The Vanishing Vision: The Inside Story of Public Television

By James Day

Book Overview

This spirited, first-ever history of public television offers an insider's account of its topsy-turvy, forty-year odyssey. James Day, a founder of San Francisco's KQED and a past president of New York's WNET, chronicles public television's fascinating evolution from its inauspicious roots in the 1950s to its strong, fiercely debated presence in contemporary culture.

The Vanishing Vision provides a vivid and often amusing behind-the-screens history. Day tells how a program producer, desperate to locate a family willing to live with television cameras for seven months, borrowed a dime--and a suggestion--from a blind date and telephoned the Louds of Santa Barbara. The result was the mesmerizing twelve-hour documentary, An American Family. Day relates how Big Bird and his friends were created to spice up Sesame Street when test runs showed a flagging interest in the program's "live-action" segments. And he describes how Frieda Hennock, the first woman appointed to the FCC, overpowered the resistance of her male colleagues to lay the foundation for public television.

Along the way, Day identifies the particular forces that have shaped public television. The result, in his view, is a Byzantine bureaucracy kept on a leash by an untrusting Congress, with a fragmented leadership that lacks a clearly defined mission in today's multimedia environment. Public television's "democratic" structure of over 300 stations stifles boldness and innovation while absorbing money needed for national programming.

Day calls for a bold rethinking of public television's mission, advocating a system that is adequately funded and independent of government, one capable of countering commercial television's "lowest-common-denominator" approach with a full range of substantive programs, comedy as well as culture, entertainment as well as information.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520086597
• ISBN13: 9780520086593
• Release Date: October 1995
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 453 Pages
• Weight: 1.94 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.8" x 1.3" x 6.8"

Customer Reviews

The definitive guide to Public Broadcasting

This book gives you just about anything you need to know about public broadcasting from its early stages in radio clear up to its publication date in the mid 90's. Not only do you get great personal accounts of James Day's journey from that start of KQED in San Fransisco to him heading NET, but there is a great overview of the machine that is public broadcasting. The book commemorates educational/public broadcastings journey from its infancy and is a fantastic read for any who love public television and wish to know more.

A very good memoir of life in public broadcasting

Anyone who wants a first-person account of life as an insider in public broadcasting would do well to read this book. The author was head of WQED, San Francisco and WNET, New York as well as head of NET, the educational network which preceded PBS. Day's account shows how the good intentions of those who founded the system paved the road to where public broadcasting finds itself today...