Betraying the Dream (Machine): NET,the FBI,and Regulating Public Television Content in the 1970s

Abstract

This article investigates the history of content regulation in the US public television sector. It analyzes the context and consequences of an October 1971 decision by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) to remove a segment from National Educational Television’s (NET) popular series The Great American Dream Machine that alleged the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had recruited young men to infiltrate student groups and engage in violent acts. The controversy that followed PBS’s decision both exposed fissures and resolved conflicts over who would have the authority to determine the contours and politics of public television programing. This moment, as this article illustrates, also spoke to an escalating shift in the press’s relationship to the government, particularly the FBI, and the uncertainty of publicly funded television’s contribution to adversarial journalism.

Keywords

television censorship content regulation federal bureau of investigation public broadcasting service national educational television

On October 6, 1971, The Great American Dream Machine was to premiere its second season on public television. Produced by National Educational Television (NET), The Great American Dream Machine’s first season had won an Emmy and received critical praise for its irreverence, wit, and creativity. Dubbed “Sesame Street for adults” or the “intellectual’s Laugh In,”¹ Dream Machine to many of its fans exemplified the potential of public television to embrace experimentation, provide a platform for diverse perspectives, and counter the timidity of commercial television (Woods 1971, B1, B8; Jones 1971, Ferretti, 1971, 71; Bacharach, 1971, B5; O’Connor 1971a, A2). Its producers prioritized innovation in form—Dream Machine had a magazine format of short segments edited together without the guidance of a host or narrative voice over-—and embraced the sardonic and the controversial. When, for example, CBS News refused an essay penned by Andy Rooney on war the Dream Machine producers, who loved its satirical edge, bought it from CBS and hired Rooney to present in on the show (^{WNET Seminar}).

Of the many segments planned for its second season premiere—which included a spot featuring daredevil Evel Knievel, an interview with a crop duster in Mississippi, and a humorous performance by satirist Marshall Efron on the business of selling patriotism (O’Connor 1971b, 94)—was a twelve-minute investigative report by Paul Jacobs on the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Jacobs had contributed to Dream Machine in its first season, most notably in a segment co-produced with journalist Saul Landau on the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) that explored the health consequences of the AEC’s nuclear weapon testing; the report included accusations that the AEC had suppressed reports warning of the link between radiation exposure and grave illnesses and had not taken appropriate precautions to shield people from these harms.²

Jacobs’ segment for the October episode featured three young men (Charles Grimm, Jeff Desmond, and David Sannes) who stated that as informants for the FBI, and with the knowledge and support of the bureau, they had participated in acts of violence to discredit campus organizations and allow authorities to “get in there and crush those Communists that are on campus.”³ The night before the premiere, Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) president Hartford Gunn pulled the Jacobs report from the episode. NET refused to replace the segment and concluded the episode with this announcement: “Tonight’s abbreviated version of ‘Great American Dream Machine’ results from the deletion of an investigative report on F.B.I. informers. In future weeks ‘The Great American Dream Machine’ programs will run an hour” (Shepard 1971, 93). Gunn and PBS general manager Gerald Slater claimed they had acted responsibly to support public television stations; Jacobs and the leadership at Dream Machine and NET asserted they had been censored. At the center of their disagreement was who had the authority to regulate public television content.

Histories of public television have positioned this moment as a pivot point in the content regulation of the sector (Day 1995, 181; Ledbetter 1997, 71–73; Brooks 1994, 287–291). This essay extends this work by demonstrating how content regulation in the nascent public television sector was shaped by three interlocking political considerations: the impact of federal funding, or the politics of public support; the ideological commitments of its programing, or the allegations of public television’s liberal politics; and the intra-sector battles between incumbent and newly constituted stakeholders, or the internal politics of the public TV sector. The Dream Machine episode not only brought these tensions into clear view but illuminated how part of the project of making public television palatable to a range of stakeholders involved distancing the sector from its longstanding identification with NET. The Dream Machine episode clarified how the greater financial support provided, and greater visibility afforded, by public support for public television as established by the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 would produce greater levels of content regulation and paradoxically diminish, rather than extend, the political potential of public television.

