[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 2]
[House]
[Pages 1598-1599]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO PUBLIC BROADCASTING?

  (Mr. BLUMENAUER asked and was given permission to address the House 
for 1 minute.)
  Mr. BLUMENAUER. Mr. Speaker, this next week we are going to have a 
very interesting conversation here in Washington, D.C., where the zeal 
that some of our friends have for both an ideological agenda and an 
effort at trying to cut government spending wherever they can, will put 
public broadcasting in the crosshairs.
  I think it's an unfortunate development, one that's going to be a 
disappointment to the 170 million Americans who rely on public 
broadcasting every month. It's going to be particularly unfortunate if 
this agenda succeeds because it's not going to punish people in New 
York, or Portland, Oregon, or Seattle, or San Francisco. They will 
always have public broadcasting, although it will be diminished because 
of what some of my friends on the other side of the aisle hope to 
accomplish. But the real losers are going

[[Page 1599]]

to be people in small-town and rural America. It costs 11 times as much 
to broadcast a signal to the far reaches of eastern Oregon than it does 
in the metropolitan Portland area. People should watch this discussion 
carefully. A lot depends on it.

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