only if it had the elements they proposed (for $12.7 million).”

Although many PBS stations endorsed “The Election Project” and even considered trying to raise money for the project independently last summer, some had objected to one controversial proposal in the project: awarding free airtime on PBS to political candidates. The notion was advanced as a way to let candidates be seen speaking on their own, as opposed to in newscast “sound bites” or in TV commercials, but some station managers were concerned about simply turning over the time.

CNN President Tom Johnson said that former President Jimmy Carter, acting as an intermediary for the Markle Foundation, first approached him about a possible venture in July. Carter shared the foundation’s concern about the state of campaigns and declining voter participation, he said.

“We will discuss what we are going to do with them, but CNN will maintain absolute editorial control over our election programming,” Johnson said.

Tom Hannon, political director for CNN, said that much of the Markle-related programming will air within regular CNN programming under the umbrella title of “Democracy in America.”

PBS is using the $3 million that it planned to devote to “The Election Project” to fund its scaled-down coverage, Lawson said.