Public Media Quotes

A free public broadcast license is a privilege.

I get real excited when I hear my shows on the radio.

My first experience on public radio still ranks among the most embarrassing episodes of my relatively short life.

Less money for public media means less access to the arts.

The public airwaves provide a chance to affirm we want to be a good, decent people; a good, decent nation.

I come from an educational environment that really praises, as do I, the forms of representation that are otherwise lacking in our public media.

I want to do more television and I want to do more radio.

It is a tragedy when you pay to make a public broadcaster survive.

It is hard to manage a personal life when everything you do is amplified in the public media.

I grew up watching PBS and wanting to be a part of it, just like HBO.

As our leaders in Washington confront tough decisions about our budget priorities, I urge them to continue federal funding for public broadcasting.

I think public access television has more to do with my career than anything else in the world. And that's a system that's been around of many decades and is something that people think is so outdated that they don't even think it still exists.

For better or worse, the United States enjoys the lion's share of public and media attention. We influence much of the conversation on social and public media by sheer volume.

In our society, I see public media as a lever. It pushes people by elevating them and their sights. It brings them into more thinking and understanding, and it brings us together.

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

The current public television and radio system in the United States, while it's better than nothing, that's about the best you can say about it. It's nowhere near the standard it needs to be for our society, and we've got to make a commitment to rethink the system altogether. You know, just giving more money to what exists on PBS now would be not great; we've got to have a new vision of PBS.

Now, the one thing that's clear is that we need nonprofit, noncommercial media - not just broadcasting - more than ever in the United States. We don't need a purely nonprofit, noncommercial system, but we need a significant nonprofit, noncommercial system. Advertising-run media, profit-driven media, simply is not acceptable as the entirety of our media system. There's no defense for it.