Who Watches Public Television?

Abstract

H o m e r it has been measured, the projik of the audience for public TV has t u d out to be a well-educated, afluent minority.One of the difficulties in writing about the audience for public television is that it is so small.' Another difficulty is due to the fact that public television is a decentralized cluster of local stations which do not necessarily share programming philosophies. Some stations, especially those in the large urban markets, are interested in attracting large and loyal audiences, because they need the membership dollars, while other stations, often associated with "state systems," have a legislated mission to telecast instruction and "quality programs" which usually attract small audiences. This diffusion of goals, as well as a patchwork of funding and support mechanisms for the stations, makes it difficult to generalize about all public television stations or their audiences (see 8).These difficulties have also plagued past attempts to define and measure the audience for public television. Before the seventies, the little empirical work that was performed concerning public television audiences can be traced to the efforts of Wilbur Schramm, his students, and his colleagues. However, as Schramm recognized in 1963, "in studying ETV [educational television] audiences, one is faced with the problem that bedevils the students of most minority behavior not of a public n a t u r e t o find the minority" (see 16,17,18). Then, as now, the public TV audiences were so small and irregular in their behavior that locating them for any study was a very difficult and expensive task.These early studies introduced concepts and methods that continue to dominate research on public television audiences. In the seventies this research was The audience is so minute, in fact, that Comstock d al. could write in their seminal work, Teleuision and Human Behauior (3), "a description of the [TV] viewing behavior of the American people would not be seriously distorted were no mention of [public television] made" (p. 116).

Moving beyond the “Vast Wasteland”

“…The U.S. public broadcasting system came of age during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson and was passed by Congress in 1967 as an extension of Great Society programs. While officially presented as a vehicle to bring quality, diversity, and public interest goals to all Americans, the servicewith the key exception of children's programs-became a channel for the professional middle class (Lyle 1975;Statistical Research 1974;LeRoy 1980). Conceived against the grain of the "vast wasteland," U.S. public television did not solicit public involvement (Rowland 1976(Rowland , 1986, nor was the service intended to provide widely viewed news and entertainment.…”

“…While PBS claims to reach a cross section of the U.S. population (Public Broadcasting Service 1995a), audience research has consistently shown that its core adult viewership is small, well-educated, and above average in socioeconomic status (LeRoy 1980;Public Broadcasting Service 1990a, 1990b, 1995b. The cultural aura that surrounds public television, coupled with its programming priorities, has also limited the service's multicultural policy goals.…”