That the segment that transformed the editorial dynamics of public television was a report critical of the FBI is important. The bureau’s history had been intertwined with the history of mass media since the 1930s. The FBI had cultivated both the press and the entertainment industry to present the bureau as heroic, professional, and disciplined, and as the safeguard against internal and external threats to the nation. Many journalists worked closely with the bureau and received information and intelligence in exchange for conceding to bureau oversight of their stories. In the postwar period, the bureau also influenced the regulation of broadcasting, the allocation of broadcast licenses, the blacklisting of creative personnel, and the firing of journalists and news analysts. The FBI had been both content creator and content regulator, in other words, committed to aggrandizing its own image while narrowing the parameters of who could contribute to, and what could be said over, the nation’s airwaves. The Jacobs report was part-and-parcel of a new era in which the FBI lost control of its image in popular media and the press and exemplified an intensifying adversarial treatment of the FBI by journalists. If the Dream Machine controversy spoke to longstanding station dissatisfaction with NET programing and concerns over federal funding, it also hinged on debates about how and whether to reconstitute the media’s, and especially public television’s, relationship to the FBI and to the role of adversarial journalism within the public television sector.

The history of US television is a history of multiple pressures—regulatory, financial, industrial, political, public—bearing on the production and distribution of programing (Bodroghkozy 1997; Hendershot 2002; Jaramillo 2018; Krattenmaker and Powe 1994; Heins 2007; Montgomery 1990; Pondillo 2005; Silverman 2007). The enthusiasm for public television that accelerated in the late 1960s and contributed to the passage of the Public Broadcasting Act (PBA) owed in part to dissatisfaction with how commercialism operated as a powerful form of content regulation, one that seemingly impeded the production of bold, erudite, pedagogical, controversial, or experimental programs for network television. As Fred Friendly, former president of CBS News and Ford Foundation TV Advisor put it in his testimony in support of the PBA, commercial television “makes so much money doing its worst that it cannot afford to do its best.”⁴ Liberated from commercial imperatives and ratings pressure, noncommercial television was to take risks with its programing that sponsor reliance ostensibly had made impossible for commercial television. To fix television was not to exert greater public interest requirements on broadcast licensees but to shore up and expand a noncommercial alternative. The story of the Dream Machine raises the question of whether the displacement of commercial support with public monies, as designed by the PBA, substituted one form of content regulation with another with similar implications for the fate of controversial programing.

Content Regulation and the Politics of Public Television

The Great American Dream Machine was produced by National Educational Television (NET), an organization created in December 1952 by the Ford Foundation’s Fund for Adult Education as the Educational Television and Radio Center (ETRC). Its initial purpose was to circulate programing to noncommercial television stations. In April 1952, the Federal Communications Commission ended its television licensing freeze and reserved over 200 television channels for noncommercial, educational uses. The Ford Foundation and its subsidiaries, notably the Fund for Adult Education and the Fund for the Advancement of Education, would be the primary financial benefactor of the educational television sector throughout the 1950s and 1960s, providing grants for station activation, program production, public relations, lobbying, technical and engineering support, amongst other activities. Educational television broadly, and NET especially, owed its existence to the Ford Foundation. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, NET produced programing, secured programing from a range of sources (such as local stations, independent producers, foreign broadcasters), and distributed programing to local affiliates. And while the conditions of Ford grants often determined the scope of NET’s activities, the foundation did not intervene in the content of the programing it circulated or produced (Wood 1969, 131–144).

Throughout the 1960s, stations complained about both the “liberal” orientation of NET programing and NET unresponsiveness to station demands. Stations had been especially upset about, for example, public affairs programs on the Black Freedom Struggle, sympathetic documentaries about Fidel Castro and North Vietnam, and avant-garde cultural programing. Under the leadership of John White, who served as NET’s president from 1958 to 1969, the organization sought to provide an alternative to commercial television, one that offered unheard perspectives, foregrounded controversial content, and embraced experimentation Many of its affiliates hewed to very different visions of the function of noncommercial broadcasting, however, and resented not only the content distributed to them via NET but the deaf ear that NET leadership seemed to turn on their complaints (Perlman 2016, 55–57). A number of affiliates were critical of what Frank Barraca of KUAT-TV referred to as the “New York establishment.”⁵ Others were concerned that NET public affairs programing abandoned strict neutrality and took editorial positions.⁶ Affiliates could and did refuse to air NET programs, as NET adopted a “take it or leave it” policy that prohibited stations from editing the programs it circulated.⁷

