Smith, Roger P. (Roger Phillips), 1929-2011

Broadcasting executive. Executive Producer, WTTW-Chicago, 1965-1966; Producer, WNET-New York, 1967-1968; Producer, Director and Writer, WGBH, 1968-1977.

Roger P. Smith has been involved in the development and production of innovative public service television programs and films since 1955. He has worked on network news programs, as well as network and local programs for public television. His programs, numbering over 500, have been both general audience and instructional. Programs that Smith has been associated with have won Peabody, Ohio State, Edison, and Television Academy Awards. Smith received his B.A. from Yale University in Literature, Philosophy, and the Arts in 1952. After three years with the U.S. Army Signal Corps in Germany, he entered the CBS Executive Training Program in News and Public Affairs. Upon completion of the training program in 1955, Smith joined the Public Affairs Department of the Columbia Broadcasting System in New York. Smith worked in a variety of capacities at CBS, including writer, producer, associate producer, researcher, project manager, and production coordinator. He also acted as production assistant for "Let's Take A Trip", a weekly live remote for children, which won the Thomas Alva Edison Award. Smith's position at CBS ended in 1965 with the abolition of the Public Affairs Department. Smith's career in public television began in 1965 . From 1965 to 1966, he produced several shows for WTTW in Chicago. His work as executive producer on Facet, a weekly one-hour prime-time arts series, earned two Academy of Television Arts and Sciences "Emmy" Awards. Smith soon left WTTW and returned to New York, where he worked at public television station WNET from 1967 to 1968 . At WNET, he produced Newsfront, a daily one-hour prime-time live news program. In 1968, Smith left WNET and joined WGBH in Boston, where he would work for nine years. At WGBH, he served as producer, director, and writer for a number of shows and films. Among the major productions on which Smith worked are: Urban Decisions a 1973 pilot for an empowerment series for minority youth; prefaces to the BBC's 1974 War and Peace series; Shapers of Our Times: Eamon DeValera a 1976 pilot for a history series; the 1978 Public Awareness Project for the Handicapped, and The Teaching of Interpersonal Skills to Health Professionals a 1978 series of six studio dramas produced in conjunction with the National Library of Medicine. Several programs that Smith worked on at WGBH have won recognition. The Captioned French Chef, the first television program captioned for the hearing impaired, led to federal funding for the National Caption Center at WGBH. What's My Thing? earned the prestigious Ohio State Award. A Part of Yourself, the 1972 motivational film about organ transplant, was recognized with a Certificate from the American Medical Association. Nova earned the George Foster Peabody Award. Other programs with which Smith was associated won the Cine Golden Eagle Award, and the First Prize in the Rehabilitation Film Festival. Smith left WGBH in 1977. Since then, he has served as consultant on a variety of projects. As president of his own production consulting firm, the Production House, Inc., he wrote Public Media and Community Dialogue, a handbook for the Association of Junior Leagues. He has taught courses in film analysis at the University of Massachusetts, and children's television at Graham Junior College. He has also been guest lecturer on television at Boston University, Emerson College, and Harvard University. In 2002, Smith's book The Other Face of Public Television: Censoring the American Dream was published by Algora Publishing.