Public Broadcasting
The Debate Over Federal Funding
When President Lyndon Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, he hailed the new law as a “great movement for the next century” and envisioned a “network of knowledge” that employed “every means of sending and storing information that the individual can use,” all in the cause of education. While President Johnson may not have foreseen the full extent of communications advances that were to take place over the coming decades, the Act laid the groundwork for the development of nearly 1,300 locally owned and operated public television and radio stations that now reach almost every American household and…