Jeremy Hunt Quotes

I don't have any quarrel with the BBC.

It was an interesting question as to whether the BBC had a future in the digital world, and what form of market failure could justify the licence fee system.

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.

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

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.

What's happened to broadcasting is that broadcasting really used to be... it used to have a very clear public service quotient. And it's more or less now. And it's been lost.

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.

A free public broadcast license is a privilege.

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

All I can do is advocate changes at the BBC while respecting editorial independence upon which the success of the BBC rests. I can't do anything that requires the BBC to pay certain people certain amounts.

The BBC is the greatest broadcaster in the world. It's the standard that everyone measures themselves against. If we lose the BBC, it won't be quite as bad as losing the royal family, but an integral part of this country will have gone. But then, I'm an old guy.

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

Importantly, while PBS is subject to some of the Commission's Kid Vid rules, its business model is designed around community programming, and its efforts will continue with or without Commission mandates.

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

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.

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.

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.

Why something in the public interest such as television news can be fought over, like a chain of hamburger stands, eludes me.

And I believe that public broadcasting has an important trust with the American people, it's an intimate medium of television, and that we can do reading and language development for young children without getting into human sexuality.

Isn't it only appropriate that, in return for the free use of the public spectrum, broadcasters provide something substantial, something that wouldn't otherwise be provided by marketplace competition?

The BBC fulfils a wonderful cultural function. Maybe the problem is that it feels it needs to be everything to everybody.

The public gets not one penny from them in return for those airwaves.

Consumers can choose from hundreds of channels today, including dozens for kids. At a time of dwindling resources, we don't need to be subsidizing PBS. It's time for Big Bird the mooch to compete with 'Dora the Explorer' and 'Bob the Builder.'

The BBC is part of the glue which binds the United Kingdom together. At those times of national moment - of joy or sadness, in the UK or around the world, at times when the nation wants to celebrate, mourn or just enjoy itself people turn to the BBC.

The BBC is a victim of its own independence.