Media Policy Quotes

Years ago, NPR tried to stop me from going on "The Factor." When I refused, they insisted that I not identify myself as an NPR journalist. I asked them if they thought people did not know where I appeared on the air as a daily talk show host, national correspondent and news analyst. They refused to budge.

MSNBC policy requires journalists to report any potential conflict of interest and to seek approval from the president of NBC News before making any political contribution.

Not every item of news should be published: rather those who control news policies endeavor to make every item of news serve a certain purpose.

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 has a strict policy of having Clare Balding present everything.

We are developing a media policy which would be about breaking up single ownership of too many sources of information so that we have a multiplicity of sources.

Governments, whether right or left, have become commissioners-in-chief, nudging and cajoling networks into preferred business models without the slightest sensitivity or awareness of what the public wants or the TV industry is capable of.

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 Times' new credibility committee report that was issued on Monday very specifically said they will be putting in a policy that reporters must get permission from their department heads to appear on television, which I think is a really good thing.

Television of course actually started in Britain in 1936, and it was a monopoly, and there was only one broadcaster and it operated on a license which is not the same as a government grant.

“If the United States…can pass laws to block media cross ownership within one market to protect the diversity of voices, then we in Canada must ask ourselves why we do not seem to attach the same importance to that important principle.

[Describing glasnost:] A media management policy.

I just did not discuss my personal life, my sexuality with the media. That was my policy.

Deregulation is a popular term that's used across the political spectrum. And it's one of these terms like "choice," that corporate interests have used because they know their focus-group buzzword testing makes it sound like a popular word. Because, who can be against deregulation? Being free, having liberty, not having someone tell you what to do, being deregulated, hey, that sounds great. But deregulation is a non sequitur in the realm of media policy or media regulation. The issue is never regulation versus deregulation; our entire system is built on media policies and subsidies.

I'm all for the Fairness Doctrine, whatever that is.

The concept that the press is an organ of government policy dies hard.

Our existing media system today is the direct result of government laws and subsidies that created it.

The ethics of editorial judgement, however, began to go though a sea change during the late 1970s and '80s when the Carter and Reagan Administrations de-regulated the television industry.

The difficulty with the present state of affairs is that there is no legislation on the sources of funding for the Polish film industry. There is no legislation concerning filmmaking. And, there is no legislation on television that would be beneficial to filmmaking.

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.

Both CNN and NPR prohibit political activity by all journalists, no matter their assignment.

ABC forbids political activity by journalists.

Some newspapers have a hands-off policy on favored politicians. But it's generally very small newspapers or local TV 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.