Excerpted from "Beyond Limits"
by Ken Martin, Good Life Magazine August Issue

Today, Citizens for Independent Public Broadcasting (CIPB) is in the forefront of the reform movement, claiming some seventeen chapters around the country; most are on the West Coast and in the northeast. There are no chapters in Texas. Jerold "Jerry" Starr, who teaches sociology at West Virginia University in Morgantown and lives in Pittsburgh, is the group's executive director.

Starr says CIPB was initiated when he was approached by Bill Moyers and Jack Willis. Moyers is not only a respected journalist, but at the time was president of the Florence and John Schumann Foundation. Willis, a former head of public television stations in Minneapolis-St. Paul and New York City, was connected to the Open Society Institute, which is funded by the Soros Foundations. Moyers and Willis supplied the funding for CIPB to educate the public, and public officials, about the need for public broadcasting reform, Starr says. All this was the result of a growing concern for what Starr calls "media democracy," a concern that grew stronger in the wake of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which allowed far greater monopolies in media holdings.

To understand what CIPB is about, one only need recognize that its most important goal is to establish a trust fund for public broadcasting-as recommended by the original Carnegie Commission in 1967. The trust fund is an idea which has been advanced and defeated countless times since the Carnegie Commission's proposal. CIPB states the trust fund is crucially important because it would allow public broadcasting to focus on what the public needs, rather than on what corporations or the federal government will pay for.

"PBS member stations…produce somewhere between eighty-five and a hundred hours of local programming a year, that's all," Starr says. "And national programming is concentrated in just three stations, Boston, Washington, and New York, and they account for sixty percent of all national programming. Another twenty percent that is independently produced comes through those (three) stations, as presenting stations…So it's highly concentrated."

PBS Chief Operating Officer Wayne Godwin agrees with Starr, as to where the programs originate. "I think it's fair to say that…WGBH in Boston, WNET in New York, and WETA in Washington are leaders in presenting the national schedule," he says. Godwin says the strength of the production system is that national programming marries the funding from corporations and the federal government with funding from the stations and their membership base. "That allows PBS to be one of the most recognized brands as far as quality and trusted media in the country, perhaps even in the world."

Starr views it differently, saying, "One of our great concerns is that, by and large, PBS has failed to provide local programming that reflects the diversity of the community." Starr says the overarching question becomes, "'Which corporation is going to be interested in a program like this?' rather than 'What does the public really need to be educated about?'"