NET’s role in the noncommercial television sector shifted in the late 1960s. The Carnegie Commission on Educational Television, impaneled in 1965 to study the financial needs of the noncommercial television sector, in its January 1967 report called for sustained federal support of public television (Public Television, 1967). The Public Broadcasting Act (PBA) would implement this recommendation. And while the work of both the Carnegie Commission and the PBA tackled the noncommercial television sector’s longstanding, existential concern over funding, they also imagined a substantial reconfiguration of NET’s role. Even during the research gathering stage, NET’s leaders were nervous about the disposition of the commission toward it. Gerard Appy, head of field services for NET, recalled that the commission met with NET as a “matter of courtesy,” but already were disposed to see “NET as an agency whose time had expired.”⁸ White returned from meetings with the commission staff depressed that the accomplishments of the center were being downplayed and underappreciated.⁹ White surmised that the Carnegie Commission did not want “strong programing” for the sector” (Pepper 1975, 61). White’s suspicions were not without cause. The Carnegie report’s emphasis on localism as the bedrock of the public television system owed in part to its goal of shrinking NET’s role in the sector.

The report’s recommendation for a second national production center did likewise. As Lee DuBridge, member of the Carnegie Commission and member of the NET board, reported to Norman Cousins, NET board member and head of its special committee on the Carnegie report, the commission disagreed over “the place of N.E.T. in our proposed structure.”¹⁰ Members of the commission were split on whether centralized control over national programing impeded the freedom of local stations to program for their communities or whether some bulwark was necessary to redress stations’ timidity, such as “the reluctance on the part of stations in the south to air programs on civil rights matters.”¹¹ Ultimately, despite DuBridge’s desire for a more comprehensive role for NET in the final report, “there existed among some members of our Commission some prejudices against N.E.T. Thus, the Commission came out with a majority recommendation to favor a second ‘program center.’”¹²

The PBA passed with the active support of the Johnson administration in November 1967, though many unknowns about the public television sector remained. How station interconnection would happen—via phone lines, microwave relay, cable, or satellite—was unclear. How much money would be required to cultivate a sustainable public broadcasting sector was not certain. And despite the testimony of many witnesses that political insulation for public television would be vital—that subjecting funding to the congressional appropriations process would compromise the sector’s independence—how public broadcasting would be funded was still undecided when the bill was signed into law in November 1967 (Avery 2007, 358–364; Day 1995, 120–121).

The PBA created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) as a new, nonprofit corporation to receive and distribute federal funds. The CPB, under the law, could not operate a station or network and so one of its first tasks was to determine who would oversee interconnection. Though, in one of his first acts as the new president of NET, James Day submitted a proposal to the CPB outlining why NET should do this job,¹³ Fred Friendly of the Ford Foundation and Frank Pace and Ward Chamberlin of the CPB already had decided to create a new entity, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), to oversee interconnection and program distribution. Not only were the stations themselves dissatisfied with NET’s programing decisions and policies but the PBA, from Friendly’s read, required the separation of production and distribution, which NET had combined. In addition, the Nixon administration was acutely hostile to NET and had communicated to CPB leadership that future federal support hinged on replacing NET with producing stations (Engelman 2009, 286–288). Hartford Gunn, who had been president of WGBH in Boston, would become PBS’s first president (“Gunn Leaving 1970, 54). PBS was not to be a network, like NBC or CBS, but an organization composed of member stations that oversaw the national distribution of programing.

The creation of PBS transformed NET. Not only would NET lose the responsibility for distributing programing, but it no longer would function as the intermediary for local stations seeking national distribution of locally produced programs. With the formation of the CPB and PBS, as Day noted, local stations could receive funding from the CPB, secure airtime from PBS, and not involve NET in any way with distribution of its programing. NET, which had relied on the production facilities of stations for its own program production—its charter had prohibited it from owning its own production facilities—was now in competition with stations.¹⁴ Thus, when the Ford Foundation suggested that NET merge with WNDT, the New York noncommercial television station, NET’s leaders recognized the benefits given the redistribution of roles and authority in the public television sector.

