What we can learn from America’s long era with no public broadcasting
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A version of this commentary was first published in the author’s newsletter, and this edited version is published with permission.
Now that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has announced that it will shut down next year, the horrible truth of what Congress and the administration have done is unavoidable. Radio historian Josh Shepperd was blunt when interviewed by the Chicago Tribune: “I would call it the most dire situation I’ve ever seen for any public media system in the West, including Europe.”
The one perspective I haven’t seen much in the discourse is the long historical view. So let’s get into it.
Education by radio
The fact is, it took close to half a century for the U.S. to progress towards publicly funded broadcasting on a national scale, despite plenty of popular support for the notion. Actual scholars have written a lot about this struggle, so I’m including a bibliography at the end of this post, in case you want to read more. Suffice to say that the fight for public broadcasting took longer than a generation, from the idealistic dreams of educators in the 1920s to the final passage of the Public Broadcasting Act, which was signed by President Lyndon Johnson Nov. 7, 1967. (And, incidentally, that bill did not mention radio in its first few drafts — only television. Radio had to be smuggled in at the last minute.)
I think there are lessons to be learned from the long period when civic-minded advocates wandered the wilderness of American media capitalism. For years, it seemed they would never get any real support for the notion that the public airwaves should be supported with public money to foster the public good rather than be given entirely to private enterprises prone to takeover by goat-testicle-based impotence cures, antisemitic demagoguery, or just lots and lots of soap sponsorships. Now that we’ve backslid almost to the starting square on this whole idea of public media, it’s time to reexamine some of the lessons of the pre-CPB era. A few top-line takeaways, which I will unpack below:
- Do not give up, and do not stop pushing lawmakers for concessions and seemingly worthless consolation prizes, as these can mean a lot later.
- Advertising-based systems are unstable, and today’s winners are often tomorrow’s losers, so there’s always a place for scrappy efforts to survive in the cracks of this janky media structure.
- The audience for civic, fact-based media is always there. But it doesn’t like being bored any more than other audiences.
- Foundations and communities must play a crucial role in keeping nonprofit media alive until political conditions improve. Universities may hold some educational radio licenses, but they don’t necessarily want to fund stations to the level of quality audiences expect — if they hold onto those stations at all.
Explainers of yore
As I write this, I am an ocean away from my beloved library shelves, else I’d be citing a lot of media histories here. But I can at least cite myself citing one such history: Ralph Engelman’s Public Radio and Television in America.
To back up a bit: The rest of the world does not understand the American public broadcasting “system” at all. I wrote a piece for Nieman Lab about our early rejection of any systematic business model for broadcasting, whether from taxes, fees or advertising. While we were engaging in magical thinking in the 1920s, most other nations skipped the arguments and opted to support some form of broadcasting as a public good (or in the case of the Nazis, a public ill).
State-run broadcasting is of course endemic to the Russian Federation, successor state of the USSR. Way back in 2002, in a temporarily better world, I got a fellowship to do radio training in Russia. The Moscow NGO I was paired with asked me to write an explainer of the public radio system in the U.S., because it made no sense to them. So I brought along Engelman’s book, schooled myself and wrote that explainer, which a friend of mine then translated into Russian.
I still have that document on my computer, so let me quote my own potted summary of the history of “educational radio” in the U.S., which I think has held up pretty well (thanks to being based on Engelman’s book, no doubt).
In 1926, the first commercial network (NBC) formed, followed quickly by CBS. These networks banded together to urge the government to regulate radio licenses so as to reduce audio interference from other stations. Soon the federal government began allocating licenses almost exclusively for commercial broadcasters. “There is no room in the broadcast band for every school of thought, religious, political, social, and economic, each to have its separate broadcast station,” declared the Federal Radio Commission in 1929. At this time, the government believed commercial networks would take care of the public’s educational interests on their own.
Educational stations found themselves unable to compete within such a system. Sometimes the government would force them to share a frequency with commercial stations. Or the government would require them to upgrade to expensive new equipment before they could get their license renewed. Throughout the 1930s, the number of non-commercial stations in the United States dwindled, despite lobbying efforts on the part of educational broadcasters.
The increasingly powerful commercial radio networks did not view humble educational and municipal radio stations, with their professorial lectures and mayoral addresses, as a threat to their audience share. They saw the nonprofit stations as squatters on valuable broadcasting real estate. Individual station owners would lobby federal regulators for frequencies held by educational stations, and very often those federal regulators — many of whom came from the commercial world — ruled against nonprofits as “special interests.”
A spectrum allocation of one’s own
Despite all the obstacles, educational broadcasters had organized in various ways since 1925. One of their main demands was that some of the radio spectrum should be reserved for nonprofits. This failed with AM, but in 1938, the broadcasters won what felt like a slight victory when Congress asked the FCC to set aside a portion of the newly invented FM radio band for “noncommercial educational use.” Almost no one had an FM receiver back then and wouldn’t for decades.
But the potential of this small win snowballed over time, allowing passionate media reformers such as Charles Siepmann to see a path forward for what remained of educational broadcasting. Siepmann had gotten his start with the BBC and came to the U.S. on a Rockefeller Foundation grant in 1937 to survey the blighted landscape of educational stations. Josh Shepperd, whom I’m quoting a lot today for good reason, lingers on Siepmann in his book Shadow of the New Deal. The Brit heard plenty lacking as he traveled the U.S. from one station to another, and he described it all acidly: boring lectures that didn’t start on time, beleaguered staff who had to play violin solos to fill airtime, and pompous station managers who never seemed to think of their listeners. Despite that, Siepmann became fond of the weird ol’ USA and found a way to stay here.
In 1946, Siepmann argued that the FM allocation finally gave educational broadcasters a foothold and second chance. Still, he had a warning.
