PUBLIC TELEVISION: AMERICA'S FIRST STATION
An Intimate Account

Public Television: America’s First Station reviews:
     
            “Public television has become so much a part of American life that it now seems as if it has always existed. Dr. Hawes has thoroughly researched the origins and history of KUHT-TV (Channel 8) in Houston, Texas from its May 25, 1953 dedication to the present. This first station had a difficult time with programming, technology and financing. Not every person or group shared the vision of those first educational television pioneers, and not everybody could foresee the future of the new communication medium. Hawes ends with a chapter on the challenges now facing public television from cable television, computer programs and the proposed cuts in Federal funds. The book is illustrated with photographs and has an index.”
      —Marcia Muth, “Book Chat,” Enchantment
     
     
            “On May 25, 1952, Houston, Texas station KUHT-TV was dedicated and at 5:00 P.M. went on the air. In those days it was an “educational,” not a “public,” TV station and it was primarily connected with a university community. In 1967, KUHT-TV was a founding member of the Public Broadcasting Service and continues strongly today in the Houston market. Its story is inspirational and illustrative of the struggle for serious media in our culture.”
      —Bookman News
     
     
            “Most students majoring in mass communication learn in an introductory course that KUHT-TV in Houston became America’s first noncommercial television station in 1953. What author William Hawes adds to this well known fact is a perspective that compares the 1950s goal to make instructional television an “electronic blackboard” with the Public Broadcasting System in operation today.
            “Hawes, who taught telecourses as early as 1959, outlines KUHT’s origins and growth from the early days when the Joint Committee on Educational Television was formed to explore the educational possibilities of this still-new medium. The account stretches into the 1990s, when PBS stations were busily redefining their role as competitors for a shrinking audience. During that forty year period, many of the early teaching missions of stations like KUHT were taken over by other sources of instruction such as the public school systems in Houston and other cities. The constant search for money to finance community television and provide local programming forms a recurrent theme and a frame of reference for comparisons between public television stations and their usually wealthy, commercial cousins. As the author points out, commercial station owners even begrudged the FCC decision to set aside what broadcasters saw as an ‘exorbitant’ number of more than 250 stations dedicated to educational television.
            “Because the bulk of the writing focuses on KUHT’s role in the Houston community, readers curious to know more about how this station’s original educational mission can be compared to the distance learning aspirations of today’s Internet-based teaching strategies will find few answers from Hawes. It would be interesting to know if this new mass medium will change its content as much as public television has over the past forty-five years. A section on how the lessons learned from the 1950s experiment with instructional television at KUHT could be applied to today’s distance learning might be very useful to educators.
            “The author’s close relationship with key figures at KUHT and the University of Houston, where he joined the faculty in 1965, offers a richness of anecdotal support to this evolutionary story of a constant fight for financial survival. The details of KUHT’s license challenge based on accusations that the station did not adequately represent the entire Houston “community” will be instructive to those who may believe that only the executives of commercial stations ever have to worry about license renewal. Communication faculty and students everywhere can learn something from KUHT’s continuing questions about its mission and the role of university-related television in American broadcasting.”
      —Larry Elliott, Review of Texas Books