Here's our letter.

Wayne Godwin
Executive Vice President & Chief Operating Officer
Public Broadcasting System
1320 Braddock Place
Alexandria, VA 22314
Via fax: (703) 739-7500

Dear Mr. Godwin:

The New York Times reports today that PBS and Comcast are partners in a new 24-hour digital cable channel for children that will play commercials along with programs such as Elmo and Sesame Street. Other co-owners will be Sesame Workshop and HIT Entertainment.

Public broadcasting is supposed to be an alternative to the commercial networks and a refuge from the huckstering that assaults children there. It is supposed to give kids, and parents, a real choice in this regard – a choice where kids won’t be seduced with junk food, junk entertainments and noxious commercial values with which parents may disagree.

In case you somehow haven’t noticed, American children already are subject to an unprecedented barrage of commercial propaganda. And, not surprisingly, they suffer from an epidemic of marketing-related diseases, such as obesity and type 2 diabetes. Recent research by Juliet Schor found that “High consumer involvement is a significant cause of depression, anxiety, low self-esteem and psychosomatic complaints” in children. Why would you want to make this any worse?

Your descent into commercial predation has been swift. In 1998, PBS first ran national commercials before and after Sesame Street. And despite shocking rates of childhood obesity, in 2003, PBS began running ads for McDonalds before and after Sesame Street. What’s next? A partnership with Philip Morris? If there’s enough money in it, why not?

Children need adults who will stand up to the commercial culture. They need adults who will put their health and development above the interests of money. It looks as though they aren’t going to find these adults at PBS any more.

Sincerely,

Gary Ruskin, executive director, Commercial Alert

<------letter ends here------>

Following is an article in today’s New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/30/arts/television/30pbs.html

Bob and Barney, With a Few Words From Sponsors
By Julie Salamon

Has Big Bird sold out?

On Monday Comcast is to announce the details of its new 24-hour digital cable channel for preschoolers, which will feature Elmo, Big Bird, Barney - and commercials. PBS not only approves, but is a partner: the channel's co-owners are PBS, Sesame Workshop and HIT Entertainment, producer of "Barney and Friends" and "Bob the Builder."

"I don't like pitching products to young children and I never have," said Joan Ganz Cooney, a co-founder of Children's Television Workshop (now Sesame Workshop) and the chairwoman of the executive committee of its board. "But to some degree that is nostalgia for a time that is past. The whole society, the whole business is so commercialized, even public television. This is another way of getting PBS's excellent programming to children."

Some public television station managers worry that the Comcast deal represents a potential threat to an essential ingredient of the Public Broadcasting Service's shows for young children. "The crucial issue is providing a commercial-free haven for over-the-air delivery of children's programming as opposed to a commercial entity that is out of our control," said John Hesse, general manager of KUHT, the public television station in Houston.

The distinction between public and commercial television has become increasingly ephemeral in the last decade as traditional underwriter announcements have taken on the trappings of regular advertising. The merchandizing of popular characters like Barney and Elmo is big business. Meanwhile, technology has upended traditional ideas of what people watch and when.

The new channel "is responding to a television industry that is in revolution," said John Boland, executive vice president at public television's KQED in San Francisco. "We're moving into an environment of total audience control. This channel is just one little part of that."

Others think the revolution is not so benign. "This is a slippery slope," said Nancy Carlsson-Paige, an education professor at Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass., who has been a consultant for WGBH, the public television station in Boston. "What can prevent them from going further once they see what an inviting territory that is?"

"I don't blame PBS for this," Professor Carlsson-Paige said. "It's a society-wide problem. We aren't adequately funding public television and public programming for children. PBS doesn't have enough funds and so they are doing this."

Public television stations will continue to operate their usual children's programming schedules, and provide the premiere runs of "Sesame Street" and other familiar shows. But these schedules vary market to market and are limited, Ms. Cooney of Sesame Workshop said. "If you don't have children around, as I do grandchildren, I don't think it's understood how difficult it is to get a schedule of little children's programming when you need it," she said.

Local public television stations must decide whether they also want to be affiliated with the new channel. That would mean promoting the channel as well as giving up any digital channels providing preschool programming that they might be operating locally without advertising.

KUHT in Houston decided not to affiliate. "The spots that are going to run on the commercial channel are outright commercials, product endorsements, superlatives, all that sort of thing, which we don't have on our underwriting spots on our channel," Mr. Hesse, the station manager, said. "I have some concern about pointing our viewers toward a commercial station when we have touted ourselves as a safe haven from commercial programming."

KQED in San Francisco has signed on, even though it already operates a digital cable channel called KQED Kids. That channel will no longer carry preschool programming. "We plan to redirect it to kids who are too old for 'Barney' and 'Teletubbies,' " Mr. Boland said.

Comcast and its partners, which announced the deal in October, plan to provide details - including the channel's name - on Monday at the annual trade show of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association.

The digital channel that will provide a 24-hour diet of PBS-branded children's-show reruns won't begin until this fall. On Monday, however, Comcast will begin a video-on-demand service containing 50 hours of reruns of "Bob the Builder," "Thomas & Friends," "Angelina Ballerina" and "Sesame Street."

The video-on-demand programs will come commercial-free, at least at the beginning, a Comcast spokeswoman said. On the 24-hour channel, however, commercials will appear before and after the programs, though not during them.

Wayne Godwin, chief operating officer of PBS, stressed that the commercials on the new channel would be in terms of their placement and intended audience. "We at PBS were a part of shaping the message around what was and what was not appropriate," he said. "Messages will be targeted to parents and caregivers as opposed to things aimed directly at children."

But James Day, a co-founder of KQED who was on the original board of Children's Television Workshop, said he wondered how easy it would be to control commercials and their content. "It's awfully hard to choose your advertiser," he said. "You get who wants to reach that audience, not what you want that audience to be reached with."

PBS and its partners have veto rights over the question of commercial interruption as well as the educational nature of the channel. But, as Mr. Godwin said, "I don't think you'll find someone from PBS screening each one of the commercials."

Participants in the venture, as well as many public television station executives, said the Comcast deal simply reflects financial and cultural realities. For years PBS was in a league of its own when it came to children's programming. But with cable television came competition from the likes of Nickelodeon, the Disney Channel, the Cartoon Network and Discovery Kids. Digital cable opened the door to more competition from more channels.

"It made sense to have private industry leverage up money to create a new channel, which will give children the opportunity to view these characters which are right now in limited time periods," Gary Knell, president of Sesame Workshop, said. "If public television doesn't take bold steps like creating this new service, it's going to be a wind-down. The trend isn't going to get better, and it's naïve to say you can simply do what you are doing and pretend the world isn't changing."

Except for people with long memories, it has become a given that children as well as adults should be able to watch what they want 24 hours a day. Mr. Day, however, is dubious. "Anybody who sees me quoted will recognize that I'm an old-fashioned crank," he said. "But I believe the competitiveness that leads to such a proliferation tends to degrade the quality of television itself. It may be there's a downside to choice. My point is not 'What's the harm?' but 'What's the value?'"