Statement of Cheryl Halpern

Before the Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies, U.S. House Committee on Appropriations

Washington, DC
March 21, 2007

Chairman Obey, Ranking Member Walsh, and distinguished members of the subcommittee, thank you for allowing me to testify before you today on behalf of the Board of Directors for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB).

Last August, the Board voted unanimously in support of our appropriations request for Fiscal Years 2008 and 2010. Since my public broadcasting colleagues here today will give you a thorough description of these requests, I wanted to take this opportunity to talk about the reforms the CPB Board and management have put into place over the past 18 months. I would like to thank CPB's President and CEO, Patricia Harrison, and the entire CPB staff for their outstanding work, long hours, and strong leadership during this review process.

As you know, the Board is charged with overseeing compliance with the laws and regulations governing the Corporation and the use of public broadcasting funds, principal among these being the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. These responsibilities extend to approval of the annual budget and oversight of corporate programs, functions and activities. CPB's Board has no role, however, in individual program decisions. Rather, we give the CPB staff broad policy guidance, consistent with the directives of the statute. It is then up to the staff to implement this policy. These are not only our statutorily-defined roles, but the deliberate practice of every CPB board member.

I have been the Chair of CPB since September 2005, and during that time we have made significant revisions to our governance procedures, established more clearly defined roles and responsibilities for the Board Chair and for the CPB President and CEO, and improved accountability and transparency in the operations of our organization.

For the first time in CPB's 40-year history, we initiated a top-to-bottom review of its operations and procedures. Never before has our organization undertaken a major examination of every task, operation and practice to ensure that CPB is following best practices and promoting accountability. Every aspect of the organization has been scrutinized. We have done this for three reasons:

The Inspector General outlined a number of areas where CPB could make substantive improvements, such as better definition of Board roles, responsibility, and accountability; measures to prevent political tests; the development of sound procedures for addressing our mandate to ensure objectivity and balance in programming; and executive hiring, compensation, and evaluation. Further, the OIG recommended that CPB establish policies to emphasize the importance of internal controls and ethical behavior within CPB's culture.

As soon as we received the OIG's recommendations, we moved to act deliberately and quickly. A comprehensive review of the governance and internal operations of the Corporation followed; we call this review the Project Champion. We needed to establish a "tone from the top" based on integrity, ethical values, and clear assignments of authority and responsibility, which are critical to the success of any organization. Thus the Board established a Corporate Governance Committee, currently chaired by one of our newest board members, Senator David Pryor, and an Executive Compensation Committee, chaired by the board's Vice Chair Gay Gaines. The Corporate Governance Committee is charged with improving checks and balances within the Corporation and defining the respective roles of the board and senior management, while the Executive Compensation Committee is charged with making hiring and compensation practices more transparent.

Project Champion, overseen by CPB's Chief Financial Officer, involved a full-time project manager and three project staffers with substantial analytical and accounting skills and a thorough understanding of CPB's operations. Each week since December 2005, the Project's team members have met with CPB's executives, the OIG, and representatives from CPB's departments -- grant-making, human resources, business affairs, and financial operations -- to discuss challenges and present their recommendations. The Office of the Inspector General has also played an integral role, meeting frequently with senior management to discuss and provide feedback on the project and CPB's planned actions.

CPB's President and CEO Patricia Harrison took the call to establish a new "tone from the top" very seriously. She responded by committing management, staff and resources to addressing the OIG's findings and recommendations. Pat emphasized the value of the project and encouraged both the project team and the employee representatives' advisory group to work toward the best results for CPB, even if they seemed difficult to implement. She has worked with the Board to set an ambitious agenda for the project, and kept the focus on achieving our long-term goals.

The Board has also made changes in accordance with Project Champion, which include implementing a new code of ethics and a conflict of interest policy for directors; clarifying Board and CEO roles and responsibilities; committing to transparent actions during Board meetings; preventing the use of political tests in employment decisions; adopting a whistleblower policy; adopting new expense guidelines; and committing to a revision of its role in CPB contracting. I'm proud to say that we accomplished this extensive review and revision with a board that had only two-thirds of its full complement of members.

