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This made a total of $4 million of which the Federal share was $2.5 million. In addition, Atlantic-Richfield has contributed $2.5 million for this project. I think all of those who provided funds thought of it as a pioneering development in America, serving simultaneously the humanities and American television, by illustrating American culture during the bicentennial year. This had never been tried, and seemed urgently desirable.

We understand from WNET in New York that they have indeed experienced more success-substantively and technically-with that project than was anticipated. Now, in terms of dollars, we ascertained very carefully that funds were indeed spent for purposes for which the grant was made. And we ascertained that the completion of the project will occur on schedule. So while WNET is still experimenting and has spent more dollars than anticipated 2 years ago when it started the project, it has not cost the taxpayers any further dollars nor will it. It is an institutional problem rather than a grant problem. Senator PELL. Well, whose responsibility is the oversight?

Mr. BARCROFT. Essentially, the production costs, as we understand it, are considerably higher than the budget projected 2 years agoreflecting inflation and other factors, and the fact that no American public broadcast organization has the experience of mounting a program of this complexity, which tries to deal with 150 years of history. This entails changes in sets, costuming, and actors. WNET underestimated how difficult this task was going to be, but I do not think it is correct to say WNET will not be able to produce it.

Senator PELL. Who will pay the overrun in the end? The taxpayers will probably pay, but through whom?

Mr. BARCROFT. No, they won't. As I understand WNET, the taxpayers investment made 2 years ago, $2.5 million that I mentioned, is the obligation and the only investment which the public will make in this project. WNET has no intention of seeking further funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Senator PELL. How will they pay that bill?

Mr. BARCROFT. I think that WNET had estimated that the cost of this project would be $5.2 million and, as often is the case, they had estimated that they would be able to use their overhead expensesdollars which they sought from Atlantic-Richfield and from the Endownment and from Mellon-to fund other kinds of programs. What they are going to have to do is use those overhead expenses on the Adams project rather than on the other projects where they hoped to allocate them. So the institution we understand is going to absorb this additional cost.

Senator PELL. I would ask at this point that the article from the New York Times be inserted in the record. I have some more questions, but will defer at this time to the chairman from the House side and will come back to my questions later.

[The newspaper article follows:]

RIDING OUT THE STORM AT CHANNEL 13 WITH JAY ISELIN

(By Judith Hennessee, contributing editor at [More] magazine)

Channel 13 (WNET) is in a state of turmoil. Memos are flying around the offices of New York City's public television station. Employees are wondering if and when they're going to be fired. The staff is meeting with management;

management is meeting with the board of trustees; the executive committee of the board is meeting.

"Adams Chronicles," a series of 13 hour-long episodes due to start Jan. 20 which will dramatize the lives of four generations of the Adamses and their impact on American history.

'BEHIND THE LINES' AND 'ROUND TABLE' ARE OFF THE AIR, THE 51ST STATE' IS STUNNED AND MEMOS ARE FLYING

The impact of the Adamses on Channel 13's public-affairs programing has been devastating. Because of the budget crisis, two shows-"Behind the Lines" (press analysis) and "Round Table" (interviews with cultural figures)-have been knocked off the air. The growth of at least two others-"The 51st State" (local news analysis) and "The Medicine Show" (health information)-has been stunned. The station's entire staff of local film editors and camera crews has been added to the unemployment rolls.

At the eye of this storm, which turns out to be revealing of important changes at Channel 13, sits John Jay Iselin, the cool, unflappable, 41-year-old president of WNET, explaining.

Iselin has the boyish, optimistic air of one for whom things have never seriously gone wrong. A descendant of John Jay, the first chief justice of the United States, Iselin is the properly educated scion of Southern textile money, product of St. Mark's and Harvard (class of '56), recipient of a Cambridge B.A., and M.A. in law and a Ph. D. in political science from Harvard. Short, wiry, with big, brown saucer eyes, he looks like a leprechaun and talks like a foundation proposal.

