Senate Confirms Three to CPB Board

The Senate has confirmed three members of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the independent entity created by Congress in 1967 to oversee government's portion of funding for noncommercial TV and radio.

Actually, two were new members, Janice Miriam Hellreich and Robert A. Mandell, and the third was the renomination of current board chair Bruce Ramer, who is currently slated to serve in that post through 2024.

Hellreich is a speech language pathologist and has been president of the Hawaii Speech Language & Hearing Association.

Mandell is former Ambassador to Luxembourg and currently a partner in medical device company Velocitas Venture and tech company ReactiveCore.

Ramer is a partner at media law firm Gang, Tyre, Ramer, Brown & Passman, is on the board of councilors of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, chairman of the Peabody Advisory board, a member of the Executive Advisory Council of the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, and is a former board member of one of PBS' anchor producers, noncommercial KCET Los Angeles. He has been chair since October 2018.

While noncom funding has been a dicey thing in Congress under past Republican majority's, the current Senate Republicans (and House for that matter) have been generally supportive of full funding in the face of attempts by President Trump to zero it out.

John Eggerton

Contributing editor John Eggerton has been an editor and/or writer on media regulation, legislation and policy for over four decades, including covering the FCC, FTC, Congress, the major media trade associations, and the federal courts. In addition to Multichannel News and Broadcasting + Cable, his work has appeared in Radio World, TV Technology, TV Fax, This Week in Consumer Electronics, Variety and the Encyclopedia Britannica.