THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 22, 1995 TAG: 9501210145
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Interview
LENGTH: Long : 167 lines
White-haired and bespectacled, WHRO President and General Manager John Morison may look more like a school principal than a television executive, but lately he has become something of a media star. Morison can often be heard and seen over the airwaves urging public broadcasting fans to contact their representatives in the General Assembly and Congress to oppose proposed cutoffs of taxpayer dollars to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Staff writer James Schultz sat down with Morrison last week to discuss how WHRO colleagues are preparing to live with drastically pared budgets.
Q: How likely is it that federal and state funding for public broadcasting will be eliminated? What's the latest from Congress and the General Assembly?
A: It's hard to speculate about what's likely to happen. We are probably headed toward phasing out public funding for public broadcasting at both the state and federal level. I regret that, given the fact that public funding does play an important role. We leverage five, six, seven dollars for every one dollar in support we get from other sources. It's been a good private-public sector partnership.
Today, federal funding represents about 13 percent of our operation. State funding represents about 25 percent of our funding.
What would be regrettable, I think, is if the phaseout of funding at both the state and federal levels would happen at the same time. It would represent about $1,250,000 that we would lose in next year's budget. That's a 20 percent downsizing we would have to do quickly.
There's no bill on the floor yet. We don't know except from what the Speaker (of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich) has said about zeroing out the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. That seems to be very sudden, very drastic and very deep.
On the state level, the governor came along December 19th and proposed to reduce the community service grants, the general operating support grants for public television by 50 percent and the radio grants entirely - in one year. We've always had bipartisan support in the General Assembly. . . . But the direction coming in Virginia seems to parallel closely what we hear as a national agenda coming out of the Speaker of the House.
Q: If all federal and state money disappeared tomorrow and you couldn't find alternative funds, could you continue to exist? How serious is this situation?
A: Probably it's more serious on the radio side. We operate two public radio stations which receive public funding. We could probably continue to operate the classical music station from contributions from people who enjoy fine-arts programming. Between 40 and 50 percent of the budget for (the National Public Radio and news and information) station is public funding from state and federal support. The question is, can you operate a full-service public radio station in the 28th market in the nation with half of its budget disappearing overnight? That's going to be a tough question for us and for our board to wrestle with.
Q: What would you have cut to survive? What specific staff positions, outreach services, programs or equipment would be sacrificed?
A: I don't know how specific we can get into some of that because those decisions haven't been made. We haven't recovered from the last 20 percent downsizing. If you remember, we had two radio stations on 24 hours a day. Like most of the other stations in the market, having that presence is important. We cut back hours of operation, which meant staff. We cut back program acquisition budgets. We cut back some of the local programs, in particular ones we did on television that we just couldn't afford to do anymore. We downsized about 20 percent on staff. In the last four years, we've built back some of that but not near all of that capability. If we have to cut another 20 percent, it's going cut into the quick of some of the services that people take for granted.
Q: Are you planning to make up any potential shortfall from other sources, such as foundations or corporations?
A: We certainly are stepping up our fund-raising efforts to try to make a case. This spring, as we go into our big fund-raising period, March will be a big effort on television and April on radio. By that time we'll know what Congress and the General Assembly have done. I suspect that a familiar theme will be ``We're counting on you more than ever'' to the private sector. That's exactly what I think the legislative bodies will say if they cut. We heard that message back in the '80s in the Reagan administration. And the private sector did respond to a large degree.
Q: Do you think the business community is hostile to continued funding of public broadcasting?
A: I don't have any reason to believe that. We have a lot of strong support from the business community. People serve on our boards and underwrite and so forth. I think most of them are having to make choices about what they're going to invest in. Do you as a businessperson look at us as a charity or do you look at us as a marketing decision, in terms of a quid pro quo? I'd like to help you and support you and I like your programming and you have interesting demographics, but do you have the size of audience that makes it worth advertising?
Underwriting is basically a disclosure announcement. It's not an ad. There are lots of things we can't offer to a person who is looking at this as a quid pro quo. Some of the commercial guys say, ``If they take away your public funds and don't unleash you from the regulations, that isn't fair.'' If you're going to be prevented from running advertising and editorializing by the regulations, you can't compete.
Q: Critics contend that public broadcasting has a liberal, elitist slant in its news and public affairs programming. If that's the case, why should taxpayers foot the bill?
A: I think it's a bum rap, frankly. It's like labeling cable television as the Playboy Channel, or commercial television as ``Roseanne'' or whatever on-air program we least admire.
Public radio came out of the counterculture of the '60s, where a lot of issues in American society were being challenged and questioned. There was a lot less polarization of society in those days. As a result, NPR began to be a focal point for raising a number of these issues that were in the public dialogue and treating them in some depth.
The thing I hear from people a lot of times is that NPR news focuses so much on liberal issues. I'm not sure I know what a ``liberal issue'' is. If we're going to talk about AIDS, it exists and deserves to be treated and with hopefully some intelligence and integrity. There are various points of view on issues like AIDS and race.
I don't think they are liberal issues as much as they are uncomfortable issues. Institutions are wrestling with the polarization of society and this kind of lack of civility over issues. Public broadcasting is somewhere in the middle, where most people are. It's the issue of stoning the messenger.
Q: Has public broadcasting outlived its usefulness? You have The Discovery Channel and The Learning Channel, Nickelodeon, Arts & Entertainment and Bravo, to name just a few. Don't all these for-profit cable outlets eat into public broadcasting's franchise?
A: They have captured, tapped into and even bought off some of our best products and things we have pioneered. I don't see them replacing public broadcasting at all.
The strength of public broadcasting is that we are a local resource. We don't have a lot of gurus in programming at network headquarters someplace who victimize us by their decisions and whims. People know who we are, they interact with us and they are not hesitant about contacting us.
We have a range of activities that will never be provided by these distant cable program services. Public television's is a much bigger audience every night of the week than any of these cable services. I don't think any of them are going to deal with race relations in Hampton Roads or cover the Virginia General Assembly in depth.
Q: As a public television and radio station, how exactly are you contributing economically or in other ways to the community at large?
A: We're an employer, a taxpayer. We buy goods and services in the community. We bring $800,000 a year in federal appropriations to Virginia. We bring in funding from other grants. We have a half-million dollars from the feds for the new transmitter here that didn't have to come out of local pockets.
We bring back $100,000 a year in royalty income from products that we've developed, mostly educational materials in national distribution. We're one of the top five producers of instructional video material for schools across America.
We do all the satellite distribution for Old Dominion University for their Teletechnet project. We feed their off-campus sites by microwave in Hampton, Virginia Beach and Portsmouth. We lease space on towers we own all over the area to commercial enterprises for wireless cable/cellular telephone broadcast. We have a contract with the American Critical Care Association based in San Diego. They come here to produce their four or five national teleconferences a year. We're going to do a teleconference for NASA in the spring on the space station.
These are core capacities that have been developed that we're beginning to broaden and diversify. We are generating more income from marketing these core capacities than we get from federal funding. It's almost as much as we get from the state. It's twice what it was three years ago.
One of the issues that we'll have to look at is to form a for-profit subsidiary that would help to generate income to supplant the lost public dollars or free up some cash flow. That may very well be in our future. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
BETH BERGMAN/Staff
KEYWORDS: PUBLIC TELEVISION GOVERNMENT FUNDING
INTERVIEW by CNB