"Obviously, I'm responsible for what's happening here," he says. "It's my obligation to see that a project is well administered once it has taken off. We're disappointed in the procedures we set up to manage the project. We had a breakdown in procedures."

"The Adams Chronicles," a De Mille-type extravaganza produced at studios on 54th Street and 10th Avenue-which now resemble the back lot of MGMwas plagued by strikes, delays, extreme overtime pay and difficult union negotiations. But the budget overrun became as great as it did, and had such serious consequences, because WNET's administrators failed to pay attention; they just did not know what was happening until the damage had become enormous. The remedy now being applied is a kind of middle-management shuffle ("like blaming sergeants for Waterloo," says one staff aide). The production unit is being transferred from the operations department to the finance department. "In the future," says WNET's treasurer, George Marketos, "we'll have a two-man team on every project, a production manager and a production accountant. This may not prevent an overrun, but it will tell us if we are incurring one."

Attributing the loss to "a breakdown in procedures" has evidently satisfied the station's board of trustees, to whom Iselin accounts.

"We had a full review of the problem," a trustee says, "and I can assure you it won't happen again." Perhaps not-yet the event is symptomatic. It reveals both Iselin's weakness as an administrator and the strengths he has demonstrated since arriving at Channel 13 four years ago, which may, in fact, have ensured the station's survival during a critical period.

When the Ford Foundationed winding down its support for public television a few years ago, the expectation was that the Federal Government would make up the difference. A Nixon veto ended that fantasy, and just as it looked as if Channel 13 was ready for the welfare heap, the board of trustees brought in Iselin.

His chief virtue, it soon became apparent, was his adeptness at playing the corporation-foundation game as it is waged along the New York-Washington axis, WNET's lifeline. Under Iselin's stewardship, financial support began to flow from four sources-Federal and state government, foundations, corporations and viewers. Tapping the last two turned out to be the new president's specialty. Iselin himself went on the air urging viewers to become members, and he organized promotional schemes such as the televised auction last spring that attracted wide attention and earned $500.000. Viewer support now covers about 25 percent of the station's $32 million annual budget (up by about $10 million from last year). Some 250.000 members of Channel 13, a non-club the benefits of which are entirely psychological, send in an average of $21 a year for something they can get free by just switching on their sets.

Iselin also understood that corporations with "a public relation problem" were potential sponsors of public television programming; accordingly, he paid numer

ous visits to those that might be feeling a little guilty about their latest profit statements and often as not came away with an underwriting contract in his pocket.

This increased dependence on viewers and corporate support changed the direc⚫ tion of the station's programming. The loss of Ford Foundation block funding, which had enabled WNET to experiment with controversial public affairs shows, meant that each program now had to be underwritten separately-and tough investigative programs were predictably the first to be dropped. Corporations that fell all over themselves to bestow their largesse on such elegant, popular and uncontroversial efforts as "Upstairs, Downstairs" (Mobil) or "Civilization" (Exxon), shied away from hard-hitting documentaries. In brief, Chanel 13 soon found itself in a position analogous to that of commercial television stations, with the sponsor exercising a considerable degree of control over what gets on the air.

"We used to do what the networks wouldn't do," a staff producer says, "—"The Poor and Banking,' and 'Your Money's Worth,' real muckrakers. Since we lost the Ford money, controversial scripts, plays, concepts for series are rejected. Public television is now a buyable commodity. When Channel 13 went to Chase Manhattan for money, Chase asked if we were planning to do any more shows on banking and the poor. Channel 13 said 'no'." Before it decided to fund a show on unemployment, Bankers Trust let it be known it would not care to see the socialist Michael Harrington on the screen. Lack of corporate enthusiasm has prevented Bill Moyers, the station's resident liberal, from doing shows on industrial pollution and on the influence of the automobile in American society.

