Lawrence K. Grossman, who expanded public television programming as the top executive at PBS in the 1970s and 1980s, and who later led a resurgence of NBC’s news division before *budget battles with the network’s corporate bosses forced his departure, died March 23 at his home in Westport, Conn. He was 86.
He had Parkinson’s disease and oral cancer, a granddaughter, Rebecca *Grossman-Cohen, said.
As a longtime advertising executive, Mr. Grossman was an unlikely choice to lead the ad-free Public Broadcasting Service. But one of his advertising agency’s clients in the 1970s had been PBS — his company designed the network’s familiar logo featuring the letter P combined with the stylized profile of a head — and he had previously worked at CBS and NBC.
Mr. Grossman moved to Washington in 1976 to take charge of PBS, at the time little more than a loosely aligned group of hundreds of locally controlled educational TV stations around the country. During his eight-year tenure, he maintained financial stability while giving PBS more of a national presence, largely through cultural programming and news.
“Public television is, and will continue to be, indispensable in America,” he said in 1982. “We must continue to be the bulwark of quality that stands firm against the tide of mediocrity and worse which now engulfs so much of television.”
He introduced such programs as “Live From Lincoln Center” and concerts from the White House and the Kennedy Center and approved production of a 13-part series on the history of the Vietnam War. He led efforts that expanded “The MacNeil/Lehrer Report” to a full hour in 1983, making it the first hour-long nightly newscast on any network. (It is now called “PBS NewsHour.”)
Mr. Grossman also received credit within PBS for standing up to federal and corporate opposition to a 1980 docudrama, “Death of a Princess,” about a Saudi princess who was beheaded after being accused of adultery. He resisted efforts by members of Congress, the State Department, the military and the oil firm Mobil — one of PBS’s largest underwriters — to block the broadcast.
In 1984, despite having no experience in daily journalism, Mr. Grossman became the head of NBC News, personally chosen by network chief Grant Tinker. At the time, the network’s news division was slipping in ratings and respect, with its “NBC Nightly News” broadcast in third place behind CBS and ABC and the onetime morning-show juggernaut “Today” trailing ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
