Broadcasting Policy Quotes

In 1996, Al Jazeera was the first TV station in the Arab world to allow Israelis to appear on the screen and express their views and address the Arab world. Before that, Arab broadcasters did not allow what was perceived as the enemy to appear on the screen.

The cable law. Prasar Bharati. The Broadcasting Bill. These are all overlapping things.

There was a time when the FCC tried to require a certain amount of television and media to be educational, a certain amount to be newsworthy and a certain amount of it to be public access.

They will open up to what I would call corporate broadcastings where the non-commercial material will have air time. There's no possibility of that here right now, none.

The Satellite Home Viewer Improvement Act expires at the end of this year. Thus, we must act quickly to ensure our constituents continue to receive the services they enjoy.

This is the first time in my 32 years in public broadcasting that PBS has ordered up programs for ideological instead of journalistic reasons.

I don't have any quarrel with the BBC.

In the US, commercial interests stole the airwaves early on, before public broadcasters could get a stab at it. And the deal that was made with public broadcasting was, "Okay, we'll allow there to be a handful of public stations to do the educational programming that commercial broadcasters don't want to do, but the deal is they can't do anything that can generate an audience, anything that's commercially viable." Anything they do that could be commercially viable could be considered unfair competition to commercial interests and should only be on the commercial stations.

People pay their licence fee in this country because people believe that we should have public service broadcast programming. Of course, there are lots of different ways you could do that.

The big difference in those days was that in England the Government subsidized TV, in America we work on TV so we can subsidize the Government.

The perception of broadcasters as community trustees should be replaced by a view of broadcasters as marketplace participants.

If policymakers are serious about avoiding a society of TV 'haves and have-nots,' they should refrain from policies that favor pay-TV operators over the providers of our nation's only free and local communications system: over-the-air broadcasting.

I don't think the BBC supporting digital switchover is top slicing. Top slicing is putting the license fee up for grabs for other broadcasters to bid for.

It would be helpful if broadcasters were willing to be a bit patriotic.

Which is supposed to mean they're doing something in their broadcasting they would not do is they were simply out to maximize profit; if they were really public service institutions, not purely profit maximizing institutions.