The Vanishing Vision - by James Day (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

This spirited history of public television offers an insider's account of its topsy-turvy forty-year odyssey. James Day, a founder of San Francisco's KQED and a past president of New York's WNET, provides a vivid and often amusing behind-the-screens history. Day tells how a program producer, desperate to locate a family willing to live with television cameras for seven months, borrowed a dime--and a suggestion--from a blind date and telephoned the Louds of Santa Barbara. The result was the mesmerizing twelve-hour documentary An American Family. Day relates how Big Bird and his friends were created to spice up Sesame Street when test runs showed a flagging interest in the program's "live-action" segments. And he describes how Frieda Hennock, the first woman appointed to the FCC, overpowered the resistance of her male colleagues to lay the foundation for public television.

Day identifies the particular forces that have shaped public television and produced a Byzantine bureaucracy kept on a leash by an untrusting Congress, with a fragmented leadership that lacks a clearly defined mission in today's multimedia environment. Day calls for a bold rethinking of public television's mission, advocating a system that is adequately funded, independent of government, and capable of countering commercial television's "lowest-common-denominator" approach with a full range of substantive programs, comedy as well as culture, entertainment as well as information.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1995.

From the Back Cover

"A monumental achievement. He has written a comprehensive history of public broadcasting that reads like a 'who done it.' Sometimes a detached observer and sometimes a key participant, Day provides the reader with a riveting account of the events, the heroes, the villains and bit players that make up the compelling and complex story of public broadcasting."--Joan Ganz Cooney, Chairman, Executive Committee, Children's Television Workshop "A lively, highly readable, important account of the idealists, bumblers, bureaucrats, well-meaning incompetents, and dedicated souls who built America's flawed and perpetually endangered public television system. James Day is one of the giants of public television's not-so-distant early days, and he provides a knowing, fascinating, and intelligent history of the little television system that has tried to be everything to everybody, has satisfied practically nobody, was built on a foundation of no visible means of financial support, and is more desperately needed now than ever."--Lawrence K. Grossman, former president of PBS and NBC News and author of The Electronic Republic "James Day's fascinating history of public television is the very best way I know of to understand that glorious, complicated, frustrating, and utterly American institution. It comes at a time when PBS is facing its greatest challenges and could well be the reference guide as public television approaches the millennium."--Ken Burns, producer of "The Civil War" and "Baseball" "The long, unfinished struggle to create--against daunting odds--an alternative television not tethered to market forces is James Day's theme in this sweeping chronicle. This story--one of achievement eroded by internal dissention but, more significantly, by political log-rolling and chicanery--needs to be told, and Day does so with panache."--Erik Barnouw, author of Tube of Plenty

About the Author

James Day was cofounder of the public TV station KQED in San Francisco and the president of WNET in New York. He was Professor Emeritus of Television and Radio at Brooklyn College, City University of New York.