About Public Media

  • The Voters’ Channel: A Feasibility Study, 1990

    The Markle Foundation, then a major backer of public TV, proposed in 1990 that PBS develop the Voters’ Channel, a project planned ...
  • Independent Television Service Inc. Articles of Incorporation, 1989

    ITVS was funded through 1988 legislation requiring the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to establish an independent program service “to expand the diversity and ...
  • Temporary Commission on Alternative Financing, 1983

    The Temporary Commission on Alternative Financing for Public Telecommunications (TCAF) delivered its recommendations to Congress on Oct. 1, 1983, after extensive research, ...
  • Tuning out education, Chapter 5

    Failing to foster lasting Cooperation between commercial broadcasters and educators, but sticking to its rhetoric, NACRE covered up the fatal inertia that ...
  • Tuning out education, Chapter 4

    The Depression created a demand for sober, public-service uses of radio. Seizing the moment, NACRE launched the most ambitious experiments in national ...
  • Tuning out education, Chapter 3

    Rival lobbies fought for regulators’ nod “If you educators do not hold radio for yourselves,” Judge Ira Robinson told educational broadcasters in June ...
  • Tuning out education, Chapter 2

    Education had no 'inalienable right to part of the air,' said the spokesman for broadcaster-educator Cooperation in 1930. It would have to ...
  • Tuning out education, Chapter 1

    Educators never made up the ground they lost during the 1920s and 1930s. They were outspent, outmaneuvered in Washington and outproduced on ...
  • Tuning out education

    How did advertising-driven broadcasting establish itself as the dominant user of the airwaves in America? A crucial episode occurred in the 1930s ...
  • Temporary Commission on Alternative Financing, 1983

    The Temporary Commission on Alternative Financing for Public Telecommunications (TCAF) delivered its recommendations to Congress on Oct. 1, 1983, after extensive research, ...
  • CPB budget allocation formula,1981

    Congress  limited CPB’s  discretion in spending the federal appropriation. The corporation’s authorizing law imposes a budget allocation formula that divides the appropriation ...
  • A Public Trust, Carnegie II’s report, 1979

    Preface to A Public Trust In 1977, 10 years after the original Carnegie Commission recomended federal aid to public television, the Carnegie Corporation of ...
  • A Public Trust: Report of the second Carnegie Commission (Carnegie II), 1979

    In 1977, a decade after the first Carnegie Commission boosted the idea of federal funding for noncommercial broadcasting, the Carnegie Corporation of ...
  • Nixon Administration Public Broadcasting Papers, Summary of 1971

    A major part of OTP’s activity in 1971 involved the development of a long-term financing bill for CPB. However, because of disagreements ...
  • Nixon Administration Public Broadcasting Papers, Summary of 1973

    In 1973, CPB negotiated an agreement with the PBS defining the relationship between the two organizations with respect to program control, operation ...