Page 300 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Nat onal Publ c Rad o |

hisTory
National Public Radio can trace its lineage to the University of Wisconsin,
where experimental station 9XM (now WHA) was established in 1914. Before
World War I, many land-grant colleges in the Midwest were broadcasting edu-
cational programs as well as news and weather. By 1925, 171 educational orga-
nizations had stations on the air, accounting for almost one-third of the radio
stations in the United States. However, by 1936 only 38 educational radio sta-
tions remained due to Depression-era funding cuts as well as federal regula-
tions (most notably, the Communications Act of 1934) that favored commercial
broadcasters. The Ford Foundation, which throughout the 1950s and early 1960s
nearly single-handedly set the agenda of what would become public broadcast-
ing, virtually ignored radio; it was added to the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967
only at the last minute. While the number of noncommercial radio stations had
grown throughout the 1950s, most were low-powered student laboratories with
very limited budgets. A 1969 study recommended that federal funding be di-
rected to the most well-established noncommercial radio stations as a form of
triage, and that a national programming service be created to provide consistent
programming to these stations. The resulting service, NPR, was formally incor-
porated on March 3, 1970.
A former executive recalled that “in part, NPR was a missionary enterprise
whose role was to broadcast programs which would not be commercially vi-
able” (Looker 1995, p. 113). NPR’s first production was a tape of 20 concerts
by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and it began live programming with cover-
age of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on Vietnam in April
1971. NPR’s flagship program, All Things Considered, was modeled on the Ca-
nadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC) This Country in the Morning, whose
“long-form” reports of narratives interspersed with “actualities” (taped inter-
views and ambient sound) marked a significant departure from the 60-second
news spots that were standard fare on commercial network radio. All Things
Considered’s first broadcast, on May 3, 1971, was carried by 104 stations and
included nearly half an hour of excerpts from May Day protests by Vietnam
veterans, a 16-minute story about a heroin-addicted nurse, a CBC piece about
war, and a contribution from WOI in Ames, Iowa, about waning business at
a barbershop. It concluded with a conversation between poet Allen Ginsberg
and his father.
All Things Considered won its first Peabody Award for excellence in radio
journalism in 1973, yet the program’s success heightened tensions between
NPR and its affiliated stations. Local station submissions to NPR were in-
tended to account for one-third of All Things Considered, yet many were re-
jected on grounds of poor quality or lack of national interest. In addition,
NPR reporters would at times suddenly “appear” to cover an event in a local
affiliate’s coverage area without giving the station prior notice, and the varying
length of the program’s segments offered few opportunities for local stations
to address listeners. The biggest complaint, however, was that much of All
Things Considered’s “populist” programming was at odds with the high-culture