The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967: Radio’s Real Second Chance

This introductory essay serves to frame this special public radio symposium that commemorates the 50th anniversary of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, on November 7, 2017. Drawing from his earlier writings on public broadcasting history, the author tells the story of how educational radio got its start and continued to struggle for survival until the fledgling enterprise could be reborn as public radio, a result of what may be the most significant piece of communications legislation of the second half of the 20th century. The author argues that despite the enterprise’s marginalized roots and repeated political attacks that span a half century, public radio, in one form or another, will survive well into the future.     

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?

Early Canadian radio broadcasting policy privileged private, commercial broadcasting enterprises above alternative broadcasting formats, including amateur and community radio. One station, 10AB, operated by the Moose Jaw Radio Association (MJRA) and owned by community members took exception to this policy and engaged in a decade-long dispute with radio authorities, first the Radio Branch of the Department of Marine and Fisheries and later the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission (CRBC). The MJRA ignored regulations with which it disagreed and challenged the radio authorities whilst requesting a private commercial broadcasting license. Absorbed by perceived discrimination, the MJRA failed to understand the complex situation the CRBC faced. I argue that considering transnational radio history can deepen our understanding of the dispute between the local station and national regulators in Canada.     

Public Radio at a Crossroads: Emerging Trends in U.S. Public Media

While useful in establishing U.S. public media, the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 is an imperfect instrument for moving public radio to a secure future. Policies governing public broadcasting are insufficient to address the economic, political, social, and technological changes upending media organizations, both commercial and non-commercial. The urgent need is for more flexible structural arrangements as public radio and public television stations merge, partner with non-profit media entities, and seek funding that builds on the strength of the local public radio network as well as responds to the demand for imaginative, on-demand content from national networks.     

Undervaluing Mutual: The FCC’s Missed Opportunity to Restructure Radio Broadcasting in the New Deal Era

This article reexamines the Federal Communications Commission’s investigation into monopoly practices by the “chain” or network radio broadcasters in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The FCC targeted NBC and CBS and eventually succeeded in forcing NBC to sell its Blue radio network. But the Commission ultimately failed to prevent network domination of affiliates. I argue that the Commission missed an opportunity to recognize that the Mutual Broadcasting System offered an alternative, cooperative model for organization of the industry that could have better served the FCC’s goals of harnessing the power of chain broadcasting and promoting localism in broadcasting.     

American Network Broadcasting,the CBC,and Canadian Radio Stations During the 1930s: A Content Analysis

Canadian historical literature of early radio broadcasting focuses largely on policy and formation of two successive public networks: the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission (CRBC) and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). This literature rests fundamentally on the assumption that the CRBC and CBC were formed to counter the threat of American cultural domination. This study is based on a stratified random sample of radio schedules selected from Vancouver, Montreal, and Halifax newspapers. This content analysis of radio schedules demonstrates an overall trend of greater U.S. programming within Canadian radio station schedules coinciding with the introduction of programs produced in the United States by the CBC.     

Part of imperial communications

From 1934 to 1941, three British-governed radio stations were established in the Middle East: Egyptian State Broadcasting (ESB) in Cairo (1934), the Palestine Broadcasting Service (PBS) in Jerusalem (1936), and the Near East Broadcasting Service (NEBS) in Jaffa (1941). These three stations were modeled on the BBC and run as colonial or imperial stations—but they were also considered national stations. As a result, they operated as hybrid entities with overlapping and sometimes conflicting mandates. Through the three case studies—a contentious hire at the ESB, the PBS' ‘Jerusalem Direct News Service’, and the NEBS' Islamic broadcasts—this article charts the evolving relationship between Great Britain and its Arab-world radio stations, examining these three stations in tandem tension between national and regional broadcasting mandates, as well as the challenge that managing each station raised for British officials in the UK and in-country. It moves away from a focus on the disembodied spheres of ideology and propaganda, and toward the messy administrative decisions that reflected British officials' on-the-ground efforts to navigate the administrative control and programming decisions in the perplexing world of semi-independent radio broadcasting stations in the Middle East. It closes by noting that while UK-based British officials saw these three stations as operating under the aegis of British governance and on the model of the BBC, the ESB and the PBS, in particular, reflected and projected not a British imperial identity but an Egyptian and a Palestinian nationalist one.     

