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In Memory Of…

By Neela Banerjee

James T. Yee

James T. Yee, a former executive of the Independent Television Service (ITVS) and a long time crusader for diversity in public television, died last month at the age of 53 after an 18-month battle with cancer.

Yee served as the executive director of the San Francisco based ITVS from 1994 to 2000. ITVS was established in 1991 by Congress to increase the diversity of public television programming and to address the needs of underserved audiences, particularly focusing on minorities and children. According to their mission statement, ITVS brings “independently produced programs to television — programs that engage creative risks, advance issues and represent points of view not usually seen on commercial or public television.” They are funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

ITVS funds some 30 to 40 projects each year, two-thirds of which are documentaries.

“It is now evident that under Jim’s leadership, ITVS became the pre-eminent documentary commissioners. ITVS has probably produced more important social issue documentaries than any television organization since WNET in the 1960s,” Jack Willis, a former ITVS board member, said in an ITVS tribute to Yee. “ITVS has brought voices, topics and controversial themes to public broadcasting that would never have happened otherwise.”

Yee was born in the Bronx, New York and graduated from Fairleigh Dickinson University, and received a master’s degree in early childhood education from Antioch Graduate School of Education. After that, Yee worked in community organizing and was a VISTA volunteer in rural Nebraska, where he focused on tenant organizing and childcare.

His interest in education led him to public television, where he saw that he had a chance to reach a wide range of children. He started out working at WGBH in Boston. In 1977, he joined the production team for Rebop, a multicultural teen series.

In the early 1980s, Yee was the first executive director and a co-founder of the National Asian American Telecommunications Association (NAATA).

“Jim very clearly was a visionary about public television and saw the need for a diversity of images and of content in public television,” current executive director of NAATA Eddie Wong said. “He wanted to democratize the public television system.”

According to Wong, Yee was integral in working with the CPB to make sure there were funds available for an organization like NAATA to exist. In the early days, NAATA had very little money so it was only able to acquire programming for broadcast. NAATA did not actually have the funding to produce their own programming until the 1990s and Yee was instrumental in getting that funding.

“His role goes beyond public television. He was an advocate of multidimensional images of Asians, portrayals of Asians on television in general,” Wong said. “In the early days of NAATA, they were involved in protests against films like Charlie Chan and the Fu Manchu film with Peter Sellers. They had a role in educating people about stereotypes of Asians and the counter to that was the original programming that our producers were creating.”

Yee led ITVS through a landscape of shifting visual formats and congressional funding cuts, which his colleagues at ITVS say were restored largely because of his diplomacy and the confidence placed in him by CPB.

Yee, a seasoned producer, received a 1997 Emmy award for the documentary a.k.a. Don Bonus, a documentary about the senior year of a Cambodian youth at Galielo High School in San Francisco. Yee was also the recipient of the Steve Tatsukawa Award, given by Visual Communications to honor those who have made a significant contribution to Asian American media, and the Asian Cine Vision Award.

“He was really a recognized leader in the field. He had this amazing sense of humor and a presence that was way beyond his physical height,” acting ITVS director Judy Tam said. “In the six years he was here, we gained a strong profile as a content provider for public television.”

Yee served on former President Clinton’s Advisory Committee on the Public Interest Obligations of Digital Television Broadcasters, which was a 20-member working group appointed to address the digital transition of the television medium. He was also a board member of the San Francisco Film Commission, Pacifica Radio Foundation, Western Public Radio, KPFA Radio and the Film Arts Foundation.

Yee is survived by his wife Betty Quan Yee and his two children, Jane and Liam, of Piedmont, Calif.