With as much scholarship and literature has been created about media, including broadcast television networks and newspapers, it’s a little surprising to hear there’s scant information about the origins of public media in the United States.
In his new book, “The Shadow of the New Deal: The Victory of Public Broadcast,” Josh Shepperd sets out to correct that.
An associate professor in the College of Media, Communication and Information at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Shepperd says he first became interested in the topic when studying for a PhD in film and media studies and “became interested in the logistics of how a public works, what it looks like, how it creates what John Dewey called an intentional agency that promotes a public good, like journalism, education, institutions like that.”
The historical developments that led to the creation of what we know today as public media, including PBS and NPR, were never really written down, according to Shepperd. “America has no working history of public broadcasting from its inception moment, which is what the book is about, to the Public Broadcasting Act.”
There was a strong conviction in the late 1800s that there should be, in the United States, compulsory education, that everyone would and should have equal access to education and, in the pursuit of that goal, there should be facilities provided to allow and facilitate that access.
“We don’t get the first compulsory education law until the 1850s and it’s not completed, since it was a state-by-state basis, until the 1910s, right before broadcasting emerges,” he says. “The idea that there needs to be facilities and resources that promote access points to curriculum, which is where radio, from a nonprofit perspective, emerges.”
Broadcast radio was intended at the start to be open to everyone and a way to reach students in rural areas where they might not otherwise have the opportunity to get an education.
“There was some early trial and error by which commercial broadcasting wins the American system, it becomes a free market and not public,” Shepperd says. “Between 1934 and 1967, people were so scandalized that there wasn’t equal opportunity for educational resources widely available, and they had to compete with NBC in Dayton, Ohio for students on farms. The activist movement was structured around understanding policy and audiences, and that became public policy research.”
That’s not the only way educational radio influenced our current education and entertainment options. Educational radio programming established the genres of television shows available today, Shepperd says.
“The first forms of radio of any kind are educational resources, weather reports, stock reports but then you have instructional broadcasts, in the 1920s, where you have someone like me on the radio talking into a mic. It might be a home economics broadcast. That becomes cooking shows. You had a history broadcast. That becomes like a Ken Burns documentary later. A lot of the genres we associate with public media started as literally classroom lectures that were so poor at what they did, they were so bad at the aesthetics of it, over time they developed into what we now call educational entertainment.”
Shepperd also gives NPR a lot of credit for doing something really right, and smart, in the internet era.
“They made radio synonymous with digital,” he says. “They just went online and made it an extension of broadcast, part of listening to the broadcast. It was a crucial part of NPR’s growth and identity and stabilization, considering they deserve a lot of money they don’t get. At the same time, TV streaming has been reduced to five major distribution mechanisms. None of them are PBS. PBS did not get a hold on that, it’s like a subscription right now to access it instead of being easily publicly available. I could see a situation where a carve-out is made where NOVA is funded but it goes straight to Netflix. Where does that leave PBS with the digital is above my pay scale. I hope it survives forever. I think it’s a crucial part of our democratic discourse.”
