WQED assists startup of Bermuda’s noncommercial TV
Pittsburgh’s WQED is helping the government of Bermuda develop its first noncommercial TV station under a $200,000 contract publicized last week.
Ewart F. Brown, premier of the locally governed British overseas territory, said he wants the new station, CITV or Community Information TV, to make local programs to fill a media void for his constituents, who are “being fed a steady diet of programming from outside Bermuda.”
For help with the project, Brown made contact with WQED President George Miles through a mutual friend, he said.
Several Pittsburgh staffers trained CITV employees and helped launch the station last fall. It has 10 full-time employees and a budget of about $500,000 a year, Brown said. The all-digital station is received entirely through cable TV for now, said WQED President George Miles.
Brown, a U.S.-educated physician and track star whose Progressive Labor Party first took power in the 1998 parliamentary elections, said he intends “to establish sufficient distance” between government and the station so that CITV will not become a tool of the administration in power, and the station will have “creative freedom.”
Web page posted May 1, 2008
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