Over the course of the first half of 1970, plans for what would become the ultimate merger took shape. The Educational Broadcasting Corporation (EBC), the licensee for WNDT, would absorb NET; EBC would receive all assets, take over the operations and functions of and assume responsibility for the obligations of NET. The station would file with the FCC to change its call sign to WNET. While NET as an organization was dissolved, EBC would be able to continue to use its brand—its logo and identity—in its nationally circulating programing.¹⁵ The agreement also stipulated that for a period of at minimum five years EBC would maintain a national programing service commensurate with what NET had offered.¹⁶ The Great American Dream Machine was one of the shows produced by EBC’s national production unit circulated with the NET logo. Its innovative style, tone, and structure was an experiment that owed to Day’s exhortation to his staff to produce the kind of programing they would want to watch (Day 1995. 171–172).

The relationship between PBS and NET initially was murky. For nearly two decades, NET had not had to answer to anyone for its programing choices. Stations could reject its offerings, viewers or listeners could file complaints, station managers through NET affiliates’ committee could express anger, the Ford Foundation’s grants could specify genres or programing (public affairs, cultural affairs, children’s programing), but NET had had autonomy to determine what to produce and what to distribute. Whether PBS would have editorial oversight over NET programing would immediately become a contentious issue.

Tensions erupted between PBS and NET over NET’s 1970 documentary Banks and the Poor. The film highlights predatory, discriminatory banking practices and ends with a list of 124 members of the House and the Senate who had financial holdings in banks, served as bank directors, or were associated with law firms that had banks as clients. Prior to broadcast, PBS attorneys had queried NET about the credibility and integrity of the documentary’s claims, which raised alarms by NET’s lawyers over PBS’s “overactive voice” in programing decisions.¹⁷ PBS further warned local stations about potential protests—many stations had bankers on their boards or received financial support from local banks—and refused to nominate the film for an Emmy award. In this, PBS drew on the criticisms of political scientist Stephen Farber who had noted errors in the documentary. Banks had gotten favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal and American Banker, and the filmmaker Mort Silverstein was not consulted about Farber’s critiques (Gould 1970, 69; Gould 1971, 75). PBS at once questioned NET’s judgment, signaled its own comparative political timidity, and underscored its self-perception as a shield—for individual stations and for the sector on whole—to protect the financial future of public television.

Tensions also flared when in 1971 PBS drafted guidelines on “Public Broadcasting Journalism,” a document that Day read as expressing a “thinly veiled hostility toward NET” as well as “an insult to the integrity and intelligence of those” who bore the responsibility for broadcast journalism within the public media sector long before PBS was formed.¹⁸ The document–with its warnings against “discussion of what may seem important to the very few, but which is trivial to the many,” its confusion (in Day’s view) of fairness with balance, and its call to keep “individual biases” “under control”–read as an attack on the integrity and professionalism of NET and an elevation of PBS as “the surrogate father and protector of its 200 member stations.”¹⁹ In Day’s view, it also promised to hamstring the public affairs programing of public television and undermine its capacity to address controversial issues.²⁰

PBS’s deletion of the Jacobs segment from Dream Machine realized NET’s fears over interference with its editorial discretion. When the series had premiered in January 1971, critics had applauded its experimentation and irreverence, as well as its innovative structure; most notably, they hailed it as a new form of television, one that shook off the mustiness of noncommercial television and the predictability of commercial television. Dream Machine struck some critics as exciting (Woods 1971 B1, B8; Ferretti 1971; Jones 1971, 71). For others, the show cemented longstanding perceptions of NET as east coast, liberal, and elitist, as it punched not only up (in its attacks on sites of power) but also down (in its satires of Middle Americans), and offered, in the words of an Oakland Tribune review, “the unmistakable flavor of condescension, the aftertaste of the cheap shot.”²¹ In tone and subject matter, Dream Machine was the apotheosis of NET’s ambitions for public television and of some local station’s greatest concerns over national programing. The FBI segment amplified this battle over the content of public television programing and the internal tensions that had marked the sector for over a decade.

