R.I.P.: Arthur Singer Jr., 'Father' Of Public TV

Arthur L. Singer Jr., who became an unheralded father of public television in the late 1960s after commercial networks were famously accused of broadcasting a “vast wasteland” of programs, died on Wednesday at his home in Westport, Conn. He was 90, reports The NY Times.

Arthur L Singer Jr

In the formative years of government- and subscriber-funded public television and radio, Mr. Singer was said to have been instrumental in galvanizing federal officials, philanthropies and academics to seed the public airwaves with quality programming and to finance future development.

His efforts came in the wake of a speech in 1961 by Newton N. Minow, the newly named Federal Communications Commission chairman, to a roomful of 2,000 television executives in Washington, in which he dismissed their product as a “vast wasteland.”

According to Steven Schindler, writing in “Casebook for the Foundation: A Great American Secret” (2007), it was Mr. Singer, as executive assistant at the Carnegie Corporation of New York, who persuaded its president, John W. Gardner, in 1965 to create a commission that, with the endorsement of the White House, would study the future of educational television.

The 15-member Carnegie Commission on Educational Television would produce a report, “Public Television: A Program for Action,” that laid the groundwork for the Public Broadcasting Act, which President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law in 1967, setting up the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which would seed the formation of PBS and NPR and an infusion of high-quality programming.