TeleVISIONS (Autumn 1976)

5 night of the convention by Theodore H. Kheel, a New York labor lawyer and the guiding force behind Automation House, a non-profit foundation hitherto devoted to studying labor questions and experimenting with modern artists. In the studio | met Arlene Krebs who was working for Automation House as a kind of studio manager. She was the kind of person who symbolized underground video for me. She had made tapes in prisons, she taught video, and she was well aware of the new generation who get al! their news from TV. She asked me a question at one point that | cannot forget: ‘Do you find it different,” she asked, “working in Cable?” For her it was different. Cable was where the networks weren't. For me it was television journalism. ' In a meeting with Clay Felker and his staff and with Av Westin who was consultant to Automation House, we mapped out . the themes of the four programs. We took lists of Felker’s reporters who were to receive no fees and who had to be individually recruited. Ken Auletta, Tom Morgan, Gail Sheehy, Ed Diamond, Milton Glazer, Bob Grossman, _ Alexander Cockburn, Dorothy Seiberling, Ellen Stern, Molly Haskell, Fred McDarrah and Felker himself with a nightly newspaper critique began to appear on our rundowns. We were to have no floor reporters, no remotes. Basically only live studio, with maybe a little pre-taping if the soldering was finished in time. It is fair to note that the series backers were all highly motivated. Not from a profit point of view, but for the alternative, power. The publications were getting an exclusive play; the cable companies were stirring up some subscriber interest; Automation House was kicking off its studio — which was to continue to operate for future cable productions at a flat rate of $100 per hour, | plus tape. How did we do? An extraordinary array of guests trekked to our location. The word came back to us that delegates, with Channel L in their hotel rooms, had discovered us. And when ‘Bella Abzug, for example, heard that her three rivals for the N.Y. Democratic Senatorial nomination were all booked she dropped everything to make it to our studio — where she proceeded to share a series of stories of her personal encounters with Jimmy Carter. Producer Peggy Daniel managed to get ‘The Convention”, an off-off-Broadway revue, into the studio to perform excerpts of their production. Global in N.J. By JOHN REILLY Our premise was simple. We wanted to profile a state delegation to a national convention. This year was colored by the fact that Carter had won, there wasn’t much wheeling and dealing. New Jersey was one of the few states that wasn’t in the Carter camp; they had elected HumphreyBrown delegates. So we tried to get a feeling of what they were really doing. We taped Carter talking to the delegation, Caucuses, press conferences. Interviews with the state’s major politicians. A subplot was Carter’s consideration of Cong. Pete Rodino for vice president. Our tape wasn’t anything newsy. We examined the process — nothing had not already been exhuastively covered by the media. The tape was shot in %” color. We will edit it to a haifhour in Dec. Originally we hoped to work through WNET, but negotiations broke down. We were able to work out an arrangement with WNYC, although they really didn’t provide a budget. WNYC will air it locally in NY, and we hope to show it, . in New Jersey. bay witha receive-only static n TECHNOLOGY NASA Leaves Indira Gandhi A Propaganda Tool Goals of satellite experiment are corrupted By TED CONANT MELBOURNE, en route to DELHI (October 18)—Last night in Tokyo’s Foreign Correspondent’s Club | had a chance to talk with one of India’s senior overseas correspondents. | asked him about the rash of stories now appearing in the Indian Press on Indian space research, electronics development, and_ satellite broadcasting. “Many benefits of space science” ... “Broadcasting from on high” ... “Space research spin-off’ these are the sort of headlines one can see in the Times of India (Bombay), and the New Delhi Statesman. | asked my friend specifically about a September 18th story in the Times of India—‘‘The SITE experiment has been hailed as an indication of the immense potentialities of the audio-visual media. Dr. Rao’s (director) hope is that India will soon have a multipurpose national satellite, both for television broadcasts and communication.” What exactly was SITE, the indian Satellite Instructional Television Experiment? Conceived in the late 60’s by officials of NASA and the Indian atomic energy agency, it started on August 1st, 1975, and ended on July 31st, 1976. The space link was by NASA’s ATS-6 satellite. The ground segment transmitting stations were at New Delhi, Ahmedabad and Bom Programs were primarily received in the six clusters of villages; about half the villages received relays from the ground stations, half received programs directly from the satellite by means of 7-10 foot ‘chicken wire’ antennas. The _ satellite systems project of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) was responsible for technical matters, Dr. U. R. Rao, director, with Professor Yash Paul, a physicist, Head of the Space Applications Centre. All india Radio (AIR) had overall responsibility for the programming, and continues, via microwave links. One of the fascinations of the scheme is that India has so little television of any sort. What SITE did was to bring television to the hinterland before a full urban television service had been developed. India is probably the first country in the world to introduce télevision in this way. At present there are only 350,000 receiving sets in the whole of India, to serve over 600 million people, but the Indian Government is proposing to augment the present transmitters in Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta and Madras with additional transmitting centres in Jaipur, Hyderabad, Raipur and Cuttack by March, 1977, and with further centres at Muzaffarpur, Gulbarga, and Kanpur later that year. “Well,” Menon (not his real name) began, “The significant ‘spin-off’ the articles talk about is in hardware for Indira Gandhi's propaganda machine, as well as in electronic systems and sub-systems for the military.” My friend paused, and went on to say that people like Professor Yash Paul, B. S. Rao and E. V. Chitness of the Indian Space Research Organization are in a way the Indian equivalents of Dr. Werner Von Braun. They are in it, as he was, to develop large scale programs, or as the Times of India puts it, ‘an expanding program that will make heavy demands on (the country’s) electronic