KCET Pays Price in Flap With Church : * Television: Channel 28 reports a loss of nearly $55,000 after the L.A. Archdiocese suggested withdrawing support for the station in a dispute over ‘Stop the Church.’

KCET Channel 28 has lost an estimated $54,744 in contributions as a result of Catholic Cardinal Roger Mahony’s call four weeks ago for subscribers to consider withdrawing their support from the public-television station.

At the same time, the Los Angeles Archdiocese--which lashed out at KCET in an attempt to stop the station from airing “Stop the Church,” a short film about a protest against the church’s policies on AIDS at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York--has been roundly criticized for attempting to interfere with the station’s freedom of speech and for urging economic sanctions against public TV.

For KCET, the losses come at a time when public-television stations across the nation are suffering from a drop in contributions that has accompanied the recession. While industry executives would like to believe that economic weapons such as the withdrawal of support encouraged by the cardinal would not affect programming decisions, some worry that such sanctions are becoming increasingly difficult to withstand.

Despite their public relations and financial losses, however, officials at KCET and the Archdiocese say they would handle the situation the same way were it to come up again.

“Any attempt at curtailing (KCET’s) income source, or threatening it, is very serious,” said Barbara Goen, KCET’s vice president for public information. “It probably has greater significance in hard times than in flush times. But does it mean we change the way we make program decisions? No, it doesn’t.”

Father Gregory Coiro, spokesman for the Archdiocese, said that he is still hopeful that KCET will apologize for airing “Stop the Church,” which was screened as part of a 90-minute discussion program about church policies on AIDS and the gay-rights activist group ACT UP, which made the film.

At the very least, Coiro said, Mahony intends to wait until the station develops a formal policy about programs that criticize religion before he will begin to support the station again.

Coiro acknowledged that the church’s stand against KCET has caused some public-relations problems and has put the Archdiocese on the defensive about its ministries to people with AIDS and the gay community.

Still, he said, the Archdiocese had no choice but to react the way it did to “Stop the Church,” which Mahony has likened to a religious hate crime. The 23-minute film shows scenes of Catholic worship against the musical backdrop of the satirical song, “The Vatican Rag,” and depicts AIDS activists disrupting Mass and shouting, “You’re killing us!” to New York Cardinal John O’Connor.

“There have been some good things that have come out of (the controversy) from my perspective,” Coiro said. “The huge Catholic population in Southern California has been awakened to the fact that there is such a thing as anti-Catholicism, and there are people who hate our church.”

While the Archdiocese appears to have won in terms of dollars, the figures are somewhat misleading: As of Sept. 30, KCET said that only 365 people canceled their memberships, which the station estimates were worth about $21,900. So many people pledged extra money to help KCET fend off anticipated boycotts--their contributions totaled $65,156--that the station would have actually made money on the deal had not businessman George Pla pulled back a massive pledge of $98,000.

“The diversity of support that public television gets helps to provide insulation,” said Jennifer Lawson, PBS’ executive vice president for national programming and promotion services. “Viewer support, coupled with federal, state and local government support and corporate monies, really does help public television, particularly in a case like this.”

“With the exception of somebody who wields a $100,000 checkbook,” agreed Greg Sherwood, director of communications at public-television station KQED in San Francisco, “we are insulated from any but the largest (boycotts).”

But the fact is that, in this case, somebody did wield a $100,000 checkbook. And Pla--who resigned as a member of KCET’s board of directors over “Stop the Church”--has also withdrawn the support of his company, the Cordoba Corp.

Whenever that happens, some executives worry, public television moves one step closer to being forced to cave in to the demands of special-interest groups.

“Sometimes you swallow very hard and you say, ‘Are we going to put our lights out for this kind of (controversial program)?’ ” said William Baker, president of WNET in New York.

WNET has just three days of operating capital in reserve, Baker said, and “if all funding stopped, we could go three days and we would go under.”

KQED has experienced firsthand the way that finances can force a station away from controversial programming, Sherwood said.

Sherwood estimated that KQED lost $100,000 in donations because of individuals and pro-death penalty groups who were offended by the station’s unsuccessful court fight to win the right to videotape an execution.

“When we lost our First Amendment case and there was the option to appeal, (there was a) concern that this was costing us money,” Sherwood said--a concern that played a big part in the decision not to appeal. “I remember our marketing director saying if we stayed in the First Amendment case that we would lose $70,000 in memberships, and urging us to get out.”

Already, Sherwood said, managers of public-television stations in smaller communities have said that programs like “Stop the Church” or “Tongues Untied,” a film about black homosexuals that nearly 100 public-television stations refused to run earlier this year, are “too controversial” for their markets.

And that, Sherwood says, is a euphemism for the fear that some in their communities would withhold funds. Indeed, before KCET decided to broadcast “Stop the Church,” gay-rights activists threatened to tie up the station’s phone lines during the August pledge drive if it didn’t put the program on.

But Thomas Fanella, president of KTEH in San Jose, said he believes that while stations might indeed feel the impact of economic attacks, the sense of mission among public-television professionals is so strong that virtually all would resist the urge to cut back on controversial programming.

“The subject of controversial programming and how we treat it has certainly been discussed openly and roundly, and in small and large groups” among public-television executives, Fanella said. “I have never once in all those discussions ever heard the question of whether or not a large pressure group could harm a station, and, attached to that, whether or not a program should be aired.”

With regard to “Stop the Church,” Coiro of the Archdiocese said that he hopes the financial loss and attendant publicity surrounding the cardinal’s criticism of KCET will have an impact.

“I would just like to think that from here on out, nobody will take on the Catholic Church,” Coiro said.

The church does not plan further activities along the lines of the well-covered press conference at which Mahony attacked the station, or the advertisements the cardinal took out in The Times and the Los Angeles Daily News, Coiro said.

But he said that even if the church’s efforts to influence the station backfired completely, the Archdiocese would not change its position.

“I think the cardinal did the only thing he could do,” Coiro said. “The man is charged with shepherding a flock of some 4 million people, and that puts him in a position of being not only their teacher, guide and pastor--he’s got to be their guardian as well. Even if it resulted in KCET getting a huge endowment and never having to have a pledge drive again, I would say, ‘ Mazel tov to the station; the cardinal had to do what he had to do.’ ”