The FBI and the Politics of Public Television

In advance of the Dream Machine segment, the FBI had taken only intermittent interest in NET. On infrequent occasion, when NET producers had requested FBI agent participation in programs, the bureau had declined, primarily because of the limited reach of educational broadcasting.²² Bureau interest in NET programing, especially its programs on Black power, campus protests, and the Department of Justice, accelerated in the early 1970s.²³ The FBI, for example, kept tabs on a first season segment of Dream Machine, filmed at Oberlin College, of a panel discussion of faculty and students about the mood on college campuses in 1971.²⁴

Though disinterested in appearing on NET shows in the 1950s and 1960s, the FBI otherwise had created an extensive public relations campaign. Starting in 1933, the FBI became “one of the greatest publicity-generating machines the country had ever seen” (Olmstead 1996, 14). One prong involved cultivating relationships with friendly journalists, providing them both with aggrandizing material on the FBI’s accomplishments and with derogatory information on individuals the FBI deemed subversive or critical of the bureau (Cecil 2014). In addition, the FBI worked with Hollywood producers to craft the image of the G-man, or the professional, disciplined, effective FBI agent. Films, cartoons, television and radio programs embraced the G-man mythos and augmented the heroic narratives published in the press about the FBI’s effectiveness in combating both internal and foreign threats to national security (Herzberg 2007). Through its Crime Records Section, the bureau’s public relations arm, the FBI from the 1930s through the 1960s managed public opinion and burnished its reputation as a highly disciplined, effective, and ethical federal law enforcement agency (Cecil 2016).

Behind the scenes, the bureau also played a significant role in shaping broadcast regulation and broadcast programing in the postwar period. In collaboration with members of Congress, the FBI attacked as radicals FCC commissioners who sought a more interventionist regulatory schema and intervened in licensing decisions by leaking information about and conducting investigations into the alleged subversive activities of applicants (Brinson 2004). The bureau also contributed to the blacklisting of journalists, commentators, performers, and writers and fostered an atmosphere of caution, timidity, and capitulation (Baar 2008; DeSpain 2011; Godfried 2004; Smith 2009; Stabile 2018). Significantly, the ambit of perspectives deemed “radical” or un-American to warrant FBI investigation and accusation was broad. License applicants who prioritized public service programing, commissioners seeking to embolden public interest requirements on licensees, commentators that advocated for workers, or performers who fought for civil rights were attacked as dangerous. If the FBI had carefully crafted its media image, it also played an important role in delimiting legitimate goals for broadcast regulation, shaping requirements for broadcast licensees, and structuring who could speak and what could appear on the nation’s airwaves.

While there had been ruptures in the bureau’s capacity to control its public image, most notably when in the late 1940s the espionage convictions of Judith Coplon were overturned because the FBI obtained evidence via illegal wiretaps, since the 1930s the FBI had secured public support, and had warded off congressional investigation or meaningful oversight, through its robust public relations activities and its relationship with journalists (Theoharis 2004, 67–68, 87; Medsger 2014, 129–133). In March 1971, this control shattered when antiwar activists broke into the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, stole its confidential files, and sequentially distributed curated packets of them to journalists and members of Congress. The Media files revealed illegal surveillance and harassment of Black and student groups, inclusive of the use of informants, often rooted in false or incomplete information or driven by rank prejudice (Medsger 2014).

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover launched an ultimately unsuccessful manhunt to locate the burglars, while Attorney General John Mitchell sought to dissuade journalists from disclosing the contents of the stolen documents on bogus claims that doing so would compromise the national defense (Medsger 1971, A1, A11; “FBI Asks” (1971) Subsequent news coverage of the “incredibly embarrassing exposure of FBI domestic counterintelligence practices was very extensive” (Davis 1992, 20) in both print and broadcast media. Public television programing first addressed the escalating criticism of the FBI and its leader in a May 1971 episode of The Advocates, a series co-produced by Boston’s WGBH and Los Angeles’ KCET that staged debates over current issues. In the FBI episode, guests debated whether Hoover should be replaced as FBI director, a position he had held since 1924. Without directly mentioning the Media burglary, proponents of replacing Hoover pointed to multiple reasons to oust him from leadership, including his massive surveillance operation, his “unhealthy preoccupation with subversion,” the bureau’s alienation of Black and youth groups, and its collection of private, incriminating information about public figures to discredit, humiliate, or control them.²⁵

The episode of The Advocates is something of a window into the conflicting relationship between the media and the FBI in 1971. The FBI provided National Review publisher William Rusher, who was to argue the case on behalf of Hoover, with material from the bureau inaccessible to other participants.²⁶ One of the “witnesses” called to support Hoover was Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., the actor who starred in the TV series The F.B.I., over which Hoover and the FBI were “completely in charge” (Powers 1978, 485). The opposition to Hoover included syndicated columnist Jack Anderson, whose “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column appeared in over 1,000 newspapers; a muckraking journalist who gained notoriety for exposing high-level scandals and improprieties, Anderson had turned his sights on Hoover and the bureau’s range of illegal and unethical activities (Feldstein 2010). The episode, in which advocates of Hoover conflated criticisms of the bureau with attacks on law and order, pitted the heroic version of the FBI long cultivated in the media with accusations that the bureau misused its tremendous power to spy on and harass US citizens.