In response to such criticism, Iselin cites examples of Chanel 13's having stood up to outside pressure. "We did "The World's Worst Air Crash' [about the crash of a DC-10 outside of Paris]. It has not endeared us to the airlines, as you can imagine. Fred Wiseman did the primate show [which raised questions about cruelty and the value of animal research at the Yerkes Primate Research Center in Atlanta]. Yerkes is at the center of the establishment. It was unforgivable to go in there. We have a new series of contracts with Fred. He's working on the influence of institutions on people."

Iselin's critics point out that the DC-10 show was an acquisition, not originating at the station, and that one Fred Wiseman documentary is not sufficient. "There's enough public money now for us to be more aggressive," an associate says. "Jay is very conservative. He deserves credit for what he's done he ensured Channel 13's survival. But part of the cost was that we had to step back. We haven't done anything controversial in two years. The amount of prior restraint within the station is incredible."

WILL THE MONEY THAT ISELIN HAS PROVED SO SUCCESSFUL AT RAISING
BRING BETTER OR SIMPLY BIGGER PROGRAMMING?

There's special anger around WNET at the sacrifice of local shows to shore up "The Adams Chronicles." "The long-range commitment to public affairs seems to be dwindling," says a producer. "If we hadn't already shot most of "The 51st State,' it too might have been canceled. We're frozen in amber. Anything else we do will be in-studio."

Instead, Channel 13's nightly news presence is Robert MacNeil. His show is budgeted at $1.4 million, his salary about $70,000. “Does he fill local needs?" asks this same producer. "No," he answers. "National issues are MacNeil's focus." The death of local programs is one of the chief criticisms of the Iselin stewardship. The old NET did vital, exciting shows such as "Free Time" and "The Great American Dream Machine." Since the advent of Iselin viewers have come to identify the station with its classy imports such as "Upstairs, Downstairs" and "Jennie" (most of which were brought in by Robert Kotlowitz, vice president of programming and Iselin's first lieutenant). WNET has done nothing in depth on the city's fiscal crisis.

There is not likely to be any change in Channel 13's approach as long as the station's management-Iselin and his old-boy-fraternity board of trusteesremain all of a piece. George Piercy, a senior vice president of Exxon, is a trustee. Two members of the board, Donald H. Elliott and chairman Ethan Allen Hitchcock, belong to the same chic law firm as John Lindsay. It is understandable that they would warm to a series devoted to the Adams family. The Adamses were their kind of people.

Iselin nods politely to charges that the WASP-oriented Anglophiliac programming suggests that WNET is an extension of the playing fields of Harvard. "You

do inevitably tend to produce or write for yourself or your view of the typical viewer. Our demographics tend to be on two ends of the scale-better educated viewers and a disproportion of minority viewers. We've done a lot of minority programming of one kind or another. The area we have to learn how to approach is the large working middle class in this country."

A proposed series of profiles on "Main Street America, 1975," an examination of neighborhood life, may fill that gap-if it ever gets made. The station's recent series on social security was an effort to bring information to, in Iselin's words, "people who are somewhat disadvantaged, who do not have the luxury of being divorced from government help." Now running is a feminist series, "Woman Alive!"

Speaking of the difficulty of getting funding for "Woman Alive!" Iselin says, "The companies were scared to death of it. You have to appreciate what it means for a company's internal management policies to fund a series like 'Woman Alive! We ran into too many situations where a company had no board member who was a woman. 'Come back in a couple of years,' they said. 'How can we take a leadership position?'"

There are those within the station who think it is up to Iselin to take more of a leadership in programming-although others are grateful that he does not. "If he trusts you, he lets you do whatever you want," a producer says. "We took on Stanley Steingut and the nursing homes at a time when we were going hat in hand to the state for extra money. Jay said, "It's up to you.' We did gavel-togavel coverage."

"Jay is a print man," another associate observes. "He has no philosophy of television. He doesn't understand it. Someone who understood it would have had an instinct about "The Adams Chronicles.'" "It never occurred to me that this should not be an editorial operation," counters Iselin, who used to be nationalaffairs editor at Newsweek magazine and later executive editor at Harper and Row. "The techniques are different in electronic journalism, but the evaluation of ideas, the ability to communicate effectively and clearly seems to me to need the same sort of editorial approach one has in the supposedly different world of print."

