Public television will produce less local programming over the next...
Public television will produce less local programming over the next year while under sequester, said Patrick Butler, president of the Association of Public Television Stations. Local issues and some community programs “will be curtailed by the sequester,” he said Thursday…
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in an interview for C-SPAN’s The Communicators. The effect “will hurt and the quantity of our service will be diminished,” he said. The sequestration will reduce Corporation for Public Broadcasting grants by about 5 percent, which is about $22 million, he said. “It hurts but we understand we've got to be contributors to the solution and so we have saluted smartly and taken our medicine with everybody else,” he said. To evaluate options for public TV stations on the broadcast incentive auctions proceeding at the FCC, APTS created a spectrum opportunities task force, he said. “We think this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to get all of the efficiencies and revenue opportunities that we've been dreaming about for the last several years actually accomplished over the next three or four or five years.” Some public TV stations may be in a position to move channels to VHF, he said. Others may be interested in combining some of their back office operations and joint master control rooms with other public or commercial TV stations, he said. “It may be that most of our stations don’t have any impact at all through this except for the repacking that will probably affect virtually everybody in the television industry.” Butler said APTS is focused on “letting Congress understand better that we are public service media,” in making its case to keep the CPB government allocation intact. “Not only do we provide this high-quality programming on television, but … we are very actively engaged in the education enterprise, homeland security and other things in which a public investment is well-justified.” It’s not a matter of the federal government sustaining Sesame Street, he added: “What the federal government does is sustain the distribution system over which Sesame Street can reach every American home.”