This escalating attention to the FBI’s counterintelligence programs inspired Jacobs and his co-producer Saul Landau to do a segment for Dream Machine on the bureau. They began working in June 1971. The heart of their segment was interviews with Grimm, Sannes, and Desmond. Grimm stated he had been recruited to work for the FBI after he had been arrested for drug violations; he alleged that FBI agents encouraged him to set fires at the University of Alabama to “crush the rebellion on campus” and to create local conditions to allow for state troopers to arrest students.²⁷ Also recruited after being arrested on drug charges, Desmond alleged that the FBI and the Seattle police encouraged him, inclusive of supplying him with money to purchase items, to aid local revolutionaries to bomb a Seattle post office. Sannes stated that the FBI asked him to infiltrate a local group, participate in the bombing of a bridge, and assure that the individuals involved died in the explosion. Unlike Grimm and Desmond, Sannes had volunteered to work for the FBI. Jacobs’ segment referenced the stolen Media files to underline how the young men’s testimony was consistent with bureau practices targeting the Left. ²⁸

The segment augmented revelations already publicized by print and broadcast journalists. Alabama newspapers had carried articles since September 1970 that rehearsed Grimm’s allegations that the FBI had recruited him to infiltrate a student group and offered corroborating evidence of the veracity of his charges (“Attorneys Charge” 1970, 2A; Jean 1970, 4; “ACLU Attorney” 1970, 13; “Hoover Denies” 1970, 34). News articles beginning in September 1970 also suggested that Desmond, along with the Seattle police and the FBI, had entrapped the defendants in a Seattle post office bombing (“Seattle Three” 1970, 4; “FBI Denies” 1971, 23). Sannes in particular had been the subject of many interviews, including a June segment on NBC news (NBC Evening 1971) and a June New York Times article (Kifner 1971, 41). Part of the outsized attention Sannes received owed to an affidavit he submitted during the “Seattle Seven” conspiracy trial in which he claimed that he spied on and relayed the defense strategies of the accused to FBI special agents (“Man Admits” 1971, 36; “Pitkin Denies” 1971, 47; “Seattle Seven” 1971, 22; “Affidavit Swears” 1971, 14). Jacobs’ segment, as had the newspaper articles about the men, named their contacts in the FBI and the police.

From the outset, Jacobs and the production team at Dream Machine sought FBI participation and responses. The initial overture, in an August 1971 letter to Hoover from Dream Machine executive producer Alvin Perlmutter, was unfruitful; Hoover refused his own or any agent’s participation.²⁹ In September, NET counsel John Reiser sent letters to Hoover and to each of the named agents and officers specifying the charges made in the episode and offering a chance to respond.³⁰ NET did not receive responses until early October, nearly a month later. In letters to NET, the named agents asserted the charges were false, libelous and malicious³¹; in his letter, Hoover maintained the charges were “totally and absolutely false in each and every particular” and signaled he was referring this matter to the Attorney General and Department of Justice.³² Agents from the FBI’s NY office subsequently visited NET’s and WNET’s offices ostensibly to verify receipt of Hoover’s and the agent’s letters. Despite the apparent denials of the agents, Perlmutter, Willis, and Kobin experienced this visit as an attempt to intimidate NET into not running the segment.³³ In receipt of the letters, Jacobs and his team immediately revised the introduction and conclusion of the segment to incorporate the denials and to include additional corroborating information because of them. NET called in these changes to PBS on October 5. That evening, PBS announced it would not air the segment.³⁴

Controversy swirled quickly around the decision to censor. Remarkably, responses to PBS’s decision—in the press, on public television, by members of Congress—focused on the intra-sector power struggle between NET and PBS and on the specter of public television’s political timidity in the face of government pressure (Shepard 1971, 3; Green 1971, G29; O’Connor 1971c, D19; “PBS, NET, and the FBI” 1971, 127). The substance of the Jacobs report, and its allegations of severe FBI misconduct, was at best peripheral to debates over the regulation of public television content in an era of federal funding.