There are not many masters of the art of radio writing and production. The danger for radio education is the overconfidence of amateurs and provincial pride and exclusiveness. David can kill Goliath with a slingshot but his aim must be sure. He must know how to reach the vital spot.
Charles Siepmann, Radio’s Second Chance, p. 252
In other words, for educational radio to succeed, it needed to have not just funding and protected bandwidth. It had to be well-produced and relevant. That argument seemed to take hold, as nonprofit stations like WNYC formed the “bicycle network” in the late 1940s, a mutual-aid program swap to exchange recorded documentaries and public affairs shows. In 1949, Berkeley pacifist Lewis Hill started KPFA, the first listener-supported FM station in the US.
Meanwhile, foundation attention turned to the potential of public television as the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Ford Foundation helped set the stage for that to become a reality.
Looking back on this pre-CPB era, you see a lot of individual and small collective efforts to keep enough noncommercial broadcasting alive in the U.S. so that it could one day grow into something bigger, which it did with the founding of PBS in 1969 and NPR in 1970. Those efforts were a kind of Svalbard Seed Vault for the future. For better or worse, that may be what public broadcasters and fans have to do again.
The danger is that the ground most of our current seeds were meant to grow upon is CPB. To switch metaphors, let me quote Josh Shepperd once again in the Chicago Tribune:
I think it’s possible it will come back, or it will wind down to a skeleton that can be rebuilt later. But it’s like the spine within the body; without the spine, you have a bunch of organs and some flesh. It’s everything. Without the CPB, you don’t have public media — although you might still have NPR and PBS, because they might be able to find self-sustaining ways to continue to make programs. But it ceases to be public media as we understand it.
Unfortunately, due to my age, this imagery makes me think of Lee Majors as the severely injured astronaut-turned-cyborg-superhero Steve Austin in the ABC 1970s TV drama The Six Million Dollar Man. I had his action-figure doll as a child and would run around the yard with it, stopping occasionally to look through its robotic eye lens and declare, “We can rebuild him. We have the technology.”
Do we, though? That’s the question. Maybe radio’s third chance will be the charm — but it’s a crime and a shame that we need one at all.
If you’ve made it this far, you are a lifelong learner who wants a bunch of citations for further reading on the historical struggle over the nature of broadcasting in the U.S. Here are a few. Did I miss something? Please leave it in the comments!
- Douglas, S. (2004). Listening in: radio and the American imagination. University of Minnesota Press.
- Engelman, R. (1996). Public radio and television in America : a political history. Sage Publications.
- Hilmes, M. (1997). Radio voices: American broadcasting 1922-1952. University of Minnesota Press
- McChesney, R. W. (1993). Telecommunications, mass media, and democracy : the battle for the control of U.S. broadcasting, 1928-1935. Oxford University Press.
- Oney, S. (2025) On air: The triumph and tumult of NPR. Simon & Schuster.
- Pickard, V. W. (2015). America’s battle for media democracy : the triumph of corporate libertarianism and the future of media reform. Cambridge University Press.
- Shepperd, J. (2023). Shadow of the New Deal : the victory of public broadcasting. University of Illinois Press.
- Slotten, H. R. (2009). Radio’s hidden voice : the origins of public broadcasting in the United States. University of Illinois Press.
- Sterling, C. H., & Keith, M. C. (2008). Sounds of change : a history of FM broadcasting in America. University of North Carolina Press.
And if you want to hear the sounds of pre-CPB “public” radio, get over to Unlocking the Airwaves, an archival treasure trove of documents and audio from the National Association of Educational Broadcasters, most of it from the 1940s–1960s.
Julia Barton is a podcast and radio editor and author of the audio history blog and newsletter Continuous Wave. You can find more of her work at RadioWright.com.
I want to push back a bit against the spine metaphor and the assertion that without CPB, “it ceases to be public media as we understand it.” It sucks that CPB is closing down and that the piddly one billion two-year appropriation is going, going, gone. It’s wrong on so many levels and the loss will be felt disproportionately by stations serving Trumplandia voters. But it’s not public media because of federal taxpayer funds; it’s public media because it is a public good, it serves the public and the public provides direct support through donations.
Too many stations grew dependent on this volatile, constantly-under-attack source of operating funds. I don’t mean to be patronizing, but it’s a little bit like parents with cancer going through diagnoses, treatments and remissions, but ultimately succumb to the disease. Mom and dad have died and now the kids need to take care of themselves AND EACH OTHER without support from the ‘rents. Adulting is very hard but must be done. You can do this!
CPB is not backbone of public broadcasting. The audience is the spine of the system. Listeners have been wowing us by stepping up to fill the void of the loss of federal funding. It’s heart warming to know that listeners “have our back” and that stations got a big morale boost with that outpouring of support. They didn’t take the loss of CPB funds lying down. They fought back.
I wish I could say that public media fought back, but it didn’t. IMHO, it “ceased to be public media” as we know it when both CPB and PBS caved to President Trump’s offensive anti-woke, anti-DEI insanity. Where was the alleged spine when PBS leaders “let go” its inspiring DEI officers; when PBS pulled down a high school/college lesson on the LGBT rights movement? Where was that spine when CPB leaders encouraged stations to take down their hard-won antiracism statements and erase verboten words like “diversity” and “inclusion?” I actually like the new term, “community representation,” but it’s not the same as standing up to hate and saying, “Public media’s values and mission will not be compromised.”
These directives were meant to protect public media’s funding. How did that work out? I would rather have seen public media go down fighting instead of kissing the ring of a hateful monarchist. I have faith that the 20,000-ish professionals who (still) work in public media will have the courage and creativity to help one another and keep this service alive … and kicking.