Bill Moyers Answered My Second Question, Too

I posed another question to Moyers during his live chat on PBS web site and was really excited to find it too being selected for answer. But the answer never showed up on screen then the chat web page was down. After about 30 minutes of waiting, I was relieved to see Moyers's answer to the question in the chat archive when the web page was back online.

So below it is his answer to my second question. The class I refer to in the question is the J201: Introduction to Mass Communication for which I'm a TA. Sorry I should have said "intro to mass communication" instead of "intro to Journalism" in the question.

***

Lisa, Madison, WI: Few of my students in a college intro to Journalism class watch PBS. How do we attract more young citizens to quality/public media?

Bill Moyers: That's our fault in public television . We have too few broadcasts grounded in reporting -- the best is NOW with David Brancaccio and Frontline, the best documentary series since CBS Reports -- so we don't have that farm club I spoke of earlier. Our local stations have too few resources to cultivate new talent. The BBC is a great newsgathering organization because it was established with a dedicated tax that produces revenues of about six billion dollars a year -- that's why listeners and viewers get a feast of news and information not to mention some great cultural programming. Public media in this country has never had the means to grow our own journalists, and we don't now. We need to reconstitute ourselves with at least a third of our programming devoted to news and public affairs and a trust fund to provide the training that produces generation after generation of independent journalists.