A Social Democratic Vision of Media: Toward a Radical Pre-History of Public Broadcasting

The Public Broadcasting Act’s 50th anniversary provides an opportune moment to reassess justifications for creating a noncommercial media system. This commemorative occasion coincides with a particularly precarious moment for public radio and television’s future, adding some urgency to revisiting and reasserting its normative foundations. With this in mind, it is instructive to look back at public broadcasting’s long history to recover some of the original arguments for establishing an alternative to commercial news media. These earlier visions suggest a social democratic ideal for broadcast media, one clearly recognizing that a market-driven system cannot provide for all of democratic society’s communication needs.     

The continental marketplace: Authority,advertisers, and audiences in Canadian news broadcasting, 1932–1936

The development of radio news broadcasting in Canada, as in the United States, was delayed by bitter conflict between newspaper and radio interests. This paper looks at news broadcasting in Canada between 1932 and 1936, during the era of the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission (CRBC), Canada's first public broadcasting body. It focuses mainly on authority, advertisers, and audiences with respect to the news broadcasting policy and practices of the CRBC itself, but it places these issues in the context of the mixed public/ private and Canadian/American environment in which the Commission operated and raises questions about the narrow margins of maneuver available to the public broadcaster then and now.     

Liberating American Communications: Foreign Ownership Regulations from the Radio Act of 1912 to the Radio Act of 1927

Although foreign ownership regulations, embodied in Section 72 of the Radio Act of 1927, are most commonly associated with propaganda and broadcasting, this study shows that they targeted wireless telegraphy as a weapon of war. Archival research reveals that these rules formed part of the U.S. Navy's strategy to break the supremacy of Britain in international communications. Foreign ownership rules are only one example of pro- visions in the Radio Act that target telegraphy, not broadcasting, prompting us to reinterpret the Act as a hybrid legislation, designed to regulate two different uses of the same technology.     

Ghiglione,CBS's Don Hollenbeck: An Honest Reporter in the Age of McCarthyism,and Radio's Revolution: Don Hollenbeck's CBS Views the Press

This paper evaluates the evolution of community radio in postapartheid South Africa where a three-tier broadcasting system—public, commercial, and community—has replaced the monopoly of a state-run behemoth, the South African Broadcasting Corporation. The paper commences with an overview of South Africa's institutionalized culture of exclusion in the broadcasting sector and in other social spheres. A conceptual review of participatory communication precedes and provides foundation for the examination of the operations of two community radio stations located in two of South Africa's previously marginalized and disenfranchised communities. Although South Africa's adoption of community radio answers perpetual questions about the sustenance of community radio, the ongoing experience poses a few challenges.     

"The Farmer's Friend": Radio Comes to Rural America, 1920–1927

Nowhere did the coming of broadcasting have more social impact than in America's rural areas. With radio, farm families that were once isolated by vast distances and poor roads were brought into immediate and continuous contact with the rest of the nation. The United States Department of Agriculture was quick to seize the potential of the new medium and began producing weather forecasts, market reports, and other agricultural programming at an early date. Commercial interests also built stations and designed programming to serve the rural audience. This article examines the arrival of radio on America's farms during broadcasting's earliest years, from the introduction of radio in 1920 to the passage of the Radio Act of 1927.     

The Beginnings of Radio Communication in Germany, 1897–1918

This article surveys the prehistory of broadcasting in the German Reich. It focuses on wireless telegraphy, where the Telefunken Company succeeded internationally with its quenched spark system on the eve of the war. Telefunken's system was developed as an efficient military technology between 1905 and 1908, and it soon became the core of Telefunken's successful attempt to break Marconi's monopoly in maritime radio communication. Encouraged by this success, Telefunken started to establish wireless transoceanic connections to build a global German radio network. The properties of radio broadcasting as a possible new mass medium only gradually became evident before 1918.     

The TV News Scheduling Game: When the Face of the Newscaster Matters

From the late 1920s, all radio broadcasting in the United Kingdom was undertaken by a public sector broadcaster—the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Television was also the exclusive preserve of the BBC until the mid-1950s, when advertiser-supported commercial stations came into existence. This form of competition for audiences, but not for finance, between two broadcasting sectors—called by some a 'comfortable duopoly'—persisted until the late 1980s when the government permitted competitive entry by cable and satellite operators, introduced competition for advertising revenue between terrestrial stations, and placed commercial television broadcasting on a more competitive footing by introducing tendering for franchises. As these changes have occurred, the BBC has maintained its traditional system of regulation and has continued to operate under a Royal Charter. Although the expiry of the current Charter at the end of 1996 has provoked a debate about the role of the BBC, the government has stated its intention to renew the Charter for another 10 years. It seems likely that, until the year 2002 at least, the current system of regulating and financing public Service broadcasting in the United Kingdom will remain intact. However, the proliferation of channels represents a threat to the BBC's audience base. There may also be difficulties in combining within the same organization a public service mission and highly commercial activities, undertaken in a very competitive world market.     

