Shadow of the New Deal: The Victory of Public Broadcasting

Le résumé fourni par la source

In Shadow of the New Deal, Josh Shepperd sheds light on reforming public media during the 1930s and 1940s. While the significant loss of educational radio stations in 1934 risked public radio's future, an alliance of radio experts, scholars, professional organizations, and private foundations successfully advocated for laws and investment in public radio and television. The support made possible the conditions that led to the rise of university and nonprofit media production. While scholarship on media history focuses on divergences in public and education media since the 1960s, Shepperd tracks a moment when they were almost synonymous and focused on civic and public good, which has been crucial to the success of public broadcasting as a concept, ideal, and institution. A central theme is the resilience of public media, focusing on three features. Thanks to support and guidance from private organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation, stations could bring in experts to learn best practices, conduct audience research, and develop shared services and programming. The National Bicycle Network, which Shepperd argues is significant to public broadcasting, allowed networks to create and share quality programs that significantly augmented station programming, helping build an audience and demonstrate their contribution. The second feature was commercial stations relinquishing educational media production for local and marginalized communities to regional, public media stations, which federal policy would bolster through frequency allocations. Local production by personnel at universities and nonprofits was not only better equipped to understand more immediate surroundings but these groups also did not have the profit expectations of major networks. As well, new efforts to understand media effects led to the rise of communication studies: the processes of examining audience and reception became an academic field. The institutionalization of the emerging discipline, particularly in public universities, resulted in a clear educational path for students to learn best practices in media creation, audience assessment, and publicity to support a public media career.

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