One of the more important points made in the OIG's report was CPB's statutory mandate to ensure objectivity and balance in publicly-funded programming. Under current law, CPB is required to make an assessment of the quality, objectivity, and balance in national public broadcasting programming.

The Board has been in contact with a number of the deans from the nation's top journalism schools about working with CPB on the best ways to achieve CPB's objectivity and balance legislative mandate to ensure objectivity and balance in programming. We plan to continue these discussions with the goal of convening a colloquium of journalists, public broadcasters, and other experts to address this issue. This concept is still in its infancy, but we are eager to put in place a system that will assure public broadcasting is a non-partisan and unbiased source of information.

At the same time that the Board has, under my tenure as chair, been focused on internal reforms and transparency, we have also committed ourselves to holding more meetings outside of D.C. This allows us to see for ourselves how America's public television and radio stations are in-fact serving these local public audiences. This is a priority for me and my colleagues on the CPB board, as well as for CPB's President and management.

There's an old public broadcasting saying that "When you've seen one public broadcasting station, you've seen one public broadcasting station." My fellow Board members' and my experiences certainly reflect that. In the past year we have, individually and as a board, visited stations in Arizona, California, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico and West Virginia. Every station we have visited is unique, with its own history, its own challenges, and its own understanding of its place in its community.

We have taken every opportunity to meet with station managers, staff and members of station boards of directors. Through these visits we have been able to see first-hand the role that public broadcasting plays as connector, linking people and their communities with ideas, information and the resources they need in order to address communal concerns and create positive change. We believe that these visits offer us valuable opportunities to connect with public broadcasting where it happens, and to learn from the men and women who work every day to bring to their communities not only the programming, but also the outreach, the on-line services, and the opportunities for community engagement that set public broadcasting apart.

On a recent board trip to Arizona, in addition to our station visit to KJZZ-FM in Tempe, we had the opportunity to visit KUYI-FM on the Hopi reservation. We witnessed some ways in which the station provides a valuable public service -- including providing communication between the Hopi people and medical caregivers with the weekly show "House Calls", helping to train the next generation of radio broadcasters with instruction at a high school radio class, and creating an English and Hopi language program called "Shooting Stars" for kids featuring information, stories and music just for them. We learned how KUYI's programming helps to knit together its community with news, music, and culture.

On our trip to Bismarck, ND, we were pleased to learn that Prairie Public Broadcasting (PPB) is, among other things, working closely on a regional basis with other public broadcasting entities (in states including South Dakota, Wisconsin and Ohio) to pool resources and create programming that addresses shared regional concerns like methamphetamine abuse. Additionally, PPB recently launched a new Internet project promoting North Dakota literature, "Read North Dakota," which encourages conversation about the people, communities and values portrayed in books that have helped shape the state.

We held our February Board meeting in Jackson, MS, and later this year we plan to hold meetings in Anchorage, AK and Honolulu, HI, where there are collectively 32 public broadcasting stations.

The OIG's review, Project Champion and CPB's subsequent improvements represent a powerful rededication by the Corporation's Board of Directors, management, and staff towards excellence in governance, transparency, and towards ensuring the integrity of CPB's internal controls. Equally important, Project Champion has resulted in a system for continuous review and, thereby, improvement within CPB itself.

We have also turned our efforts outward, and are working to raise public awareness of the excellence in our programming. By reaching out to local station boards, conducting station visits, working to educate opinion leaders and elected representatives, and doing regular outreach, we are making ourselves effective good will ambassadors on behalf of all public broadcasters. We need to continue to engage the larger public audience -- not just PBS viewers and NPR listeners -- but those who simply do not know about the excellence that exists every day on America's public broadcasting stations. We strive to give voice to a simple message: Public Broadcasting is quality broadcasting. As I have often said, we need to share our pride in public broadcasting.

Thank you again, Mr. Chairman and members of the subcommittee, for inviting me to testify today. I would be happy to answer any questions you might have.

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