| Notes |
The Boston philanthropist Ralph Lowell, considered the founding father of WGBH, initially proposed the idea for a commission in 1964 and was instrumental in organizing it. It was only three years after Federal Communications Commission chairman Newt Minow had given his famous “vast wasteland” speech, which summed up some of the anxiety surrounding the still relatively new medium:
When television is good, nothing — not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers — nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite each of you to sit down in front of your own television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.
The commission — which included then-current or former presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Cal Tech; business and union leaders; and artists such as the author Ralph Ellison and concert pianist Rudolf Serkin — met for its first meetings on December 17, 1965, and it began to grapple with how it could grow a non-commercial television system that until then was mostly an exchange of pre-recorded educational programming.
Lowell — of the Boston Brahmin Lowells — addressed that first meeting of the Carnegie Commission and starkly described what confronted the assembled group.
“We have in this country right now, two systems for using television,” Lowell said. “One the commercial, is huge, powerful, enormously well financed. It has vast technical capacity, superb equipment, endless energy. The other, the educational is relatively puny, ineffectual, and financially undernourished. It is all too often lacking in people, in leadership and in drive.” |