ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Commun.
Sec. Media Governance and the Public Sphere
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2025.1548625
This article is part of the Research TopicUnderstanding Media Policy in the 21st Century: Affirmation, Challenge, Re-ConstitutionView all 4 articles
Public Media Lobbying: The Case of APTS
Provisionally accepted
Christopher Ali*
Sydney Forde- The Pennsylvania State University (PSU), University Park, United States
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This paper focuses on the governance structure that links US public television station's largest federal lobbying firm (America's Public Television Stations or APTS) with the recently approved ATSC 3.0 broadcast standard, in which APTS is a major advocate. Using a political economic approach to understand the incentives and motivations behind seemingly contradictory APTS lobbying efforts, we interrogate a string of relationships between large industry players and APTS leadership and board members pertaining to ATSC 3.0 adoption. Through an exploration of motivations driven by logics of market-based success that so often praise the pursuit of innovation, we propose that the actual wellbeing of US public broadcasting stations has been sidelined in its own lobbying firm's efforts to maximise external private profits.
Keywords: public media, PBS, ATSC 3.0, Public broadcasting policy, APTS
Received: 19 Dec 2024; Accepted: 18 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Ali and Forde. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Christopher Ali, The Pennsylvania State University (PSU), University Park, United States
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