History
The act was supported by many prominent Americans such as Fred Rogers and Senator John O. Pastore (chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Communications) during the House and Senate hearings in 1967.
The United States House of Representatives passed the bill 266-91 on September 21, 1967, with 51 members voting "present" and 2 not voting.
When Lyndon B. Johnson signed the act into law on November 7, 1967, he described its purpose:
It announces to the world that our Nation wants more than just material wealth; our Nation wants more than a "chicken in every pot." We in America have an appetite for excellence, too. While we work every day to produce new goods and to create new wealth, we want most of all to enrich man's spirit. That is the purpose of this act.
More concretely:
It will give a wider and, I think, stronger voice to educational radio and television by providing new funds for broadcast facilities. It will launch a major study of television's use in the Nation's classrooms and their potential use throughout the world. Finally — and most important — it builds a new institution: the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
The act was originally to be called the "Public Television Act" and focus exclusively on television, worrying supporters of public radio. But in a sudden change of fortune, Senator Robert Griffin suggested changing the name to the "Public Broadcasting Act" when the bill passed through the Senate. After several revisions, including last-minute changes added with scotch tape, the law signed by Johnson included radio. This set the path for the incorporation of National Public Radio (NPR) in 1970.
Read more about this topic: Public Broadcasting Act Of 1967
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“I am not a literary man.... I am a man of science, and I am interested in that branch of Anthropology which deals with the history of human speech.”
—J.A.H. (James Augustus Henry)
“The awareness that health is dependent upon habits that we control makes us the first generation in history that to a large extent determines its own destiny.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)