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Flatulent View, Since each program was padded to fill at least a two-hour magazine format, the arresting segments were buried among too many soporific ones. PBL wasted time too often duplicating the spot news and standard documentary coverage that the commercial networks already were doing thoroughly and more lavishly. There was too much controversy for controversy's sake. And the PBL chief correspondent, Edward P. Morgan, unburdened himself of weekly editorials (always winding up with the line, "That is the shape of this observer's point of view") so flatulent that dial switchers probably thought they were listening to Pat Paulsen parodies.
Despite bright expectations that PBL could avoid bickering and office politics, the lab became embroiled in the same sort of power struggles so notorious at the commercial networks. Executive Director Westin, a 39-year-old former CBS producer, was the hapless mediator. His staff members were fractious because they did not feel they had freedom enough to experiment. The managers of many of the 130-odd public TV stations that carry PBL protested, on the contrary, that the programming was too avant-garde for their audiences. As the lab seemed to flounder, the Editorial Policy Board, a group of outsiders headed by ex-Columbia Journalism Dean Edward Barrett, became increasingly meddlesome. Also constantly kibitzing was Fred W. Friendly, the former CBS News president who first developed the PBL concept
Idea Man. At the end of the first season, last June, the Editorial Policy Board urged the foundation to dismiss Westin and wondered if maybe the whole project should be dropped. Instead, it was the policy board, not the lab, that the foundation eliminated. Westin was retained, though with a coequal executive editor, Frederick Bohen, a 31-year-old ex-member of the White House staff.
An assistant dean at Princeton before going to Washington, Bohen had never worked as a journalist or film maker, but was considered the tough administrator and idea man needed to complement Westin's production experience.
The key decision of the new command was to cut the show back from two hours to roughly 90 minutes and to forgo, most weeks, the magazine format. Generally, each future broadcast will have a single theme (this Sunday's: a study of whites' reaction to integration). There will be no more of what Westin calls "instant topicality." Westin is now producing background programs on issues that he anticipates will again become crucial—the crisis on the campuses and the power of the military-industrial complex, for example. When finished, the shows will go into a bank to await a news peg.