requirements”. “Yes”, Menon continued, “that part is true enough. And so is the item about re laying via satellite the half-hour AIR news. But what they don’t say is that not only the so-called news but the big outside propaganda broadcasts, the National Day, the major speeches, stuff like that, all were fed by the satellite “live,” not only to the village receivers, but to TV stations throughout the subcontinent. That’s where the action’s at. Don’t put too much importance on the 2,000 TV sets in the villages giving practical instruction in family planning or agriculture, occupational skills, or all that. The educational programs produced were, and are, mostly made by urban types who know little, and couldn’t care less about the villages.” “Did you read the piece in the Delhi Statesman by the well known critic Anita Malik, printed just before the emergency?” My friend Menon rummaged around his clip file and came up with a telling cutting entitled “The Satellite: Doomed To Disaster”. “India’s much-heralded and _ self-publicized satellite, is causing acute worries and premonitions of the most gloomy kind all round. All sorts of terrifying stories are trickling through to this writer. One of them concerns an occasion when several Central ministers were invited to the TV studios to have a look at the masterpieces already produced for launching on satellite. They sat solidly, and, indeed, stolidly peoude us all, At the end rer was an emba Beige present viler: dageritied the pro grams to this critic as “bloody awful and an amateurish and criminal waste of time, money and effort’. “It seems,” the article continued, ‘‘that the satellite staff were more interested in starring themselves in the programs than in getting the few TV professionals in India to produce programs worthy of this internationally-watched educational experiment which also involves overcoming hurdles about our language problem. “Indeed, the officials connected with the TV satellite have spent more time attending seminars on sundry subjects in distant parts of the country, flying from international conference to conference, writing adulatory articles about their largely imaginary achievements, and talking like long-term consultants than getting on with the job in hand. “It seems,” the article continued, “that the satellite staff were more interested in starring themselves in the programs than in getting the few TV professionals in India to produce programs worthy of this internationally-watched educational experiment which also involves overcoming hurdles about our language problem. “Indeed, the officials connected with the TV satellite have spent more time attending seminars on sundry subjects in distant parts of the country, flying from international conference to conference, writing adulatory articles about their _ largely imaginary achievements, and talking like long-term consultants than getting on with the job in hand. ; “Another premonition of disaster came in no uncertain terms from an American mass media specialist who will remain unnamed, for obvious reasons: “Thank the Lord”, he said to this writer, “that American responsibility ceases once the satellite is launched. Because from what one can _ gather, AIR is totally unprepared with enough programs for the satellite and those made appear to be of such substandard quality that they are hardly worth all the excitement behind the experiment’. “Indian TV is not lacking in either fresh young talent in the program line, nor in engineering skill. But the satellite organization has mostly by-passed them on grounds other than talent. Worst of all, the people at the top have failed to give proper direction to the operation because they lack both TV expertise and talent and are more busy spending time on public relations which, in the event, have misfired too.” “Well”, my friend Menon chuckled, “‘that was written just before the emergency. Given our present censorship, one must, for current developments, read the foreign press.” | did, and reviews on the broadcasting experiment using the ATS-6 satellite, and the interim program now in effect, are mixed. Reports drafted by government officials tended to focus on its great promise as an educational tool, while working journalists appeared skeptical of the quality of programs, the high costs, and the daily dose of political propaganda. Pictures from heaven A BBC television documentary described the villages reaction to the telly as ‘“pictures from heaven’, and their footage showed the intense reactions of rural people exposed to television, who had never even seen a film. But the BBC documentary, made with Government co-operation, does not show subsequent scenes detailed by the working press: the boredom induced by straight talks and interviews, the occasions where observers found an dience sound pesleee 2 in oriented programs that failed to hold the i interest of a rural audience, to whom the concept of stainless steel utensils and pressure cookers, for example, were quite alien. Some of the villages did find a real use for the receivers. At night, after ten o’clock sign-off, they switched on the televisions, at full brightness levels, and used them as flourescent lights. _ But Indian officials connected with the SITE scheme tend to feel that in terms of “nation building” it has begun to succeed. What mistakes have been made in programming can be corrected, they say in years to come, for most of the initial villages chosen for the broadcasting experiment, are in the region now linked by terrestial microwave, and all will be eventually in reach of the new Soviet ‘“Statsionar T” television broadcasting satellite, now on order. For India is committed, like Japan, Brazil and Indonesia, to a full national satellite system. It will probably interconnect a series of sub-systems for police and military communications and surveillance, and above all it will provide Indira Gandhi immediate access to village audiences across the entire subcontinent. All this indeed may, or may not in the end happen, as the subcontinent is still a land of surprises. In a short time | will know more, as | will have the chance in Delhi to assess the situation at first hand. | will particularly focus on the question as to whether the new role of television and satellite communications will aggrevate the continuing crisis between an autocracy, enamoured of new technology, and flaunting it, and the majority's needs. Ted Conant assesses communications technologies for Scroeder, a British banking firm, and helps many alternate media groups on his own time. He has worked for public broadcasting and the Ford Foundation.