Contact:
Tania Panczyk-Collins
202 654-4222
tpanczyk@apts.org


APTS President Positions Public Television as a
Resource for Helping to Remake America
WASHINGTON—March 10, 2009—Speaking to a group of media and communications industry leaders, Larry Sidman, President and CEO of the Association of Public Television Stations, positioned public television stations as key community and national partners in addressing the challenges facing our country.

In a speech at The Media Institute, Sidman pointed to the impact public broadcasting can, and will have on our society: “With renewed and reinvigorated focus on education that will prepare our toddlers to learn, motivate our youth to seek knowledge, enable our workers to compete in a global economy and learn new job skills, and engage all Americans in preventive health care, public broadcasting stands ready to help the Obama Administration and future Administrations remake America.”

Given the economic, education and health care challenges facing our nation, Sidman said: “If public broadcasting was essential in the three-channel world of 1967, then its role as a trusted safe-haven in the enormity of today’s fragmented and all too often sensationalized media world is even more essential.”

Sidman, emphasizing that the core purposes and mission of public broadcasting are “education, diversity, localism and universal service,” observed that “for the last 42 years, public television has built a reputation as a high quality, trusted source of educational, informational and cultural programming.”

To show an example of the impact public television’s services have on the educational achievement of young children, Sidman pointed to actual studies conducted on children who watch PBS’ SUPER WHY. “In 100 SUPER WHY reading camps around the country this past summer, on average, children that participated showed a 40 percent gain in letter recognition scores, and an 80 percent gain in reading words that were new to them,” Sidman said.

In addition to developing programs addressing the educational needs of young children, Sidman said “public television is morphing into…a multimedia catalyst for community education, engagement and problem solving.” Examples of public television stations going beyond broadcasting include:

Maryland Public Television, which created Thinkport and KQED in San Francisco, which created Quest. These projects meet the educational needs of their communities by using the web to create and feed an ever renewing stream of teaching tools and community based content to our nation’s teachers and students.

Detroit Public Television, acting in partnership with the United Way, Michigan Works and others, created Jobs Now, a multimedia campaign that addresses job-loss in Michigan by providing short-form video content, supplemented by a website serving as an online home for job information, retraining resources, and links to trusted partners and job banks.

KUED in Salt Lake City, whose ongoing preventive health care project Health Matters supplements on-air programming and extensive website material with extensive outreach with local medical, behavioral and public service professionals, and county and city governments, to prepare materials that are offered free of charge to the public. KUED also offers free program screenings and panel discussions, and annually holds Speaking of Women’s Health, a day-long conference drawing more than 1,200 participants.

KETC in St. Louis, which responded to two consecutive years of double-digit increases in foreclosure rates in St. Louis by producing Facing the Mortgage Crisis, an award winning program aimed at homeowners threatened with foreclosure. KETC also acted as a community-wide convener, assembling diverse experts and resources from the United Way, The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, and a variety of community service organizations to connect those in need with those who could help.

Sidman cautioned, however, that in spite of the tremendous programming and services they provide, and public support they enjoy, local public television stations are not immune to the widespread challenges created by the global economic crisis. “Despite serving communities with unprecedented effectiveness and creativity, public television is facing contraction and, in the case of some stations, a fight for our very survival,” Sidman said. “Projected [revenue] decreases do not reflect a waning of enthusiasm for public television. Rather, they underscore the plight of public television caught up in the cross-currents of economic contraction.”

Sidman said that public television will “stare the economic hard times in the eye and vow not to bow to them.” He said that public television is responding to economic challenges by “cutting costs through innovation, tapping into the unemployment pool and reinvigorating its focus on education to prepare our country’s youths to better compete in the global economy.”


Editors Note: A copy of Larry Sidman’s speech is available at www.apts.org