The vanishing vision

by James Day (journalist)

In this fascinating, first-ever history of public television, James Day, a founder of San Francisco's KQED and a past president of New York's WNET, offers an insider's account of its topsy-turvy, forty-year odyssey. Taking the reader from public TV's inauspicious roots in the 1950s to its strong - and fiercely debated - presence in contemporary culture, Day chronicles the evolution of public television from the nadir of Nixon's efforts to control or kill it to the triumph of the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour as television's first hour-long, prime-time news show. Along the way, Day identifies the particular forcespolitical and economic - that have shaped public television. The result, in his view, is a Byzantine bureaucracy kept on a leash by an untrusting Congress, with a fragmented leadership that lacks a clearly defined mission in today's multimedia environment. Public television's "democratic" structure of three-hundred-plus stations stifles boldness and innovation while absorbing money n