As one of TV’s highest-ranking women in the 1970s, she worked to broaden the audience for public television. Chloe Wellingham Aaron, who, when she became senior vice president for programming at PBS in 1976, was “believed to be the highest-ranking woman executive at the network level in the history of television,” as the announcement of her hiring put it, died on Feb. 29 at her home in Washington. She was 81.
Emily Eliza Wall, her goddaughter, said the cause was cancer and related complications. During her four and a half years in the PBS post, Ms. Aaron sought ways for the service to compete against the big three commercial networks that existed at the time, all the while fighting its perpetual budgetary woes. She made a particular mark with arts programming, starting, among other programs, “Live From the Metropolitan Opera” (also known as “The Metropolitan Opera Presents”).
She helped PBS establish a national identity. When she arrived, the local affiliates that made up the Public Broadcasting Service were largely going their own way in programming; Ms. Aaron brought uniformity to the prime-time hours, as The New York Times noted in 1981. “She set about persuading the PBS affiliates, a fractious and independent group, to allow ‘common carriage’ four nights each week (Sunday to Wednesday) between 8 and 11 p.
m. ,” the newspaper wrote. “It was a turning point for PBS, something that had never happened before. In effect, the affiliates agreed to yield their prime evening hours and permit PBS to create a national network.
” Ms. Aaron implemented that system in 1979, and that October more than half of all television households in the United States watched at least some PBS programs, the service’s best showing ever to that point. Ms. Aaron was conscious of ratings, which had not been a priority at PBS, since the service, with public financing, did not have to worry about impressing advertisers.
“There are people in public television who think the numbers should never be mentioned,” she told The Associated Press in 1978. “I think that’s an irresponsible attitude. Once you schedule a program, and once you promote it, then if nobody watches it, you’re wasting people’s money. ” Chloe Wellingham was born on Oct.
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9, 1938, in Santa Monica, Calif. , to John and Grace (Lloyd) Wellingham. Her mother was a real estate broker, and her father was an interior designer. After graduating from Occidental College in Los Angeles in 1961, she earned a master’s degree at George Washington University in Washington in 1962.
That same year she married David L. Aaron, who was just beginning his career in the Foreign Service. He would become a deputy national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter and, in the 1990s, ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
“In 1970 Ms.”
Aaron became director of the public media program of the National Endowment for the Arts, which put her in charge of the funding of film, television and radio projects. In that capacity she fostered the PBS series “Dance in America” and “Live From Lincoln Center,” among other efforts. “Live From Lincoln Center” made its debut in January 1976; six months later, Ms. Aaron was named to the PBS post.
After her first year and a half in that job, she told Broadcasting magazine that among her goals had been hiring more women and members of minority groups. “We really cheat ourselves” if the country’s diversity is not represented in cultural programming, she said. While at PBS Ms. Aaron was especially big on live programming, like the Metropolitan Opera series.
She was also willing to court controversy. In 1978, the PBS broadcast of “The California Reich,” a documentary about neo-Nazis in three communities in California, prompted wide debate about whether it was giving a platform to loathsome viewpoints. “How much attention, then, should be given to the neo‐Nazis and their doctrines of hate and divisiveness? ” John J.
O’Connor wrote in The Times. “The film makes implicit the opposite question: How easily can they be ignored? ” Ms. Aaron found herself on the opposite side of that argument in 1989.
After leaving the national PBS post in 1980, she was director of cultural and children’s programming at KQED in San Francisco, and in 1989 she became vice president for television at WNYC in New York. In that capacity she refused to broadcast a documentary called “Days of Rage: The Young Palestinians,” saying it was too one-sided in favor of the Palestinian viewpoint. Critics contended that she was trying to appease the station’s many Jewish donors. She left the WNYC job a year later.
In addition to Ms. Wall, Ms. Aaron is survived by her husband and a son, Tim Aaron. One of Ms.
Aaron’s causes after she left the PBS vice presidency was to find a way for PBS’s best programs to live on. “I was constantly getting calls from friends and viewers who said, ‘I missed an episode of “I, Claudius” or “Nova” — how can I see it again? ’” she told United Press International in 1988. “Sometimes I told them, ‘Well, the series will be scheduled again in 10 months, so check your local listings.
’ But in most cases, I didn’t have an answer, which was frustrating. ” The development of the VCR market in the 1980s changed that. In the late 1980s she helped secure grant money to make it cheaper for libraries to purchase copies of programs that were made available on videocassette in a series called Video Classics. Patrons could then borrow the tapes and revisit — or see for the first time — the programs, rescuing them from obscurity.
“Because these shows were so expensive to produce,” she said, “it seemed like a real waste of money — they went on the air four times and then they disappeared.
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