Michael O'Rielly Quotes

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.

I like PBS. I love Big Bird ... But I'm not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for it.

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.

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.

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

Don't count out other amazing programming like Frontline. You will still find more hours of in-depth news programming, investigative journalism and analysis on PBS than on any other outlet.

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.

I don't think there's one thing I've ever said on the radio that would have been found indecent or obscene.

I love PBS! I grew up on it. If I had to say which channels were good, I'd say, you got your PBS, your History Channel, your Discovery.

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.

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.

A film has to maintain a certain decorum in order to be broadcast to a vast audience.

If you had to pay separately for just PBS, probably, sadly, not a majority of Americans would do that. So there's many channels, whether it's Discovery Channel or C-SPAN or many, many others, that just aren't viable.

I like 'MacNeil/Lehrer.'

I watch television all the time, mostly PBS and old movies like 'The Quiet Man,' my favorite Wayne movie. It's marvelous. I just loved the man and still do.

I don't have any quarrel with the BBC.

I love the BBC and I think it's a really important thing.

Cable television is such a part of our society now. Oftentimes, the shows are really good, and you're just like, 'Well, it's worth sitting through the sex and violence because the narrative is so great.'

My first job out of college was at PBS as an administrative assistant. I thought I would be on the production side of things.

At the end of the day, broadcast television has many opportunities to inform the audience, to enlighten the audience, and to entertain them.

Some things I see on television, I think, 'Oh my gosh, they're showing that now?' wow.

We have to have a business model that can be a sustainable and acceptable one to both regulators and the other stakeholders, clients, and investors.

I'd encourage more young people to apply their talents beyond finance and consulting and to think about reshaping how medicines are brought to market and how the business is run.

The 'PBS NewsHour' podcast is the audio version of the nightly TV broadcast.

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