She later stated, "I knew that I was born to be in educational television; it was St. Paul on the highway". In 1961, she began to track the progress of a court case in which a New York City nonprofit group was attempting to acquire Newark, New Jersey-based independent station WNTA-TV (channel 13), which would become the precursor of PBS station WNET, the first public television station in the New York area. When channel 13 became non-commercial two years later as WNDT, Cooney applied for a position as the station's publicist, but the general manager told her they needed producers. "I can produce", she told him, even though she had no experience in producing television shows. She later stated, "I've never been qualified for any job I've been hired for". According to television historian Cary O'Dell, WNDT hired her because of the ties she had made through her political activities and associations with Partisan Review. Cooney later said during an interview with the Archive of American Television that the transition to becoming a documentary producer was not difficult for her because she was well-read and aware of the issues of the day, adding, "I felt like I'd died and gone to heaven, dealing with foreign policy and domestic policy and civil rights, which became the great passion in those years for me". Taking a pay cut, Cooney and her boss Lewis Freedman produced what author Michael Davis called "a series of teach-ins on major issues". One of her first programs was called Court of Reason, a weekly live debate show; notable guests included Malcolm X and Calvin Butts. She produced a debate show on America's policy about Cuba that aired the week before the Cuban Missile Crisis. She also produced another debate show called Poverty, Anti-Poverty, and the World, in which poor people were brought into the studio to confront the government officials responsible for developing anti-poverty programs. Although the ratings were low, Cooney and Freedman won Emmys for its production, and as Davis stated, "the viewers who did tune in were serious-minded adults who cared about matters of race, injustice, and the imbalance of opportunity in New York and beyond". She also produced inexpensively-made documentaries that she later called "Little Grandma Moses documentaries" for WNDT that were well received by their viewers, including A Chance at the Beginning, which featured the precursor of Head Start that won her a