Our mission is to serve our communities by excelling in the production, presentation and distribution of television and radio programming and related activities that educate, inspire, enrich, inform and entertain.”
That is the official mission statement of North Texas Public Broadcasting Inc., the licensee of KERA Channel 13, KERA 90.1 and KDTN Channel 2. The goals it expresses have been the driving force behind thousands of hours of acclaimed programming during the last three decades, from award-winning KERA productions like News Addition and Project Crossroads to such PBS staples as Sesame Street and Great Performances.
Thanks to recent changes in the funding system for national public television programs, the picture is looking brighter for PBS, for individual stations like KERA and KDTN and, ultimately, for you, the viewer. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) now will be responsible for financial support for the development of new programs, and PBS will control a substantial part of public television’s national programming budget, which is funded by local station dues and corporate and federal funds.
These changes, in effect, are a streamlining of public television’s funding that wit] give our stations greater discretion over upcoming and current programming. They promise to make the public television industry more responsive to ideas for worthy new programs and, at the same time, solidify the long-term com-mitment to ongoing projects like The MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour, Wonder Works and many more superb programs.
The immediate results may not be dramatically evident to you, our viewers, but in the long run, you can expect a wider variety of programs, particularly from the independent producers who come to stations around the country with program ideas. Where many of these potential programs may have been delayed or not produced at all in the past, we now will be able to respond more quickly and see more of these projects come to fruition.
The goal of all this, for KERA and KDTN, is to serve our communities better, as stated in our mission statement. By being more efficient and innovative in our attempts to bring you TV worth watching, we hope to come close to this goal.
Best wishes,
Richard J. Meyer
Related Articles
Arts & Entertainment
DIFF Documentary City of Hate Reframes JFK’s Assassination Alongside Modern Dallas
Documentarian Quin Mathews revisited the topic in the wake of a number of tragedies that shared North Texas as their center.
Business
How Plug and Play in Frisco and McKinney Is Connecting DFW to a Global Innovation Circuit
The global innovation platform headquartered in Silicon Valley has launched accelerator programs in North Texas focused on sports tech, fintech and AI.
Arts & Entertainment
‘The Trouble is You Think You Have Time’: Paul Levatino on Bastards of Soul
A Q&A with the music-industry veteran and first-time feature director about his new documentary and the loss of a friend.