While innovative programming at Channel 13 may be getting skimpier, the station's administrative staff keeps growing. Seven and a half floors of the Henry Hudson Hotel are being refurbished at a cost of $10 million, and Iselin wants still more staff. He already has an unprecedented number of people doing fund raising ("We couldn't have any projects to begin with unless we had the people to find the funders to put up the money.") His critics complain that most of the money allocated to overhead goes for administration, not programming, and that accounting procedures in public television often conceal more than they reveal.

The great question for the future is whether the money that Iselin has proved so successful at raising will bring better or simply bigger programming. Will it merely result in a bland accommodation to the interests of corporate supporters, an increased serving up of popular, noncontroversial shows imported from Britain, more big-budget extravaganzas like "The Adams Chronicles" and less serious coverage of public affairs?

Jay Iselin is hoping for the best: "If you try to do first-class work, a viewing audience will recognize it and respond to it. The more points we touch, the more constituents we have, the better we will be able to turn down business if it's not suitable. It will take time before the system iself will come around. Public affairs in general is an area where we should not expect corporate underwriting. The public should feel it's subscribing to The Times.”

He and public television evidently have quite a way to go.

Representative BRADEMAS. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Again, Dr. Berman, it is good to see you and your associates here. I have one question following some of the questions of Senator Pell with respect to the State Humanities Committee.

Just how are the members of the committees chosen and what measures have been made to assure accountability for the expenditure of public funds? I make this latter point of course because the members of the State humanities committees, at least as I understand it, are not elected and not appointed by elected public officials.

I have a couple of follow-up questions on that.

But maybe you can comment first on these.
Dr. BERMAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

If I may, on the representation issue, right now all 50 State operating committees have autonomous responsibility to make their membership representative of their State. Typically members have staggered terms, 3 or 4 years, so that one-third or one-fourth of the committee changes every year. The committee makes elaborate efforts to consult broadly in that State. Take for example Oklahoma. In advance of adding any members, this committee receives recommendations from over 5,000 people in the State, including leadership of every State agency, and every State organization, as well as other important groups. It is well recognized that they have the obligation to maintain that kind of contact and to maintain a diversified representation of viewpoints existing in that State.

We try to emphasize representation from community groups, labor, businesses, minorities. If the State is agricultural, then we urge inclusion of leaders of agricultural organizations. And finally scholars in the humanities are naturally to be involved.

If I may speak to the notion of accountability: The State committees should have a certain amount of freedom, balanced by accountability. Our policy essentially is that there be representatives from State historical societies, libraries, State colleges, community colleges, and other municipal resources-so that the membership of the committees have expertise and a kind of unseen linkage to the very political, institutional, and cultural forces in the State of which you have made us so mindful.

In addition, these institutions have the resources that the Statebased committees must use-libraries, historical, and archives.

There are, so far as we can determine, in our State-based committees over 100 minority members and over 200 women. There are union representatives, attorneys, judges, physicians, dentists, and various civic leaders-all serve on these committees.

Now, the accountability, I think, has to be proved in the sense that. for a State to get renewed funding, a good plan and a good evaluation has to be provided. How is this done? Each year the committee in each State must submit to NEH evidence of a broad and balanced membership; evidence of its responsibility to State and local conditions.

Each committee has bylaws governing membership rotation.

Now we come to the important thing about the actual utilization of the money. Each committee must make public announcement of its program and its grants. Each committee holds a statewide evaluation. conference at the conclusion of its year's activity. And most important of all, each committee, like any other grantee in the United States-I should say like any other applicant in the United Stateshas to put in an endowment application for funds; at that point the past and proposed activities are judged by panels and voted on by the National Council on the Humanities. In other words, all grants depend entirely on the application; all applications are reviewed exactly the same rigorous way by the same machinery as everything else that the endowment does.

Representative BRADEMAS. I might say that as for my own State of Indiana, I know very little of the work of the humanities committee

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