Carnegie
Corporation
of New York
Fall 2006
Many Ideas, Many Channels
In 1964, Ralph Lowell, a Boston philanthropist and founder of WGBH educational television and radio, began making a case for the formation of a commission to evaluate public broadcasting. The idea was floated to Carnegie Corporation, which led to the creation of the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television two years later. Charged with studying the prospects for developing noncommercial television broadcasting “of diversity and excellence,” the Commission was endorsed by President Lyndon Johnson. “From our beginnings as a nation we have recognized that our security depends upon the enlightenment of our people; that our freedom depends on the communication of many ideas through many channels,” Johnson wrote. “I believe that educational television has an important future in the United States and throughout the world.”
Headed by James Killian—a former president of MIT and science advisor to President Dwight Eisenhower who later became director of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (1968–1974)—the Commission produced a landmark report in January 1967, Public Television: A Program for Action. The Commission’s recommendations, covering independence, funding, oversight, and reach, were underscored by its central conclusion that “a well-financed and well-directed educational television system, substantially larger and far more pervasive and effective than that which now exists in the United States, must be brought into being if the full needs of the American public are to be served.”
Implicit in the report was a belief in the intellectual and cultural yearnings of the American public who, the Commissioners suggested, would welcome educational broadcasting as a means of gaining “a fuller awareness of the wonder and the variety of the arts, the sciences, scholarship, and craftsmanship, and of the many roads along which the products of man’s mind and man’s hands can be encountered.”
James Reston wrote in The New York Times that the Carnegie Commission report was “one of those quiet events that, in the perspective of a generation or even more, may be recognized as one of the transforming occasions of American life.”
National Educational Radio, a division of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (at the time, public broadcasting’s primary advocate organization) noted the public interest stirred up by the Carnegie Commission report and undertook a study of radio, which was funded by the Ford Foundation. Published in April 1967, The Hidden Medium: a Status Report on Educational Radio in the United States (New York, 1967), pointed out that the nation did have an existing infrastructure of noncommercial radio stations, but that they had marginal funding and most were able to broadcast only a few hours a day.
The Hidden Medium helped to spur growing support for public radio. “Indeed, there are signs that educational radio has begun at last to respond with a budding aggressiveness to the almost overwhelming challenge posed by television,” the report said. “Like its commercial counterpart of a decade earlier, it is awakening to the realization that no one medium can be all things to all men all the time, that there is a legitimate, important role that it, too, can play in this complex, changing American society.”
While the Carnegie Commission’s report neither considered nor recommended radio, its work eventually would lead to passage of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, which established the foundation for a national public broadcasting system in the United States. Initially, with President Johnson supporting the idea and Congress willing to consider it, the preliminary draft of the new bill began going through standard legislative procedures. The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), now the Department of Health and Human Services, was charged with codifying the new legislation. It was during this period that the entire existence of NPR hinged on the fate of two words. The preliminary bill included the words “and radio” after most mentions of “television.” As the bill progressed, those words would be intensely debated: Radio proponents obviously wanted the words left in, while public television’s supporters, buoyed by the prospects of a “Public Television Act,” campaigned to keep the bill radio free. “Those fighting for public television thought including radio in the bill would drag down the legislation and reduce funding for television, ” explains Bill Siemering, a charter member of NPR’s board of directors and, recently, founder of Developing Radio Partners, a nongovernmental organization dedicated to supporting independent radio stations in young democracies.
In Listener Supported: The Culture and History of Public Radio (Praeger Publishers, 2005), Jack Mitchell, who served 12 years on NPR’s board of directors and is now a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin, writes that “a very few crusty old radio guys” fought to leave the words “and radio” in the legislation, in a manner that was “noble in intent but shady in implementation. To win a place in the future of public broadcasting, the radio guys would use misrepresentation, temper tantrums and connections with a Johnson administration insider.”
That insider was Dean Coston, deputy undersecretary of HEW and the bill’s main author. Before moving to Washington, Coston had been a radio engineer at WUOM, the educational radio station at the University of Michigan. Working with him was Jerrold Sandler, a former program director at WUOM who, in 1967, as National Educational Radio’s executive director, had overseen The Hidden Medium. Sandler, widely regarded as public radio’s main champion, had organized the relentless campaign on behalf of radio.
In the end, not only did radio remain part of the bill, but in the spring of 1967 a Senate committee also changed the bill’s title from the Public Television Act to the Public Broadcasting Act, which, in turn, helped bring into being the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. “Amazing those words got into the bill,” says Jack Mitchell. “There was a great deal of money out there supporting public television, particularly from the Ford Foundation. We had a few radio stations at the universities, but they didn’t have the moxie to go out and find the funding they needed. Suddenly, with the Public Broadcasting Act, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was forced by law to give some of that money to radio.”
Still, Congress had altered some key Carnegie Commission recommendations. For instance, the Commission had proposed that a fundamental tenet of public broadcasting should be “the need for insulation from governmental interference.” Building on that idea, the Commission proposed that the public broadcasting oversight board—now known as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB)—comprise 18 private citizens, 12 nominated by the President and 6 nominated by the board itself. Instead, Congress mandated a nine-member board, all to be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.
The Commission also proposed a tax on television sales, akin to the British licensing fee that supports the BBC, to fund CPB on a long-term basis and further contribute to insulation from governmental interference. Congress chose instead to support CPB with federal appropriations, rendering the budget process susceptible to political machinations. (Some argue that this lack of independence has politicized CPB regardless of who is in power.) President Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act into law in November 1967, allocating $20 million in federal funds to the fledgling Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and Carnegie Corporation seconded the motion with a grant of one million dollars.