The Foundation's twenty-year support for public broadcasting passed the $200 million mark in 1971. The objective has been to help build a first-rate public broadcasting service as an independent source of information, entertainment, and discussion reflecting the variety of interests and opinion in the United States.

Although the Foundation continues to be the major single source of private aid to non-commercial broadcasting, it works closely with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which is now the central element in the field. CPB, established under the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act, was funded by Congress at $23 million in fiscal 1971, far below the level recommended by the 1966 Carnegie Commission Report on Educational Television. Other elements of this system are public television stations, including major production centers (in New York, Boston, Washington, Los Angeles, and San Francisco), and a national distribution system called the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which is a membership corporation of public television stations. PBS schedules and distributes programs produced by station-based production centers. The centers are funded by CPB and by the Foundation.

The Foundation also continued this year to support local news and community affairs programming, research on the public television audience, and the study of such telecommunications issues as the implications of cable television.

PROGRAMMING

The central challenge in public broadcasting is to develop national programming that is diversified, balanced, and professionally produced. The production centers and the national distribution system, PBS, work together toward this goal.

Prior to the 1971 season, the Public Broadcasting Service invited individual production centers to submit a list of program ideas. After the choice of programs actually to be produced was agreed upon by PBS and production center staffs, PBS arranged a national schedule and submitted it to funding agencies, principally CPB and the Foundation, which provided funds to the centers to produce the programs. This year a total of twenty-two organizations—twenty-one stations and the Southern Educational Communications Association—provided programming for public television.

Foundation support for the Educational Broadcasting Corporation in New York, which operates the largest national production center, included $8 million this year, principally for national programming; the center also received $4 million from CPB. The New York center provides PBS with 156 hours of new programming a year, an average of three hours a week, including at least fifteen hours of special-events programs and five hours of children's programming. The Children's Television Workshop, producers of "Sesame Street," continued to receive support through the Foundation's Office of Public Education (see page 45).

The Foundation made grants totaling some $1.7 million to other station-based production centers, in Boston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. These funds were matched by $2.7 million from CPB. Among the programs produced were Boston's "Evening at Pops," with Arthur Fiedler, and "The Advocates," a weekly courtroom-style debate of both sides of a controversial issue. New programs included "Boboquivari," a musical series.

The Foundation also granted $400,000 for the second season of plays produced by Hollywood Television Theatre of KCET, Los Angeles, and $520,000 to enable NET Opera to continue for a second year. A $79,605 grant to the Greater Washington Educational Television Association (WETA) supported the interview series, "Thirty Minutes With...," conducted by Elizabeth Drew, columnist and political affairs analyst.

Foundation support for local news and public affairs programming focuses on the "Newsroom" format, which originated in San Francisco during a newspaper strike in 1968 and was later adapted by public television stations in Dallas, Pittsburgh, and Washington, D.C. The nightly programs feature critical analysis of events by experienced