Half a Century in the Wilderness

I’ve been avoiding the whole USA death-of-public-broadcasting topic in this newsletter, except to beg my wealthy ancestral homeland Sweden to buy public radio station underwriting — both out of national self-interest and because a certain Swedish company owes the US information space reparations. But mainly I’ve been avoiding a post about the current torching of public broadcasting because, as with other Great Society institutions now bleeding out, it’s upsetting to contemplate. Like so many people in podcasting, I learned most of my audio skills on the grimy keyboards of public radio. Seeing it destroyed by an act of Congress is akin to seeing your old neighborhood bombed.

So long, CPB

Now that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has announced it’s shutting down operations at the end of 2025, 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.”¹

Many smart people are writing and talking about what we’re about to lose, or already have.

• Read this post by John Biewen, host and producer of the Peabody-award-winning podcast Scene on Radio.

• And read Planet Money co-host Mary Childs’ essay in Vogue.

• Here’s a bracing piece by ProPublica founder Dick Tofel about what needs to happen next, and how bad it will get (vigorous argument in comments, too).

• The producer of NPR’s Tiny Desk, Bobby Carter aka DJ Cuzzin B, took to his Instagram to reassure fans the popular music show will continue.

• The public media site Transom has this beautiful roll call from rural station leaders about their work and why it matters. And Jay Allison talks about the same on the podcast Rumble Strip.

• And here’s a little grim optimism from Alex Curley, creator of the Semipublic blog and Adopt a Station.

The one perspective I haven’t yet seen much yet in the discourse is the long historical view. So let’s get into it here.

Education by radio

The fact is, it took close to half a century for the US 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 place for 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 on November 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 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 backslidden almost to the starting square on this whole idea of public media, it’s time to re-examine some of the lessons of the pre-CPB era. A few top-line takeaways, which I will unpack below:

1. Do not give up, and do not stop pushing lawmakers for concessions and seemingly worthless consolation prizes, as these can mean a lot later.

2. 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.

3. The audience for civic, fact-based media is always there. But it doesn’t like being bored any more than other audiences.

4. Foundations and communities must play a crucial role in keeping non-profit 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 here 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 US, 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.²

I still have that document on my computer, so let me quote my own potted summary of the history of “educational radio” in the US, which I think has held up pretty well (thanks to being based on Engelman’s book, no doubt).

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 non-profit 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 non-profits as “special interests.”

A spectrum allocation of one’s own

Despite all the obstacles, educational broadcasters had been organized in various ways since 1925. One of their main demands was that some of the radio spectrum should be reserved for non-profits. This failed with AM, but in 1938, the broadcasters won what felt like a slight victory, when Congress asked the Federal Communications Commission to set aside a portion of the newly-invented FM radio band for “non-commercial 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 US 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 US 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 air time, and pompous station managers who never seemed to think of their listeners. Despite that, Siepmann became fond of 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.

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 non-profit 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 non-commercial broadcasting alive in the US 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 our current seeds were meant to grow upon is the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. To switch metaphors, let me quote Josh Shepperd once again in the Chicago Tribune:

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’s 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.

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If you’ve made it this far, you are a life-long learner who wants a bunch of citations for further reading on the historical struggle over the nature of broadcasting in the US. 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.

1  Thanks to University of Minnesota assistant professor Laura Garbes for recommending this article on socials. I’m looking forward to reading her new book Listeners Like Who: Exclusion and Resistance in the Public Radio Industry.

2  Speaking of damage that can’t be repaired, neither my translator friend, nor the co-trainer who traveled with me to stations around Russia, can or want to set foot there again. Because they are Ukrainians. I pray for their ongoing protection against our former host nation.