General Info

As a public television station, Nine is a licensee of the Federal Communications Commission and, as such, bears a non-delegable duty to assure that its broadcast program services fulfill its statutory obligations as a broadcaster. In addition, as a community licensee, Nine is directly responsible for the quality and integrity of the broadcast services it provides the people of the St. Louis region.This document is founded in the Public Broadcasting Service ( "PBS" ) program policies that were first adopted in 1971/72, updated in 1987 and most recently updated and adopted on June 14, 2005.In selecting programs and other content for its services, Nine seeks the highest quality available. Selection decisions require professional judgments about many different aspects of content quality, including, but not limited to excellence, creativity, artistry, accuracy, balance, fairness, timeliness, innovation, boldness, thoroughness, credibility and technical virtuosity. Similar judgments must be made about the content's ability to stimulate, enlighten, educate, inform, challenge, entertain and amuse.To meet its local needs, Nine strives to offer a wide choice of quality content. Content diversity furthers the goals of a democratic society by enhancing public access to the full range of ideas, information, subject matter and perspectives required to make informed judgments about the issues of our time. It also furthers public television's special mandate to serve many different and discrete audiences. The goal of diversity also requires continuing efforts to assure that Nine content fully reflects the pluralism of our society, including, for example, appropriate representation of women and minorities. The diversity of public television producers and funders helps to assure that content distributed by Nine is not dominated by any single point of view.