The Center for Social Media’s latest research report, Public Television Viewers and Public-Purpose Programming, provides new hope for public media’s future.
The study, authored by Center director Pat Aufderheide and graduate fellow Echo Xie, analyzes the responses of hundreds of public television viewers who answered an open letter published by Kartemquin Films. Kartemquin had been alerted by a Current article on the consequences of a scheduling switch when PBS kicked two series featuring independent documentary work off the core prime-time schedule. The article showed that Independent Lens had drastically lost viewership when its time slot was shifted to a no-man’s land on Thursday nights (when public TV stations usually program non-PBS material). Read more...