(upbeat music) (camera beeping) (suspenseful music) - This is "In The Author's Voice" on WSIU.

I'm Jeff Williams.

Our guest today is a university professor, a historian, an archivist, and an author, Dr. Josh Shepperd, is an assistant professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and director of the Sound Submission Project at the Library of Congress.

His book is "Shadow of The New Deal: The Victory of Public Broadcasting".

Josh, welcome.

Thank you for joining us.

- Thank you for having me.

- You know, public broadcasting is at the foundation of my life experience, and I think many others, especially, those of us who grew up in the sixties and the seventies, and we grew up on Mr. Rogers and "Sesame Street".

In the car, my parents had on "All Things Considered", and then later, well, "All Things Considered and "Morning Edition".

In the classroom, they'd wheel in the TV set during one of the periods, and we'd watch instructional television from, actually this very station from WSIU, back with our instructional television service.

It's such a fabric of the lives of so many people.

How did what we know today as public broadcasting emerge from broadcasting, and it's when it became of age in the twenties and thirties?

- Yeah, so great question, thank you.

So, public broadcasting really has its foundations in public education.

And in the 1910s or so, you begin to see the expansion of what they call compulsory education, which is you had, you gotta go to school.

And at the time, adult education was defined as over the age of 16.

So, what happens is, especially in somewhere like Southern Illinois, in other Midwestern states, in rural areas.

There were a lot of people who couldn't necessarily make it to a campus or a school in time for an evening class or for some kind of training.

And so, they began to look for ways to create correspondence classes.

So, you get the beginnings of adult education and correspondence in the 1900s, 1910s, and radio begins as a mass communication technology, a one to many, or broadcasting technology roughly around 1920.

So, there's this buildup in the 1910s to expand compulsory educational reach through new technology.

And a lot of the coding for early public broadcasting comes from instructional broadcasting, as you mentioned, and its attempt to reach every possible audience with equal access to education.

- As that grew, I think in the early thirties we saw the emergence of kind of a loose collaboration, the National Association of Educational Broadcasters.

What role did they play in what ultimately became what we see to what we see today?

- Yeah, so the earliest experiments with educational broadcasting were classes that you might expect, home economics, language, farm, farm equipment shows, and then also what we would now call public service announcements, tornadoes.

I went to University of Wisconsin, and so Baraboo is a tornado alley.

And so, Wisconsin in the 1910s would've tried to announce weather changes to Baraboo, for example, about 35 miles north.

The thing is, is that commercial broadcasting emerges a little bit later, just a few years later, and they immediately absorb Vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley performances, and the skill for radio is very high right away.

And they also have a lot of technological ownership.

They own the AT&T wires and they produce the receivers and radios.

And whereas educators were more of a fledgling operation and they didn't have a set of best practices and were admittedly very, very poor at the actual aesthetics or the art or craft of broadcasting.

So, the National Association of Educational Broadcasters emerges in 1925 as an attempt to create a clearing house to discuss how do you use the technology for public educational purposes and do it in the way that audiences actually wanna listen to the broadcasts.

- So, in there we had, in terms of developing a regulatory structure, we had the, was it the first Communications Act?

Was that the, I know there was a radio act in what '27 and then we had a Communications Act, the first one when was it?

'30, '36 or '37?

- There's a Communications Act of 1934.

- '34.

So, what did that do for, because I know it's been a kind of a bumpy path for public broadcasting to grow out of what was kind of I guess in some ways dominated by commercial broadcasting.

- So, what happens is there's such an overwhelming infrastructure created by GE and Westinghouse, which was known as RCA at the time, and they owned the AT&T wires and that they had already developed an American model before regulation was able to catch up.

And the American model was largely entertainment with magazine-style broadcasts.

So, there'd be an advertisement in between, you know, some kind of segue or some kind of content on the radio.

And so, when they get to the regulation in '34, they end up defining American media in terms of that model that was already in place, which was more of a commercial private model.

And we were the only country that actually chose to do it that way in '34.

And so they defined it in terms of what they called public interest instead of public service.

And of course, what that did was the early fledgling experimental models for education could not catch up and were initially erased from the map for a few years.

- In fact, we even had trouble from reading the book, there were trouble getting frequencies assigned or they would even take frequencies away from, and typically, in at least in radio public broadcasting, it was on the lower end of the, the left side of the radio dial.

And there were even difficulties for educational stations to even get frequencies during the time.

- Yeah, so there were about 100 stations before '34, but they were not good at reaching audiences.

The transmitters weren't always well maintained, the schools weren't always supportive of the educational radio stations.

So, when '34 came along, everyone had to reapply for their licenses through the Communications Act and what they call the public interest mandate.

And what happened was at least 70% of the stations were unable to meet the criteria of the new policy, and their licenses were handed over to the commercial stations.

And this actually becomes really the beginning of public broadcasting.

And that public broadcasting was kind of an activist movement that came out to re-establish educational access for all possible listeners.

- You'd mentioned in the public interest, and that is such a foundational part of it's woven into the mission of public broadcasting in terms of diversity of programming, and attention to local issues of public interest, and to providing programming that is not otherwise commercially viable, important to cultural society, but not necessarily commercially viable.

