Dean and former CPB Chairman Ernest J. Wilson, III, Ph., D. (Neon Tommy)

Wilson spent 10 years on the board, serving under presidents Bill Clinton, George Bush, and Barack Obama. He was chairman in 2011, his final year on the board. Wilson departed after serving three terms.

Wilson brought new ideas to public broadcasting, such as his three D's, which remain in place today. Obama has nominated Jannette Lake Dates to replace him. From 1993 to 2012, she was the dean of the Howard University School of Communications and before that, she was associate dean.

Neon Tommy: The Corporation for Public Broadcasting gives money to public TV and radio stations in America. How does that work?

Wilson: In 1967, a number of foundations and other educators got together. They wanted to do something more with the media of television because they thought it could be educational. They convinced President Lyndon Johnson to introduce in Congress legislation to create a public broadcasting station system. The idea of giving government money to affect the airwaves made some people a little nervous, so what they did was to create the following system. Congress and the American people give about a half a billion dollars, channeled through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which gives about three quarters of it to television broadcasting and about one quarter of it to radio broadcasting. The CPB is supposed to be kind of a firewall to prevent Congress from telling the broadcasters exactly what they should do, so it’s like checks and balances. It is a smart system, with some limitations.

How is the money shared by TV and radio stations?

Probably 70 percent of the radio funds go to National Public Radio and the three quarters that goes to television goes to PBS, Public Broadcasting System. In addition, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting gives grants to three or four hundred stations around the country for them to use for other purposes, like KCET or KOCE, or KPCC or KCRW on the radio side.

Do you know why your position was filled just now?

The board has nine slots and the way the legislation works for this board, as with many boards in Washington, is that the majority party gets to appoint more people than the minority party. So when the Democrats are in control of the White House or the Congress, they get five appointments and the minority party, which would be the Republicans, get four. There’s supposed to be nine people on the board, but because of a lot of politics the two parties block one another’s nominees, so instead of having nine people on the board, I think there’re now three or four.

How did you manage to be a board member on the East Coast and a dean on the West Coast?

This is the chairman of the board. It’s not the chief executive officer. This is the person who runs it on a day-to-day basis. The board only meets four times a year. They usually have one or two meetings back in Washington. The board has also met in Alaska, Mississippi, Louisiana. We’ve met on an Indian Reservation in the Midwest, we even met in Hollywood. One of the things that I introduced was working committees, so that some of the work could be divided up.

How did being on the board take time away from being dean? How many days a week or out of the year were you out of the office? What did you get out of your service?

Well if there are four meetings a year, and each one is a day and a half, that’s 10 days away for those meetings. This is a way the university and the school and me can contribute to something that’s very much in the public interest. I feel very strongly about public service media. I support it. It’s essential for democracy, not for just markets, but the democratic conduct of the United States of America. One of the responsibilities of deans at schools like USC is to contribute back. It’s a way that the Annenberg and the USC brand can be made known to people in Washington. I learn things about the broadcast industry and about public service, which I can then bring back and work with my students and work with my faculty too to affect our curriculum.

What are your thoughts of the Annenberg line continuing with the re-nomination of Bruce M. Ramer?

 It’s interesting. My predecessor as dean was also a member of the CPB Board, Dean Cowan. After I had been on the board for five or six years, an opening became available and Bruce Ramer was nominated, so he and I served together on the board. He’s also a member of the Board of Trustees of the University of Southern California and he’s a member of the Board of Councilors for the Annenberg School. Bruce brings a tremendous background of knowledge about broadcasting and about content production and movies and made a real contribution to the board. His term expired and he was just reappointed. I think it’s important that USC and certainly the Annenberg School are able to demonstrate that they have the breadth and expertise and the social commitment to work in an important field like broadcasting.

What do you believe was your biggest achievement while on the board?

It was clear to me that the media was going through a very stark, radical transition and that as with many government institutions, public broadcasting was moving, perhaps, too slowly to take advantage, for example, of the digital revolution. It’s the Corporation for Public Broadcasting [emphasis placed on “Broadcasting”] and what we talked about – I didn’t get a chance to complete this on my term – but I think it should be changed to the Corporation for Public Media. That’s the way that your generation certainly consumes a lot of information. I came up with what I call the three D’s. One was digital because this whole public broadcasting system needed to think in a more digital way. The digital world is much more interactive and you have to think in terms of interactivity, not just in terms of looking at something in one direction; people want to interact with their media, so I said we needed digital. Secondly, we needed more dialogue. Public broadcasting was talking to itself, it wasn’t talking to people in Silicon Valley or it wasn’t talking to people in L.A. about the new content, about new technologies, about new ways of thinking about the world, new business models. So we needed digital and we needed dialogue.

How did the emphasis on diversity, the third "D," come about?

If you look at a lot of the TV shows or listen to a lot of the radio programs, they don't have a lot of Latino content, Latino targeted content; they don't have a lot of Asian targeted content. They’re not a lot of shows about women and there were not a lot of shows about or content produced about African Americans. It’s very much of a white male orientation, historically, as it has been in other media, but because we don’t have the Nielsen Ratings to respond we could keep it kind of at arms length. As chairman of the board and working with my CEO, I said if this is public money that we’re getting from the Congress we should insist that all of the people that we give money to increase their dialogue, increase their commitment to digital technologies and new technologies and increase their commitment to diversity. I feel very proud this. If you go to their website now you will still see those three D’s are helping to guide the allocation of money and resources.

How deep within public broadcasting organizations does your idea of three D's go?

That’s also been picked up by NPR. They have four D’s, so just speaking personally, it’s nice to have a sense of accomplishment where one can see one’s own work reflected in public policy and the way that resources are allocated in an area that I care about. I care about diversity; I care about digital work; and I care about dialogue and communication and then a couple of other things. I proposed and shared the first new media committee that we had at CPB. I proposed and chaired the first public engagement committee that we had at CPB. I learned a lot and I think I represented the University well and I like to think that I contributed something to public broadcasting.

When Mitt Romney said he was going to cut Big Bird, was he going to cut the Corporation for Public Broadcasting? Is that what he meant?

Yeah, it was a metaphor. He was talking to Jim Lehrer and basically he said I would eliminate your job and I would also eliminate Big Bird. This is probably the fourth time I’ve lived through this. There are people who philosophically believe that the government shouldn’t be giving money to broadcasting. That’s just their philosophical view. There are other people who feel that over the past number of years that public broadcasting has been biased, it’s been politically biased toward liberals and that it’s not serving the American people. The CPB is kind of a bureaucratic  organization and nobody cares about it and they really shouldn’t. When the people think of public service media, they should think of All Things Considered; they should think of Story Corps. There’s something that we in the business call the driveway moment and the driveway moment happens when you are driving home, it’s raining, you’re late, you’re busy, you want to go in the house, but there’s something on NPR on the radio in the car, it’s I can’t leave, I gotta listen to this, finish this thing, whether its humorous or heart breaking. When people think of public broadcasting, whether it’s PBS or NPR, those are just initials that nobody really cares about. What they care about is the content that will touch their heart, that will make them want to be better citizens, that will talk about ways they can be better parents or friends or brothers or sisters.

What is the tangible value of public broadcasting?

I’ve been to reservations and I’ve been to Alaska and in some of these places these are the only broadcast stations and so if you cut Big Bird, if you cut these educational programs then a lot of the preschool education goes away. Society has to pay the cost of young people from modest means or poor backgrounds not getting the kind of training that they’re getting for free or each American pays like a $1.32; Britain it’s like ten, twenty times that, so I think it’s a really valuable service.

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