The apotheosis of this framing was the premiere telecast of WNET’s Behind the Lines on October 8 which focused on the controversy. The episode opened with the original version of Jacobs’ FBI segment and ended with the revised version that incorporated the FBI’s response. In between was a lively debate between Gunn, Jacobs, Perlmutter, and Kobin, and a panel of print and broadcast journalists about PBS’s decision to pull the segment. The questions the episode addressed—and the frame through which viewers were asked to see the FBI segment—were about what constituted responsible journalism and what the future of public television portends. The men debated whether and how a journalist like Jacobs, through a production center like NET, could or should produce such a segment to be aired on a show like The Great American Dream Machine. At the core of the debate was whether Dream Machine was an appropriate venue for a segment making such strong allegations, if Jacobs had done his due diligence in his reporting, whether and how print and television journalism differed, and whose judgment on these questions—PBS’s or the producers’—should prevail.³⁵

The episode and the press coverage of this incident amplified existing questions about the editorial autonomy of the public broadcasting sector. It addressed a central concern that had hovered over the hearings on the PBA over the unresolved question of political interference without an insulated funding stream. Though Gunn insisted repeatedly that PBS acted because of its assessment of the quality and placement of the segment, much of the press coverage raised the question of government interference. The coverage also identified competing visions of public television. In defending his decision to censor the Jacobs report, Gunn maintained that the allegations against the FBI deserved more consideration and deliberation and it was inappropriate to dedicate only in a twelve-minute segment to the charges situated within an episode also featuring a motorcycle-riding daredevil.³⁶ Gunn’s vision aligned with how noncommercial television long had treated public affairs controversies, which often included panel discussions to debate the merits, implications, and context of the issue at hand. Series like Dream Machine sought to displace precisely this sort of ponderous contemplation. If public television was to matter, it would need viewers. If it was to be an alternative to commercial television, it needed not only to experiment and to innovate but to highlight perspectives, sensibilities, and topics avoided by the commercial networks. In many respects, the fight over Dream Machine was a battle over whether this was indeed what public television ought to become.

Yet the reaction that perhaps that mattered the most was that of local stations. To examine press coverage of the controversy is to encounter excoriations of PBS’s decision. To read the responses of local station managers is to find substantial appreciation for PBS’s intervention. Slater received a series of messages immediately after Gunn pulled the segment commending the decision and celebrating PBS’s advocacy for local stations.³⁷ PBS had functioned, in other words, as many local stations had hoped it would, and their approval cemented PBS’s authority to regulate the content distributed across the sector.

Conclusion

The full extent of the FBI’s criminal activities–for which its surveillance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s sex life and its anonymous letter exhorting him to commit suicide have functioned as illustrative examples—would become widely known five years after the Dream Machine censorship controversy. The senate’s 1975 Church Committee’s investigation of US intelligence agencies exposed staggering examples of illegal surveillance, infiltration, harassment, and abuse implemented under the FBI’s counterintelligence, or COINTELPRO, program (Schwarz Jr and Huq 2007, 21–49). The reporting on the bureau in the early 1970s, including Jacobs’s segment, was but a brief glimpse into widespread bureau misconduct. The allegations of Sannes, Grimm, and Desmond were just the tip of the iceberg.

Jacobs’ story, like much of the reporting after the Media burglary, represented an emergent approach to reporting on the FBI, one that rubbed up against residual deference to an agency that had long controlled its public image. Its inclusion as a segment on the Great American Dream Machine, which positioned public television programing as innovative and irreverent, confronted extant ideas about the sector’s politics and tone. This collision of circumstance led not only to the censorship of the segment, but to a practice of content regulation in the public television sector that served to neutralize this alternate vision of its potential.

This moment in the history of US public television further underlines how debates over censorship can function as their own form of content regulation. The fight over the Jacobs segment spoke to generational and political clashes within the public television sector and to generational and political clashes over journalists’ relationship to the national security state. That this intramural fight defined the public response to Jacobs’ story, rather than its revelations on FBI illegal activity, illuminates how the act of censorship can doubly operate to silence speech and to redirect public attention to the operations of media institutions themselves.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Allison Perlman

Notes

Author Biography

Allison Perlman is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies and History at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Public Interests: Media Advocacy and Struggles Over US Television (Rutgers UP, 2016). She currently is working on a history of National Educational Television (NET).

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