$2 Million Earmarked for ‘The West’ : Television: Ken Burns will develop the PBS series, scheduled to air in 1996.

Ken Burns, who produced the Public Television Service epic “The Civil War,” will receive $2 million to develop a new series about the American West, the Corp. for Public Broadcasting said Sunday.

Donald Marbury, director of the corporation’s Challenge Fund, told TV critics gathered in Marina del Rey that the series will be called “The West” and will air in the fall of 1996.

The series will explore the Westward expansion of the United States from the perspective of settlers, soldiers, native peoples, slaves and ethnic minorities, Marbury said.

Marbury and Jennifer Lawson, Public Broadcasting Service vice president for programming, fielded questions from critics who asked if the series would be politically correct, prompting Burns, who was seated in the audience, to issue a bristling reply: “The story of the West includes the story of black cattlemen, of women, of Chinese immigrant labor. Any attempt to leave them out would not be correct. At the same time, the series will not be what you have called politically correct.”

The telling of U.S. history, Burns said, has changed from the days when it was told as “the story of great white men on steeds.” But that doesn’t mean that “The West” has a political agenda, Burns said.

Also receiving funding was a miniseries called “The Prize.” Based on Daniel Yergin’s book of the same name and to be produced by public television station WGBH in Boston, the series will track “the struggle for wealth and power that has always surrounded oil,” Marbury said.

Another show, “ ‘Lectronic Comics,” an animated series based on classical literature, and “Highways to Heaven,” a six-part series about the impact of the automobile on American lives, received research and development grants of $57,000 and $20,000, respectively.

Asked whether PBS, which typically airs fictional series from Great Britain and other countries, would air comedy and drama produced in the United states, Marbury said that the Corp. for Public Broadcasting was seeking domestic projects to fund. But Lawson said that economics would likely dictate that such programs would be miniseries.

In a separate development, PBS officials said that the next debate among Democratic presidential hopefuls will be aired on public television Jan. 31 and focus on economic issues.

John Grant, PBS vice president for program and administration, said that unlike the debates produced by NBC last month, which he called “unwieldy,” the PBS debate will be sharply focused. It will feature discussions among the candidates led by Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer, hosts of public TV’s “MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour.”