This collection contains materials collected and generated by the commission during its eighteen-month study, but it does not cover the activities of the small Carnegie Task Force and other bodies which led to the creation of Carnegie II, nor the implementation and/or impact of any of its recommendations.
Of the three groups of people involved with Carnegie II (commissioners, consultants, and professional staff), it is the activities of the staff that are best documented. The staff notes, correspondence, research materials, and reports make up the majority of the records, while the activities of the commissioners, especially William McGill, are primarily represented by their correspondence to the staff. The role of consultants is scattered throughout the collection.
Statements by witnesses and summaries of the testimony as well as agendas and related correspondence exist for many of the public hearings and for most of the special meetings. The documentation regarding the station surveys and visits is not complete, however. The largest portion of these collected materials deal with the visit to the Minnesota Public Radio Network and the trip to the British Broadcasting Corporation.
The BACKGROUND AND HISTORY series focuses on the publicity generated by the Commission and the final report. Included are clippings, press releases, photographs (in SHSW Sound and Visual Archives), and information on the public relations technique adopted by the commission. Similar information (also including photographs and a transcript of the proceedings) pertains to the release of the final report. For the report itself, the collection includes a copy of the final published volume which has been specially annotated to indicate the sources for factual assertions. There is, however, very little to document the evolution of the document during the drafting process, although further information on this may be found scattered within the internal memoranda.
CHRONOLOGY FILES consist of four files of correspondence and memoranda, each arranged chronologically. The arrangement is largely that which was used by the commission, and the distinction between the four categories is not precise. The main file is that of Sheila Mahony, the executive director. This file contains her incoming correspondence, some outgoing letters, and items routed to her by staff. Copies of some of William McGill's correspondence also appear here, but these items were probably selected for routing and do not reflect a complete record of McGill's correspondence. His correspondence was presumably part of files at Columbia University. Mahony's correspondence includes many letters to and from leaders in the public broadcasting community, although there are only scattered items pertaining to the participation of individual commissioners. (An exception is the lengthy commentary, November 28, 1977, prepared by John Gardner.)
The memoranda file, a chronological file of material circulated internally to the commission and the staff, is a much better source than the correspondence for studying the operation of the commission and for determining the rationale on which various policy issues were made.
The staff members files, which are subdivided alphabetically by name, contain a mixture of correspondence and memos to or from individual staff members. At the end of the section is a special file of memoranda concerning phone calls, interviews, and other contacts by staff with various broadcasting specialists.
The MEETING FILES contain documentation about regular commission meetings and hearings as well as special meetings sponsored by the commission or attended by members of the staff, all arranged together in chronological order. The files variously include agenda, memoranda, handwritten notes, background papers, and summaries of proceedings. For a few meetings (October 23, November 16, 1978) there are verbatim transcripts. In addition, there are transcripts of a few public hearings, and among these are presentations by such leaders in the profession as Joan Ganz Cooney (November 18, 1977) and Frank Mankiewicz and Fred Friendly (both May 19 20, 1978). Also filed here is a transcript of testimony presented by McGill and Walter Heller in 1979 in behalf of the commission at congressional hearings on broadcasting aspects of HR 3333.
The CLASSIFIED FILE is a weeded remnant of a file created by the commission staff for material related to their specialized investigations. This file is divided into: Radio, Instruction, Dissemination Task Force, Funding Task Force, Programming Task Force, Public Participation Task Force, and Miscellany. Within each of these categories the material was further subdivided, as required, into a numbered file of research reports prepared by staff or by consultants; research documentation, a numbered subject file; and memoranda. (The meeting files which were originally part of this classification scheme were removed to facilitate access.) Some categories have been eliminated through weeding, and in a few cases (indicated in the container list by the absence of identifying file numbers) items have been added. In all cases, the subject titles are those used by the commission.
Documentation on the Programming Task Force is particularly strong, including numerous cases studies of individual programs and series (such as Nova and The Adams Chronicles) and general programming operations. Also here are transcripts of interviews conducted by Nick DeMartino of broadcasting leaders such as Larry Grossman. The Radio file also includes a detailed case study of All Things Considered.
The SUBJECT FILES series consists of alphabetically arranged material not classified by the staff. The majority of the files here provide only fragmentary coverage. The chief exception are the Freedom of Information files which contain correspondence pertaining to the suit brought by the commission to discover the extent of President Nixon's politicization of public affairs programming.
