Ervin Duggan Selected to Head PBS : Television: The FCC commissioner becomes the president of the Public Broadcasting Service at a crucial point in its 23-year history.

Following a six-month international search for a new leader, the board of directors of the Public Broadcasting Service on Wednesday selected Federal Communications Commissioner Ervin S. Duggan to become president of the non-commercial television network.

Duggan, 54, becomes the fourth president of PBS, which employs about 350 people and has an operating budget of $161 million for fiscal 1994. He replaces Bruce Christensen, who resigned in May to assume an academic post at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.

Duggan joins the network at a critical point in its 23-year history. PBS officials are contemplating aggressive measures to curtail a decline in corporate contributions and to keep the burgeoning cable industry from luring viewers away from such public-television staples as “Sesame Street” and “Masterpiece Theatre.”

At a news conference where Duggan gave remarks clutching one of PBS’ most recognizable symbols--a stuffed toy replica of the “Sesame Street” character Big Bird--the Washington communications veteran said he believes the public-television network can meet its financial and technical challenges.

“Public broadcasting will need to embrace and master the future,” Duggan said. But he added that he considered PBS “one of the leading brand names in American culture. I’m proud to join an institution that has built such a franchise.”

To protect its franchise, PBS officials are meeting here today and Friday to consider a variety of options, ranging from trimming the 350-station network to transforming PBS into a high-tech distribution service, able to send as many as 60 channels of video via a new satellite to be launched this month.

Duggan plans to attend today’s meeting, but in a brief interview prior to the news conference he downplayed speculation that public television would have to downsize to compete effectively in the coming 500-channel television landscape.

“All this talk about revolution and drastic restructuring is premature, to say the least,” Duggan said. “I don’t think you fit an institution for the future by destroying its base. You reshape and renew an institution by building on the base. It will be my strategy to build on the base rather than to chip away at the base.

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“There is a myth in the air that the broadcasting delivery system is doomed,” he continued. “Nobody dies. You change and adapt. Hollywood was supposed to die when television was invented--and the movie companies are making more money than ever before. . . . Radio was supposed to die when television came about; what we found out is that it adapted to a new kind of medium. It has been forced to change; it has not become extinct. So it’s silly to think the broadcasting delivery system which efficiently serves everybody simultaneously will become irrelevant.”

Duggan, who was involved in drafting the original public broadcasting act while serving as an assistant to President Lyndon Johnson in the mid-1960s, brings substantial experience to the PBS job.

He was a special assistant to Senators Lloyd Bentsen of Texas and Adlai E. Stevenson III of Illinois and worked at the State Department and the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in the 1970s. He also was a reporter for the Washington Post and served as national editor of the Washingtonian magazine before coming to the FCC.

For much of the past year, Duggan has also served on a blue-ribbon task force examining the future of public television.

Duggan’s name for some time had been on the short list of a PBS search committee. In recent months at the FCC, he had excused himself from voting on matters affecting public television.

TV journalist Bill Moyers and Sharon Percy Rockefeller, president of public-television station WETA, reportedly turned down offers from the PBS search committee. The committee reportedly also considered former TV newsman Marvin Kalb, PBS executives Jennifer Lawson and Robert G. Ottenhoff, and even NBC anchor Tom Brokaw.

In recent days some speculated that Duggan himself, unhappy with the annual $148,000 salary cap on the PBS presidency, was seeking another post that would pay more.

Duggan will join PBS Feb. 1. His term on the FCC was to expire in June. He is a Democrat appointed to the FCC by President Bush in 1990--a fact that gives him “a certain credibility” among Republicans on Capitol Hill, he noted. He also is friendly with President and Mrs. Clinton.

William H. Kobin, president of KCET-TV Channel 28 in Los Angeles, called Duggan’s appointment “an excellent choice. At the FCC, he was a very forceful and articulate champion of public television and has stressed in speeches and other statements public television’s importance as a major cultural and educational institution.”

Shiver reported from Washington, Michaelson from Los Angeles.