THE PUBLIC BROADCASTING SERVICE IS FOUNDED IN 1970

Today, The Grandma has been watching PBS, one of her favourite broadcasters, that was founded on a day like today in 1970.

 

The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is an American public broadcaster and television program distributor.

It is a non-profit organization and the most prominent provider of educational television programming to public television stations in the United States, distributing series such as American Experience, America's Test Kitchen, Antiques Roadshow, Arthur, Barney & Friends, Between the Lions, Cyberchase, Clifford the Big Red Dog, Downton Abbey, Wild Kratts, Finding Your Roots, Frontline, The Magic School Bus, The Kidsongs Television Show, Masterpiece Theater, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, Nature, Nature Cat, Nova, the PBS NewsHour, Peg + Cat, Reading Rainbow, Sesame Street, Teletubbies, Keeping up Appearances and This Old House.

PBS is funded by a combination of member station dues, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, National Datacast, pledge drives, and donations from both private foundations and individual citizens.

All proposed funding for programming is subject to a set of standards to ensure the program is free of influence from the funding source.

PBS has more than 350 member television stations, many owned by educational institutions, non-profit groups both independent or affiliated with one particular local public school district or collegiate educational institution, or entities owned by or related to state government.

More information: PBS

PBS was established on November 3, 1969 by Hartford N. Gunn Jr. (president of WGBH), John Macy (president of CPB), James Day (last president of National Educational Television), and Kenneth A. Christiansen (chairman of the department of broadcasting at the University of Florida).

It began operations on October 5, 1970, taking over many of the functions of its predecessor, National Educational Television (NET), which later merged with Newark, New Jersey station WNDT to form WNET. In 1973, it merged with Educational Television Stations.

Immediately after public disclosure of the Watergate scandal, on May 17, 1973, the United States Senate Watergate Committee commenced proceedings; PBS broadcast the proceedings nationwide, with Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer as commentators.

For seven months, nightly gavel-to-gavel broadcasts drew great public interest, and raised the profile of the fledgling PBS network.

In 2019, PBS announced plans to move its headquarters to a new building in Crystal City, Virginia.

PBS is asking the Arlington County Board for permission to add its logo to the top of its new headquarters, which has a 40-year-old restriction placed on it.

As of 2020, PBS has nearly 350 member stations around the nation.

The board of directors is responsible for governing and setting policy for PBS, consisting of 27 members: 14 professional directors (station managers), 12 general directors (outside directors), and the PBS president. All PBS Board members serve three-year terms, without pay.

PBS member stations elect the 14 professional directors; the board elects the 12 general directors and appoints the PBS president and CEO; and the entire board elects its officers.

As of March 2015, PBS maintains current memberships with 354 television stations encompassing 50 states, the District of Columbia and four U.S. possessions; as such, it is the only television broadcaster in the United States -commercial or non-commercial- which has station partners licensed in every U.S. state (by comparison, none of the five major commercial broadcast networks has affiliates in certain states where PBS has members, most notably New Jersey).

The service has an estimated national reach of 93.74% of all households in the United States, or 292,926,047 Americans with at least one television set.

More information: PBS Kids

PBS stations are commonly operated by non-profit organizations, state agencies, local authorities (such as municipal boards of education), or universities in their city of licence; this is similar (albeit more centralized in states where a licensee owns multiple stations rebroadcasting the main PBS member) to the early model of commercial broadcasting in the U.S., in which network-affiliated stations were initially owned by companies that owned few to no other television stations elsewhere in the country.

In some U.S. states, a group of PBS stations throughout the entire state may be organized into a single regional subnetwork (such as Alabama Public Television and the Arkansas Educational Television Network); in this model, PBS programming and other content is distributed by the originating station in the subnetwork to other full-power stations that serve as satellites as well as any low-power translators in other areas of the state.

PBS provides an alternate path for Wireless Emergency Alerts to wireless carriers through its Warning, Alert and Response Network (WARN). The alerts are transmitted through the PBS satellite network on the AMC-21 satellite to PBS stations, who then broadcast the messages over their transmitters for reception by wireless carriers at their cell sites.

The WARN network is funded by a grant through the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).

More information: PBS-Youtube

People see you on television, and they think you make
the same amount of money that Clint Eastwood does.
But this is PBS. All these shows are done for free.

Bob Ross