Pbs Offers Free Air Time To Presidential Candidates

PBS has offered to provide “free, regular, primetime opportunities this fall to the major presidential candidates” and expressed the hope the practice will become part of a joint effort with the commercial networks to provide free time for the candidates.

PBS president Ervin S. Duggan said, “We are eager to sit down with our colleagues in commercial broadcasting and cable to work out the details and make this a contribution by all American television.”

The public television network’s announcement recently came as the Free TV for Straight Talk Coalition - founded by Walter Cronkite and including 78 leaders from a variety of fields - said it was inviting executives of the commercial networks, PBS, cable operators, representatives of the political parties, the presidential candidates, the FCC, the FEC and interested citizens groups to a conference to be held at a “mutually convenient time within the next month.”

They would discuss and seek to implement the coalition’s recommendation “that the major presidential candidates be offered two to five minutes a night of primetime air time, on alternating nights, for talking head presentations in the final months of the 1996 campaign.”

Fox Broadcasting announced a similar plan last month.

No precise format for the candidates’ appearances has been decided on by PBS but Ellen Hume, executive director of the network’s election-year Democracy Project, said the recommendation “would be a good place to start.”

“There will be ‘strings’ to our offer,” she said; “we don’t want negative ads; we do want the candidates themselves on the TV screen,” as the coalition recommended.

The coalition includes five former network news anchors, six past party chairmen and nine senators and a number of academics.

Regardless of what is decided among coalition invitees, Hume said Thursday, PBS will go ahead with its plans, though some stations may not choose to participate. She said major PBS stations have endorsed the offer of free time.

Early indications are that the commercial networks are not too enthused about the coalition plan.

ABC president Bob Iger, responding to questions from employees via closed-circuit, dismissed the Fox plan for free air time as “grandstanding” by a network that doesn’t have a regularly scheduled news offering.