October 1970 - KCET Joins PBS

On October 5, 1970, the new Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) television network officially went on the air, with KCET as one of its 190 charter member stations.

Following the passage of the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act and the creation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provided a reliable source of funding for the National Educational Television (NET) network, which had been in operation since 1954 and was primarily funded by the Ford Foundation. PBS assumed much of NET's programming, such as the children's shows "Sesame Street," "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood," and the KCET-produced, "Hollywood Television Theater."

As KCET had already been an NET-affiliated station since 1964, the transition from NET to PBS was relatively low-key, the only exception was the new on-air system cue that bore the voice of actor Macdonald Carey who said, "This is PBS, the Public Broadcasting Service," over the network's temporary text-only logo. The September 1970 issue of Gambit, KCET's member magazine at the time, published a three-page preview article on the new network and its fall programming schedule.

Unlike the commercial networks, PBS does not produce its own programming nor own any of its own stations. All content is produced by member stations, production companies like the Children's Television Workshop (now Sesame Workshop), or syndication providers such as American Public Television. As a member station, KCET produced countless educational, cultural, and arts programs for the network, including a number of installments of "American Playhouse" and "Nova."

KCET also became the network's west coast relay center, transmitting programs from the Arlington, Virginia base to other PBS stations in the west. KCET served in that role until October 1977, when it was switched to the Rocky Mountain Relay Center in Colorado.

During the 1970s, KCET had relatively close ties with PBS; Jim Loper, KCET's Vice President and General Manager in 1970, and President/CEO from 1971 to 1983, served as the Chairman of PBS' board for most of the '70s. The founding president of the network, Hartford N. Gunn, Jr, worked under Loper as KCET's general manager from 1979 to 1983. However, KCET leadership in the following decades confronted various issues with the network, from its stature among an East Coast-dominated field of select member stations who produce the majority of the network's programs, to its membership fee structure. At the end of 2010, KCET ended its affiliation with PBS.