March is pledge time on PBS. Get ready for that fine slogan, "If PBS won't do it, who will?" Good question. But consider another: What if PBS does it half-assed? Today's case in point is Surviving the Bottom Line, the excellent special that PBS ran mostly in January. Catch it? Probably not. Though it was fed by PBS in a Friday-night position, most of the large-market public TV stations buried it in TV Siberia, Sunday afternoon. And they scattered it all over the time map, making promotion an uphill slog and sending "ignore me" signals to reviewers. They hid it, as a top former PBS producer not connected to Surviving put it, "like a bastard child at the wedding feast." Damage done to a single special isn't the end of the world. But the tale opens a little window into PBS. Unfortunately, we get a whiff of mission decay.

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Surviving the Bottom Line is a four-part examination of how the new American economy is working and not working for the middle class. The first hour looks at the new domination of Wall Street. We test, for example, the simple logic of Michael Price, a confident money manager whose machinations earned him and other shareholders billions when he pushed Chase Manhattan and Chemical into each other's arms. And at least 12,000 people out of work.

 The second segment looks at San Diego, a city whose prescription for the future has side effects. For one thing, it has become a citadel of temporary employment. The face I recall most clearly from the show belongs to Diane Fritts, once a well-paid quality-control inspector for General Dynamics. After the company shut its San Diego operation she landed at a subsidiary of Qualcomm, the hot telecommunications-equipment maker.

 Qualcomm, a major San Diego employer, has a dual workforce. Permanent hires are well paid and enjoy great benefits. The rest are temps, who labor only until the production process is honed enough to ship the work overseas. Fritts finds herself in the temp world and dying for "benefits, 401K, security," as she tells Hedrick Smith, the eminent and Pulitzered journalist who put Surviving together.

 When Fritts was hired she was told she'd become permanent in three months. In her first paycheck came a note saying that would take six months instead. Some time later "they called us in and they laid us off. About 600 of us." She got another temp job, again with the understanding that she'd be permanently hired. But again, she wasn't. "You have no idea how frustrating," she tells Smith. More striking than her words is the change in her demeanor between Smith's first interview with her in August and the second in October. She goes from warm to worn.

 In the third and fourth segments Smith turns positive, examining education reforms around the world that are successfully preparing people for the new economy, as well as innovative and job-producing management-union-community partnerships. It is sophisticated and compelling journalism, "combative, fast-paced, engrossing, and ultimately uplifting," as The Kansas City Star put it.

 That was one of just three reviews I found in Nexis.

 So who buried this show? Let's examine the crime scene. PBS's 349 highly independent stations have historically resisted being told when to run what. But over the years the wisdom of some common carriage prevailed, and by the '90s a compromise was worked out: the stations agreed to run most of the shows that PBS feeds to them in a protected core of prime time.

 On Fridays, that protected zone ends at 9 p.m., after Washington Week and Wall Street. When did PBS feed Surviving to its stations? At 9 p.m. on two Fridays, January 16 and 23, tossing the show alone into the deep woods. PBS executives know that many locals are moving to Friday Night Lite.

 So: Detroit's WTVS, which shoved Surviving to Sunday at four, ran a movie, The Lavender Hill Mob, at nine. KCET in Los Angeles, which moved Surviving to a ridiculous single four-hour Sunday slot, ran a repeat of The Great War. My own station, WNET in New York, ran a twenty-seven-year old French movie, stuffing Surviving into two Sundays at noon. Ward Chamberlin, its managing director, is straightforward: "Friday night turns out to be a lousy time for heavy, thoughtful, interesting pieces of significance. The audience is pooped out." Many stations tend to follow WNET's lead. Chamberlin concedes: "We checked around. Programmers talk among ourselves -- 'How are you going to schedule it? What are you doing with it?'"

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PBS types hate to have their devotion to public affairs questioned. They point, justifiably, to Frontline. And to the NewsHour and Washington Week in Review. But the god of ratings is clearly on the rise in a system created as an alternative to commercial values. At Chamberlin's station, overnight Nielsen reports are Xeroxed and passed around with excited handwritten notes, like "Casablanca did well with a 4.6 rating" and "Nature: The Joy of Pigs generated a strong 3.5 rating with a 6 share." Pigs are cool, but I can watch animals romp on the Discovery Channel. I can rent Bogart at Blockbuster. PBS is supposed to entertain, too, but what makes it really valuable is great art and journalism that we just can't get elsewhere. Original and deep field reporting and analysis on contemporary American life remains quite rare. When PBS has something like Surviving the Bottom Line it ought to fight bare knuckled for it. Or it ought to alter its slogan.

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