Carnegie
Corporation
of New York
Fall 2006
Beginnings
If NPR has helped determine the soundscape of American radio as many believe, its influence is rooted in the fundamental need of men and women to communicate, to exchange ideas and information. Kevin Klose says radio represents “the oldest information paradigm in the history of humanity: one transmitter to scores, tens, hundreds of thousands of listeners, one to all. It’s the same paradigm as the town crier, as the Gutenberg printing press, to a hundred readers of the Bible to a high-speed newspaper press, to a community of readers.”
To explore the educational potential of radio, from 1929 to 1936 Carnegie Corporation of New York made grants totaling nearly $400,000, helping launch such ventures as the National Advisory Council on Radio in Education (NACRE), which worked “to further the development of the art of radio broadcasting in American education.” The idea of educational—now public—radio has always aligned perfectly with the Corporation’s mission, mandated by its founder, Andrew Carnegie, of promoting “the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding.”
NACRE championed the idea of radio stations providing informational programming, for example, fifteen- or thirty-minute segments on such topics as “Our Government,” “Our World Today,” “Fundamentals of the Law,” “Short Course in Finance” and “Language Lessons” (German, Italian, Spanish, French). By 1932, NBC and CBS affiliate radio stations had presented some 96 lectures on economics, psychology, vocational guidance and government, with the University of Chicago Press distributing more than 260,000 copies of supplemental pamphlets and books. While educators and the U.S. public demonstrated a budding interest in educational radio, it was not enough to sustain the medium on a long-term basis. Before disbanding in 1937, NACRE declared in an internal review that efforts to promote radio as a source of educational programming were “experimental and demonstrational in character.”
Then, as now, commercial broadcasting was king. Statistically and legislatively, the country’s preference has always been for-profit enterprise. The Radio Act of 1927 dealt with the regulation of “all forms of interstate and foreign radio transmissions and communications within the United States, its Territories and possessions.” This legislation—reaffirming the federal government’s earlier declaration of its ownership of the airwaves, while at the same time allowing private interests to operate broadcasting facilities under licenses it issued—did not allocate any channels for educational programming.
Attitudes hadn’t changed in 1934, when Congress created the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and gave it jurisdiction over the radio (and later television) spectrum. And in 1945, when the FCC was awarding frequencies to the fledgling television industry as well as to radio stations, it allocated only 20 of 100 radio channels for noncommercial purposes.
The first listener-supported model was Pacifica Radio, established in 1946. Its maiden station, KPFA in Berkeley, went on the air three years later, just as television sales and viewership were taking off and making this flashier medium a fixture of American culture. Given television’s ascendancy, formalizing public broadcasting and finding effective ways to compete with TV in delivering information and entertainment presented a formidable challenge.