Columbia's Promise documentary on WMPT as another example of the importance of public television

The past entry "Culture planning at the metropolitan scale should include funding for "local" documentary film making" makes the point that "community" cultural plans should cover media and the codification and presentation of local history in documentary film, using examples of how PBS stations often produce and/or broadcast such programs.

One beneficial result of the Washington area being the junction of "three states" (or two states and a district) is having three separate public television stations, one in DC, one in Maryland, and one in Virginia.

Of the three, Maryland's WMPT, which is a network of stations across the state, six in total, is the most "locally focused" in that they produce a number of programs specifically about the state, including "Direct Connection" on social matters, "State Circle" on Maryland state politics, "Chesapeake Collectibles," a local version of "Antiques Roadshow" and my two favorites, "Maryland Farm and Harvest" and "Outdoors Maryland," about agriculture and "nature."

In addition, like most over-the-air television broadcasting stations, with the switch from analog to digital television, they have three additional subchannels.  They program them with the PBS Kids feed, Create, oriented to "do it yourself," and NHK World, the English language broadcast service of Japan's primary television network.

WMPT shows local and national documentaries outside of the standard PBS programs like "American Experience," on their secondary channel primarily, but also on the main channel.

Both WETA, based in Virginia, and MPT also produce some "national programs" for PBS overall, but WETA is one of the key flagships, originating programs developed by Ken Burns among others, although WETA does produce some local programs, mostly on Washington, DC (e.g., "Washington in the 1990s") and interstitial programs like "WETA neighborhoods," which isn't limited to DC proper and on the arts.

But WETA being DC and nationally focused ends up stinting, in my opinion, when it comes to programs about Virginia, which is just as interesting as Maryland.

Other PBS affiliates in Virginia do produce programs about Virginia, such as the "Virginia Currents" program produced by Richmond's Idea Stations, but they are more likely to be rebroadcast on DC's WHUT, affiliated with Howard University, or sometimes WMPT.

DC's local news and history too, is probably underserved, by public television, because of WETA and WHUT having multiple priorities, and the general public television focus on DC is its place as the national capital and home to the federal government.  Then again, because of WHUT, there is a much greater array of African-American history and culture programming than there would be on "local" tv otherwise.

DC needs a show like "Virginia Currents," which is more broadly focused than "Maryland Farm and Harvest" and "Outdoors Maryland," which have a similar but more narrowly focused approach.

(There used to be some other educational tv stations in Northern Virginia, nominally affiliated with PBS, called Megahertz, but they sold off their over-the-air broadcast frequencies, and as a result they don't have "must carry" requirements and so their programming schedule is no longer widely available in the DC area.)

WHUT, owned by Howard University, an HBCU or historically black college/university and an educational institution is interesting in that it is less inclined to run PBS's standard schedule Sunday-Wednesday, and it runs more programs that cover African-American and political matters more generally, such as "Democracy Now."

Besides a number of programs focused on the Chesapeake Bay that have been running--and WMPT every year has a "Chesapeake Bay Week" featuring such programs--one locally-focused documentary on WMPT of late that should be of interest to urban planners is "Columbia's Promise," a history of Columbia, Maryland, a planned community that is technically not a city, created by famed developer James Rouse.


I keep missing it when it's being broadcast, but having awakened very early this morning, I watched it online.

Columbia, which celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2017, is a planned community in Howard County--south of Baltimore and north of DC--with planning roots in the "Garden City" movement, with the aim from the outset of being both mixed use, fully integrated, and community- and civically-centric.

It's an example well known in planning circles ("James W. Rouse's Legacy of Better Living Through Design," Smithsonian Magazine; The Jim Rouse Story," Columbia's 50th) and has some lessons about development in the suburbs.

He aimed to show a way different from sprawl, by mixing uses at the city and neighborhood scale--at the big scale with shopping, entertainment (e.g., the Merriweather Post Pavilion concert facility), office, and even industrial alongside residential, and at the neighborhood scale, around schools and integrating civic and other functions in what would otherwise be exclusively retail community-scaled shopping centers.

Ideas they developed concerning schools ended up reshaping the County's school system overall, and Howard County is now known nationally for the quality of its school system.

It has some lessons that aren't all good--even though it has a superior system of trails and paths within the community it's connected to the rest of the metropolitan area by automobile, it's not integrated into the region's high capacity transit system ("From the files: transit planning in Baltimore County"), and over time some of the neighborhood shopping centers have failed because with changes in the retail sector, such centers need to draw on larger populations and nine centers is too many for nine neighborhoods.

But it's a fascinating story regardless that is worth watching and even reading about, such as Better Places, Better Lives: A Biography of James Rouse, by Joshua Olson, which watching the documentary has motivated me to do.

A lesson from MPT about operating at larger scales when you're not in one of the nation's biggest cities.  What probably helps Maryland Public Television is the scale and heft it has from operating as a statewide system, even though Maryland is a smaller state.

By comparison, Virginia doesn't have a statewide PBS group, and therefore certain parts of the state are under-covered and underserved by public television as a result, including and surprisingly, Northern Virginia, the most populous section of the state.

By contrast, stations in "big cities," such as KCET/PBS SoCal in California, WNET in New York City, and WTTW in Chicago produce a number of locally-focused programs that cover history and/or current events, such as KCET's "Artbound" or the four nights per week  news program in Chicago, "Chicago Tonight," Mondays through Thursdays.