Did you know that this public radio station was founded because of educational mandates put in place in the late 1860s and 70s? What about the fact that most Midwestern radio stations were first trained by a member of the BBC? Tracy Ross speaks to Josh Shepperd, assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and Director of the Sound Submissions Project at the Library of Congress, about his new book, Shadow of the New Deal: The Victory of Public Broadcasting, which discusses a history of public media that had never been documented before Shepperd's book.
"Public media comes from public education," Shepperd begins. "Around the 1860s and 70s, they started to implement what we call compulsory education, so you have to go to school. Many people — especially in rural areas — couldn't make it during the day because they were working the fields, and they couldn't make it to night class because it might be 20 miles away on a horse and buggy. So, the question, really, was a logistical and practical one: how do you create people access if everyone has to go to school and reach people who are kind of far away that deserve the same education?" Shepperd says the first generations of educational public radio included weather reports for farmers and other rural educational resources.
Many of the first educational broadcasts would later influence cable television, too. "When you think of it as an extension of educational services in the 1920s," Shepperd says, "usually, it was what we could call instructional — so, someone literally doing their lecture from a classroom into a microphone. You had home economics and cooking, so that becomes Julia Child later. You have travel logs; it becomes Rick Steves. You have language; how do you learn language? You have a lot of history. History programming became the Discovery Channel, the History Channel. A lot of cable television is public media genres that were innovated in the 1920s.
But the rise of public radio stations was not necessarily a swift one. Shepperd explains that many of the new university radio stations were, in short, bad at their jobs. To fix this, Shepperd says, "They brought someone over from the BBC called Charles Siepmann, who traveled all over the country, especially the Midwest, to evaluate the stations for the Rockefeller Foundation, which is the origin of philanthropic funding for public media. He can't believe what he sees, and he's pretty unhappy about how it's being implemented. But he stays in the US, and he helps train the first generation of educational broadcasters who will go on to build public broadcasting in the 1960s."
Shepperd says that Siepmann was so displeased with the state of public radio across the US that he encouraged donors to hold off on giving donations to local stations until they could get a better handle on their broadcast quality. "He went on to work with the FCC and wrote something called the Blue Book in the 1940s that made a case for federal funding," Shepperd says. "The Listeners' Public Broadcasting Act is 1967, so it's a good 20-something years before that that he's advocating for funding. He was an elbow grease type and sat down with the stations and taught them how to use the mic."
The National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB) was formed in the 1950s at the University of Illinois to expedite the quality control process nationwide. The NAEB would later go on to form NPR and PBS in the late 60s, but before the creation of these institutions, a clearing house was created that stored high-quality recordings from national stations in one centralized location. These recordings were handprinted into vinyl records and sent to radio stations nationwide so they could fill their day with quality broadcasts.
Eventually, music entered the fold of public media — specifically, local music. "The wonderful thing about this station and all public radio is what we call localism," Shepperd explains. "It features the local talent, and it will feature news stories about what's happening in your town but also the skilled musicians and performers. That archive for public media is so rich with local music history. It could be bluegrass, jazz, rock and roll. There was a whole lot of places where public media was the first to feature the local talent on the radio before they went on to the Grand Ole Opry or Carnegie Hall."
Shepperd says the biggest difference between public and commercial media is that public media operates on a mission statement. He believes that if public radio didn't exist today, it would still have the potential to become the institution it is today — especially considering the lack of frequency and bandwidth scarcity that was rampant in the 1920s. Moreover, Shepperd says, "There is this urge to celebrate local communities that would probably find a way."
Shepperd's book, Shadow of the New Deal: The Victory of Public Broadcasting, is available on Amazon and through the University of Illinois Press. For more information on Shepperd, visit his profile page on the University of Colorado Boulder website.
