WASHINGTON – February 26, 2024 – Patrick Butler, president and chief executive officer of America’s Public Television Stations, today called on public broadcasters to lead a restoration of civility in American life.
In his farewell address at the Public Media Summit after 13 years leading APTS, Butler said such a restoration is “the mission of our lifetime” in a country beset by division and uncivil discourse.
“In our time, perhaps the most important public service we can render is helping our people be better citizens and helping our country get along with itself,” Butler said. “We have reached a point where our divisions are so deep, our discourse so rancorous, our understanding of basic facts so contentious, and our very institutions of government so poorly understood, that our democracy itself seems endangered.”
Butler cited George Washington’s counsel in his own farewell address that “in proportion as the structure of government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.”
“That’s what we do,” Butler said. “For 21 consecutive years, public television has ranked as the most trusted institution in America. We are the oasis in the growing news desert, the modern public square.... All of us in public media have a special role to play in seeking reconciliation among our fellow citizens, nurturing a decent respect for differing points of view, and demonstrating how a civil society of free people is supposed to work.
“No one else is better suited to this mission than we are, and there are hundreds of institutional partners and millions of frustrated citizens who will be eager to join us in a search for common ground on which all of us can stand,” Butler said.
Butler also commended the public media community for weathering political storms, technological revolutions, and social upheaval during his tenure, which began in 2011.
Key to this success, he said, was “your work as partners in public service with governments and other institutions which share your missions of education, public safety and civic leadership. I was confident that if we performed those services well enough and told our story often enough, we could convince people of every political persuasion that a modest investment in you is a smart investment in America itself.”
The proof, Butler said, is that “federal funding is still flowing -- at record levels -- to America’s public broadcasters. And this year, 40 state governments will commit a record $365 million to support public broadcasting.”
Surviving in a modern media environment dominated by large companies will require public broadcasters to “make streaming easier for local viewers, modernize our infrastructure and maximize our efficiency, take advantage of artificial intelligence and every other innovation that may benefit our system, and make the most of the spectrum we steward, fully embrace the NEXTGEN TV broadcast standard, and build new platforms of public service and new sources of spectrum-based revenue for your stations and our system.
“But it also means keeping faith with our historic mission of educational, noncommercial, local, universal service to the American people,” Butler said. “No one else -- not Netflix, not Amazon, not anybody -- will educate children, or follow the legislature, or protect people in trouble, or chronicle life in hometown America as public television does.
“Public television still provides the only preschool education there is for more than half of America’s children,” he said. “This work alone would fully justify the investment which our federal and state governments make in us. But it is only the beginning of the service we provide to the American people.”
Butler cited public television stations’ partnerships with the State of Nevada to educate 126,000 students spread over 75,000 square miles, with the State of California to provide early earthquake warnings using public television’s datacasting technology, and with the state legislature of Ohio to bring transparency and accountability to the work of government through the C-SPAN-style Ohio Channel.
In a closing tribute to public media as he prepares to retire later this year, Butler said: “In a nation divided, we build community. To bitter debate, we bring civility. To an anxious people, we provide safety. To a coarsening society, we offer culture. Where intolerance looms, we celebrate diversity. To those who have little, we impart the priceless gift of education. In the darkness of disinformation, we shine the liberating light of truth.”
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About APTS
America’s Public Television Stations (APTS) is a nonprofit membership organization ensuring a strong and financially sound public television system and helping member stations provide essential public services in education, public safety and civic leadership to the American people. For more information, visit www.apts.org.
Contact:
Stacey Karp
202-654-4222
skarp@apts.org