Politics and Poster Children: A Historical Assessment of Radio Outcomes in the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967

Just over half of the noncommercial radio stations in the United States contributed in some way to the lobbying campaign that led to the inclusion of radio in the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. Most of these stations were associated with educational institutions, and were uniformly represented to federal authorities as “educational radio,” though the universe of noncommercial stations in the late 1960s was more nuanced and diverse. When federal financial assistance was finally achieved, the programs proved to be too exclusive or too expensive for some of the parties who had helped to move the Act from conception to reality. In the decades following enactment, activists for community, low power, and part time stations endeavored to correct the problems that grew out of the original legislation. For audiences, the primary consequence has been a public radio system that is less inclusive and diverse than it could have been.     

The C.B.S. Problem in American Radio Historiography

The Columbia Broadcasting System (C.B.S.) emerged in the late 1920s as the only sustainable competitor to the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) in American network radio. But scholars know far less about C.B.S. than NBC because the C.B.S. corporation failed to retain, and make accessible to media historians, internal archival and documentary materials from its developmental era. This article examines the historical void created by America’s second network while offering two specific historical case studies to establish how the loss of C.B.S. materials continues to hinder knowledge about America’s second network, the American system of broadcasting, and the political economy of the commercial mass media in the United States.     

Métissage on the Airwaves: Toward a Cultural History of Broadcasting in French Colonial Algeria, 1930–1936

This article explores the methodological challenges and possibilities of writing a cultural history of broadcasting in French colonial Algeria during the tumultuous decades between the two world wars. In a diverse, multi-ethnic colonial society, how can historians and media scholars evaluate audience reception? What meanings did radio broadcasting acquire in the colonial context? To answer these questions, this article considers the controversies surrounding two culturally hybrid broadcasts produced by Radio-Algiers during the 1930s. A careful examination of the remaining historical record concerning these broadcasts, from newspaper accounts to archival sources, exposes the cultural fluidity that typified everyday colonial life and reveals how radio broadcasting politicized music and oral language in novel ways. Broadcasting—as a purely sonic medium—challenged the classificatory mechanisms of the French colonial state and the racial and ethnic boundaries that undergirded colonial society. In consequence, historical memories of Radio-Algiers and its role during the waning years of the French empire deny the sonic cultural hybridity that flourished over the interwar airwaves.     

Foreword

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 has exerted a profound effect on radio broadcasting in the United States. The rapid consolidation of radio companies into multihundred station owners is one clear effect. Inside most consolidated operations, another effect is felt: a decline of attention to the staff. Will that decline also be felt by the audiences of today's radio? This analysis leaves the question unanswered and suggests that it's too soon to arrive at judgment.     

Independent Local Radio in the West Midlands

This essay presents the comparative analysis of two Independent Local Radio (ILR) stations in the West Midlands during the 1970s. ILR was a public, community-based, radio service funded by the sale of spot advertising, and the success or the failure of an ILR station depended on the outlook and experience of its management team. BRMB represented the appropriate balance of experience and expertise. It was headed by a managing director with a commercial background and a programme controller experienced in regulated public service broadcasting. Beacon was a station with a management from a commercial broadcasting background, and their approach brought the station into conflict with the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA), ILR's regulator. The profit motive took precedence over the fulfilment of its public service obligations, and it was this which caused the IBA to remove the Beacon licence. This essay will, therefore, address two principal questions: why were the experiences of the two West Midlands ILR stations in the 1970s so different and why were they treated so differently by the regulator?     

BBC Experiments in Local Radio Broadcasting 1961–62

In the early 1960s, the BBC was given the opportunity to demonstrate that it had the skills and resources to create localized broadcasting, by organizing a series of experimental stations across the UK. Although the output was not heard publicly, the results were played to the Pilkington Committee on Broadcasting, who were deliberating about the future direction of radio and television. Using archival research, featuring contemporary BBC documents, this paper argues that these experimental stations helped senior managers at the BBC to harness technological innovation with changing attitudes in society and culture, thus enabling them to formulate a strategy that put the BBC in the leading position to launch local radio a few years later in 1967.