ABSTRACT
This paper examines the origins of the institutional organization and advocacy strategies that later culminated in American public broadcasting. Previous to the Communications Act of 1934, which privatized American broadcasting, educational radio lacked standards for best practices and functioned in a decentralized and localized form. After the Act, the Office of Education (OOE) took interest in radio as a medium to expand federal initiatives related to educational “public forums,” town-hall style meetings centered around community debate. Noting the lack of noncommercial channels in which to broadcast forums to a larger audience, the OOE began to collaborate with the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB) to lobby the FCC, while producing civic programming with commercial broadcasters. Instead of fighting the regulation, the OOE and NAEB founded an advocacy approach centered on creating an alternate broadcasting infrastructure as a way to address regulatory precedents. In this process, early forms of production, distribution, and infrastructure later associated with public broadcasting were devised out of a hybrid of commercial broadcasting aesthetics and federal educational bureaucracy. Contrary to the received view, discussion of the origins of American public broadcasting must be framed as advocacy to change the national system through strategies of research, collaboration, and governmental incorporation instead of resistance.