So in the public interest is so much a part of what we do and how it was established in the act.

At what point was the fundamental and philosophical differences in what public interest meant and in what was being practiced by commercial broadcasters versus non-commercial slash educational broadcasters?

- Yeah, that's a really a great question.

It gets to the heart of what public media is and what it intends to do.

You know, it's always had a non-commercial, non-profit impulse.

And that came from education is that, if everyone's gonna have equal access to education, the facilities have to be in place, there has to be stable funding, and the mission statement that emerges for public broadcasting is around that concept.

It's that it should be a public service, it should promote democratic participation that no group is too small.

Whereas commercial broadcasting, which most of my consumption is still commercial media, but it emerged with a completely different set of an understanding of what the technology could be for, which was promotional, entertainment, and what they would usually call an economy of scale.

So, that there'd be all these self-sustaining divisions that work together in parallel toward the common cause of revenues.

So, almost all of commercial media is based around, you know, this idea that you're gonna predict audience behavior and eliminate chance so that you can sell data about audiences to advertisers.

And so, they got better and better and better in that at the twenties and thirties to the point where they could really develop content for what we would now call a niche audience or a target audience based upon the kinds of entertainment that they developed.

So, the genres that we see in commercial media, at least initially were some overlap with educational media, but were actually pretty different, because what becomes public broadcasting genres were actually classroom extension services.

Whereas it's pretty easy to take a Jack Benny off a Vaudeville performance, put him on the radio with his team, and they already know how to do fast comedy and just entertain the audience with the rapport.

- You mentioned in earlier days for educational stations, we had a lot of ground to make up in terms of expertise and in terms of funding and how we paid for things, how important you talk about in the book the Rockefeller Foundation, how important was the Rockefeller Foundation?

What role did they play in really helping to begin to establish public broadcasting?

- Yeah, so '34 is a pretty catastrophic moment for what we would call democratic media, which is the equal access concept of technology.

And after '34, what's interesting is that the FCC and Office of Education are actually concerned.

The government's actually concerned about the lack of access for universities and school districts to reach students.

And so, they begin to hold conferences in '35 through '37, but the way that the government works is that they can't fund special research projects on their own.

There has to be like a process of application and adjudication.

And so, they went to a philanthropic group, the Rockefeller Foundation, that was already interested in public education research, and they asked them to fund research around how to improve educational broadcasting.

So, this becomes the moment for underwriting, you know, all the public media is still largely underwritten by philanthropic interests, well, not solely, but it's a huge part of the service.

And Rockefeller Foundation started with experiments in technology.

So, like how do you relay broadcasts, how do you reach audiences within the city by networking different universities together?

And then they also started to fund audience research, like how do you even understand when an educational broadcast has been successful at educating?

And that actually becomes the origins of contemporary public policy research.

So like presidential approval ratings initially come out of advocacy for public education and research to understand for the policy makers when it was working and when it wasn't.

- So, then along came the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967.

And that quite literally kind of changed the playing field, did it not?

- Yeah, there's a huge amount of what I'd call advocacy work between '34 and '67, and a lot of that has to do with like, how do you build a sustainable infrastructure for non-commercial media without advertising dollars, without policy support, without university support?

And it was just, it was a concept that just wouldn't go away.

It was a concept that a lot of people believed in very deeply, and thousands and thousands of people became galvanized to essentially build what became public media.

And so, when '67 comes around and you get the Public Broadcasting Act, it is kind of like a conglomeration or a pastiche of all the different advocacy moments within non-commercial media history.

But it's still at the same time a continuation of the concept of the equal access to education through technology concept.

So, it has three titles and it's essentially maintain the facilities, make sure the facilities are working, do research to make sure that the audiences are appropriately thought through before the content is created.

Yeah, and just general research around what it means to sustain public media.

And it was an extension of a 1962 policy that had sort of initiated a final connection between educational access of facilities, so like a public school, but through the air.

So, they called 'em schools of the air, colleges of the air.

And on the five year renewal at the congressional level, they decided to make it permanent.

And the Public Broadcasting Act was a final victory for all these educators who had put in close to 45 years of infrastructure building.

- And is it from that nucleus that then the Corporation Republic Broadcasting came into existence?

- Yeah, so it forms the CPB and then it also imagines PBS and NPR.

And initially, they were only gonna do television.

It was the Public Television Act of '67.

And I've actually seen the original document, I found it in Austin at the LBJ Presidential Library where they actually cross out the word television on every page and they write radio in back into their, because on National Educational radio was doing a good job.

It was easy to finance at the time, so they brought it back in.

And the goal of the CPB was to mitigate what we would call state-based media.

So, state-based media would be something like, you know, propaganda, right?

Or just news from the government to receive.

So, how do you get around that and create something that is democratically viable?

And so, the concept for the CPB was that it would not create content, but it would fund content, but also facilities once again, just infrastructure.

And it does so through block grants to this day.

- So, and obviously, one of those outgrows was NPR and CPB to this day remains largely one of the primary funding sources at least for programming, public broadcasting programming across the country.

