PBS Vows to Take Offensive Against Critics : Television: Meeting in San Francisco, PBS officials call for better relationships with politicians on both the local and national levels.

When activists on the far right of the political spectrum shifted their attention to public broadcasting about two years ago, officials at PBS and its member stations didn’t see it coming.

Now, as their annual convention comes to a close here and after a bruising fight in the U.S. Senate over whether public broadcasting is too liberal, most vow that next time--and they believe there will be one--they will be prepared.

“The inoculation for the disease has to come well before the infection,” said PBS President Bruce Christensen, speaking at a day-long open forum Tuesday about the public system’s recent problems.

Again and again throughout the day--as well as in other sessions and private conversations during this weeklong meeting--producers, station officials and national leaders said that in the future, they must be better prepared to answer their critics, and must have better relationships with politicians on both the local and national levels.

Many suggested that stations use their own airwaves for promotional spots touting the station’s activities in the community and answering criticisms with facts about programming. Officials discussed plans for similar on-air promotions on the national level.

“We need to get out of this old habit of laying the rock on our shoulders and reacting,” said Jeff Clarke, chief executive officer and general manager of KUHT-TV in Houston, Tex. “It’s now time to take the offensive.”

A group based in San Francisco suggested that by electing, rather than appointing, their boards of directors, stations could build better community support and defend themselves against charges that they were not properly representing viewers.

Henry Kroll, a board member at KQED-TV here, said that his board and those of public-television stations throughout Alaska were elected by station subscribers.

Public broadcasting--never a favorite of some conservatives, who have opposed it since its inception, in part because of its reliance on government support--has been on the defensive ever since Los Angeles-based media critic David Horowitz took credit for pushing KCET-TV Channel 28 in L.A. to take the program “South Africa Now” off the air. Horowitz, a leftist-turned-rightist whose work is funded in part by the conservative Olin and Bradley foundations, blanketed the press and local and national politicians with information purporting to show that the system was too left-wing.

Horowitz, who now has a program offering conservative critiques of culture on Santa Monica public-radio station KCRW-FM (89.9), was joined in his efforts by Laurence Jarvik, another former extreme leftist who is now a scholar at the conservative Heritage Foundation working on a project designed to find a way to force the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to become a private company.

Last fall, conservative Republicans led by Sen. Robert Dole took up the cry. Dole, who has been opposed to public broadcasting since its inception and voted against the original public broadcasting act in 1967, and a handful of conservative senators held up funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for seven months. The funding finally passed June 2--with amendments against indecency and bias attached.

“We need to do some work on how we are perceived in some quarters,” said Sheila Tate, a conservative and former press secretary to then-First Lady Nancy Reagan who is chairman of the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. “If we don’t nurture our own image--burnish our perception--others will create a distorted reality under which we will not thrive.”

Tate, who called Dole’s actions “a mystery,” said that she and Richard Carlson, a Southern California conservative who is scheduled to become president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in August, planned to lobby intensively in Washington and around the country in an attempt to stave off future confrontations.

Related to the political questions raised this last year were what delegates to the convention euphemistically called “lifestyle” programming, mostly referring to programs about gays and lesbians. Dole and religious conservatives such as the Rev. Donald Wildmon of the American Family Assn. have been highly critical of such programs.

So-called lifestyle programming was a matter of much discussion at the convention, where many station managers begged producers to treat such issues more discreetly and to keep out street language and nudity.

“It’s not the issues at all,” said James Heck, general manager of WUSF-TV and WSFP-TV in Tampa, Fla. “It’s a question of civility.”

Producers, Heck said, were being “exploitive and irresponsible” in their presentation and use of language.

That view was contested by producers, who said that filmmakers might want to present a story more dramatically and provocatively than would be allowed by stricter rules about what can be shown.

Many station managers said that they wanted their right to refuse to air programs that might offend viewers in their local markets to be better supported by PBS. Again and again, producers of controversial programs were accused of secretly lobbying the press to force local stations to carry their shows.

“It’s not good citizenship” to speak to the press about a local station’s decision not to air a program, chided PBS president Christensen. Saying such discussion undermined the integrity of local stations, Christensen called for “discipline” of producers who regularly spoke to the press about such matters.