PBS Details Ambitious Election Coverage

With its eye on presenting the most ambitious election-year coverage in its history, PBS on Tuesday unveiled details of its multi-pronged “Democracy Project,” which network chieftain Ervin S. Duggan promises will have aired more than 100 hours of national prime-time programming by Election Day.

Rather than focusing on the quadrennial presidential horse race and candidate debates, “Democracy Project” will train its cameras on citizens. According to PBS executive vice president John Hollar, the project is expected to cost nearly $35 million. Between $5 million and $7 million will come from the federally funded Corp. for Public Broadcasting.

Duggan, who 30 years ago, before the arrival of public television, was an aide in Lyndon Johnson’s White House, said at the national TV press tour in Pasadena that the project is about “listening to people rather than to talking heads, Washington experts, politicians. We want to listen to Americans as America decides.”

A key component is the upcoming National Issues Convention in Austin, Texas, in which 600 citizens selected from around the nation will be divided into groups of 20 to deliberate, with the help of experts and candidates, issues relating to the nation’s economy, America’s place in the world and the family.

PBS is preparing to present three hours of live coverage of citizen sessions with Republican candidates on Jan. 20. Jim Lehrer, who is to moderate the sessions, said that so far only Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) and businessman Steve Forbes have confirmed that they will attend the convention.

It will be the Democrats’ turn on Jan. 21, and they will get two hours. Lehrer said either President Clinton or Vice President Al Gore will participate.

A 90-minute wrap-up, “Report on the National Issues Convention,” is to be broadcast on Jan. 26.

On Feb. 9--the Friday evening before the Iowa caucuses--”Washington Week in Review” and its moderator, Ken Bode, will present a two-hour program on the history of the caucuses, an in-depth look at Mason City, Iowa, and its people as they prepare for the caucuses and at how the 400 days of cumulative Republican campaigning has affected the state.

The ’96 political coverage will also be featured on PBS’ online computer service and will allow local stations to apply for special matching grants to bolster their own election coverage.

As for California’s primary on March 26, Lehrer will go live on PBS at 8 p.m. after the polls close.

PBS also announced that journalist Ellen Hume, a former Washington correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal, who from 1988-1993 was executive director and senior fellow at Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Barone Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, will become executive director of “Democracy Project.” She is to join PBS Feb. 5.