WSIU is one of the charter member stations of NPR since October of 1970.

And we were one of the first charter stations that carried "All Things Considered" when it started in the spring of 1971.

How important do you think was the establishment of NPR and PBS for really developing the programming and the focus of the programming and the content that so many people enjoy today?

- The initially popular broadcasts were drama and news.

And so, when you get the foundation of PBS and NPR, they have a couple agendas that they have to reach.

One, is that they provide the continuous service, but the other was producing content that could compete as what they call a fourth network with commercial media.

And so, you end up with "All Things Considered", which is an interesting mix of sort of features of everyday life at the beginning of that broadcast and news, Bill Simmering and Jack Mitchell and others, and of course, the great hosts.

- So, WSIU is a joint licensee, we're licensed through the SIU Board of Trustees, and there are a number of public broadcasting stations that are in one way or another inextricably tied to educational institutions.

Was that an organic growth or did that happen by design?

- Yeah, so when you look at early station growth, it's typically based at universities.

And so, almost all of the NPR and PBS stations are based where facilities were being funded.

And so to this day, a lot of the thousand plus affiliates of public media are based out of the educational stations that started as early as the 1920s up through the 1960s.

And a lot of the broadcasts and broadcast facilities also had to do with training of students and then also the growth of educational instructional broadcasting.

And so, when you get to NPR and PBS, two, it's kind of split into two.

One was like an educational technology or instructional model that continued through closed captioning, and then the cultural uplift model that was the improvement of public media in the fifties and sixties becomes with news the NPR and PBS model.

- Yeah, I know you're working one of your upcoming projects as you're working on kind of updating, revising the histories of NPR and PBS.

I know you're a historian, but if you're looking into your crystal ball, what do you see is the future of public broadcasting?

- Yeah, so that's a tough question.

I think the Democrats should fund it a lot more.

I think they should make it a model, a political model.

I would say it needs at least triple the funding to achieve its goals as it's stated within the titles of the original Public Broadcasting Act.

I think one of the real victories of this kind of service is that it often provides the only local news for rural regions.

A lot of commercial broadcasting is removing the funding or moving things to AP or Reuters, and then just reporting national, international news.

And I think that the localism of public media beyond the great national programming is what will sustain it.

- Josh, we've got about five minutes or so left.

I wanted to touch on, you're kind of on a mini university tour right now talking about your book and also your role with the Library of Congress and the importance of radio preservation.

You had a fantastic lecture here on campus and as a radio geek, it must be, I'm just amazed and fascinated about that your role as being a curator of the Library of Congress and especially in radio preservation.

- Yeah, so I'm a task force director, what they call the Radio Preservation Task Force of the National Recording Preservation Board.

And about 11, 12 years ago, we realized that there was a catastrophic lack of infrastructure to preserve media history in the United States.

And so the boards, it's connected to the film boards.

You might notice Martin Scorsese talking about film preservation.

It's the same people at the Library.

They said, "Well, why don't we think about surveying where radio is in the United States?"

And what they found within the first couple years was that almost the entirety of the history had already been either abandoned or thrown out, and then it was compounded with the problem of different formats changing every couple years and the inability to do playback.

So, we started doing surveys of what was out there and what was extent.

And we realized that a huge amount of important cultural history of the 20th century was on radio, but you couldn't find it in other places.

It wasn't in film, it wasn't in newspapers.

And so, we've been working with a very large team, representatives from a few hundred universities to locate and preserve this history.

- So, Josh, I know that just from our experience here at WSIU, the station was founded in 1958 and a lot of the, at least the first 15, 20 years of that history in terms of programming, it really doesn't exist anymore.

I mean, we have archive materials from 1978 into the early eighties to present, but we have the same issue, like you mentioned, they're on multiple formats.

So, how do we, and I use a collective we, how do we better preserve the programming that will become the future historical archive?

- So, how do we preserve the current program?

So, digital's made it a lot easier.

That's true.

And then the digital formats also change pretty rapidly, but it does seem like there should be a kind of nationally-funded earmarked money to consolidate these archives.

So, I would say the first thing you could do is you tape it, (Josh and Jeff chuckling) and then from there, you know, they call it metadata in the library world, it has to be appropriately coded.

You have to know what's on there, make sure you can find it.

And then usually cloud services are pretty stable at this point, and then you archive it.

And then the question is how do you access it?

And that really gets into a lot of copyright policy issues.

But I would say that the question of curation and reaching intended audiences, so the posterity of the memory of the events that we're creating now can be accessible in the future, is pretty central to that as well.

- I would agree.

Josh, as I say, we run out of time before we run out of questions.

I appreciate you being here, and fascinating discussion.

Josh Shepperd's "Shadow of The New Deal: Victory of Public Broadcasting" is his book.

And you are on a tour to talk about that and also talk about the history and the cultural archive of importance of preserving that cultural history.

Thank you so much for joining us on this edition of "In The Author's Voice".

I'm Jeff Williams, and please know that it is your support that helps make programming like this possible on WSIU, because we are powered by you.

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