1. Carnegie Commission on Educational Television, Program for Action .

2. Corporation for Public Broadcasting study quoted in CPB Office of Communication Research, News Brief 1, no. 7 (Oct. 6, 1978), NPBA.

3. Willard D. Rowland, Jr., and Michael Tracey, "Lessons from Abroad: A Preliminary Report on the Condition of Public Broadcasting in the United States and Elsewhere," delivered as a speech to the International Communication Association in May 1993. The paper was preparatory to a larger report to be prepared under the auspices of the Hoso Bunka Foundation in Tokyo.

4. Barnouw, Image Empire , p. 339.

5. Les Brown, "Broadcasting's Vanishing Species," Channels (Sept.-Oct. 1985).

6. Carnegie Commission on Educational Television, Program for Action , p. 13.

7. Broadcasting Research Unit, Quality in Television .

8. Huw Wheldon, "The British Experience in Television" (Richard Dimbleby Lecture) (London: The British Broadcasting Corporation, 1976).

9. Barbara Tuchman, "The Decline of Quality," New York Times Magazine , Nov. 2, 1980.

10. "Can Television News Break the Understanding Barrier?" Times (London), Feb. 28, 1975. Birt and Peter Jay coauthored four subsequent articles for the Times on the same subject: "Television Journalism: The Child of the Unhappy Marriage Between Newspapers and Film" (Sept. 30, 1975); "The Radical Changes Needed to Remedy TV's Bias Against Understanding" (Oct. 1, 1975); "How Television News Can Hold the Mass Audience" (Sept. 2, 1976); and "Why Television News Is in Danger of Becoming an Anti-Social Force" (Sept. 3, 1976).

11. William A. Henry III, "News as Entertainment," in Elie Abel, ed., What's News: The Media in American Society (San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies, 1981).

12. Murrow's speech to the Radio-Television News Directors Association, Oct. 15, 1958, quoted in Sperber, Murrow , p. 539. Also in Reporter , Nov. 13, 1958.

13. Postman, Amusing Ourselves , p. 106.

14. Sydney S. Alexander, "Public Television and the 'Ought' of Public Policy," Washington University Law Quarterly (winter 1968).

15. Graham Murdock and Peter Golding, "Information Poverty and Political Inequality: Citizenship in the Age of Privatized Communications," Journal of Communication (summer 1989).

16. The Times-Mirror study and the study of the People for the American Way are both quoted in Michael Oreskes, "A Trait of Today's Youth: Apathy to Public Affairs," New York Times , June 28, 1990.

17. Alexander, "Public Television," p. 66.

18. A dissenting study of the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting concluded that "by and large the promise of broad, in-depth coverage on MacNeil/Lehrer remains unfulfilled." FAIR was particularly critical of the program's guest list, which it contended represents an extremely narrow segment of the political and social spectrum." The study was based on viewings of the show over a six-month period in 1989. See the special issue of Extra (a publication of Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting) 3, no. 4 (winter 1990), "All the Usual Suspects: MacNeil/Lehrer and Nightline ."

19. William A. Henry III, "News as Entertainment: The Search for Dramatic Unity," in Abel, ed., What's News .

20. Alterman, Sound and Fury , p. 307.

21. Alexander, "Public Television," p. 66.

22. Jeremy Isaacs, "Consensus and Dissent—or Freedom of Speech," EBU Review (European Broadcasting Union) (Mar. 1979), p. 28.

23. Justice Holmes's comment in Gitlow v. New York is cited in Anthony Lewis, Make No Law (New York: Random House, 1991), p. 85.

24. Jack Gould , "NET's Freedom Is Threatened," New York Times , April 12, 1971.

25. Quoted in Katherine Bouton, "Quest for Quality TV," Saturday Review (Feb. 1982), p. 28.

26. British Research Unit, "Quality in Television," p. 2.

27. Alexander, "Public Television," p. 66.

28. Ibid.

29. Hughes, Culture of Complaint , p. 5.

30. Rowland and Tracey, "Lessons from Abroad," p. 44.