Public Radio and Television in America: A Political History. - book reviews

Reason, Oct, 1997 by Jesse Walker

Among Beltway power brokers, public broadcasting means PBS: multicultural muppets, a soporific newshour, and a perpetual Three Tenors concert. (Why three tenors? Is that supposed to make the show three times as good? A friend suggests that PBS has embraced the Universal Studios Principle: If Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolf Man were scary in their own movies, they'll be really scary together.) Sometimes someone will remember National Public Radio, domain of Some Things Considered and Terry Gross, the rich man's Arsenio. But that's pretty much it. As far as policy makers are concerned, PBS and NPR represent the sum total of noncommercial broadcasting in the United States.

That's one reason to appreciate Ralph Engelman's Public Radio and Television in America: A Political History. Engelman served on the national board of Pacifica, America's oldest noncommercial radio network, from 1973 to 1979. Perhaps because of that background, he is more attuned than most writers to public broadcasters who do not fit the standard NPR/PBS mode, such as independently licensed community radio stations or public-access channels on cable TV.

For Engelman, "public" refers not just to state subsidies but to citizen participation - not just to city hall but to town square. "A fundamental distinction," he writes, "emerges between federal and community forms of public radio and television, with the former rooted in the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, the latter in more decentralized and participatory processes." His book aspires to be the story of both brands of broadcasting - not a path-breaking history rich with primary research but a synthesis of the many books and articles that preceded his.

His book is also, one gathers, an attempt to defend these stations against the alleged Threat From The Right, i.e., Republican politicians' now-dormant efforts to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. This seems odd, as his account actually suggests that government money has been as likely to curb good noncommercial broadcasting as to nurture it. Again and again, federal funds have transformed genuinely grassroots stations into ratings-driven, "professional" outlets. But Engelman repeatedly lapses back into conflating the public sector and the public sphere. For Engelman, however flawed PBS and NPR may be, they are "public" institutions worth preserving. Profit-seeking businesses, he implies, could never create anything comparable.

That is nonsense. Talk radio, at its best, is the local, participatory platform for exchanging ideas that NPR no longer even aspires to be. Anyone who doubts this need only scan through the AM band on a Sunday afternoon. The last time I did, I heard citizens debating the proper direction of their school district, relying on personal experience rather than ideological cant. I heard state legislators fielding calls about pending bills, forced by the format to answer in more than soundbites. I even heard a rabbi debating some Randites over the existence of God. The best talk radio has a vitality that most NPR programming lacks.

Still, Engelman is happy to describe public broadcasting that takes place outside the state, even if he draws the line at embracing the business sector. He notes, accurately, that broadcasting was invented not by businessmen but by hobbyists: the grassroots network of amateurs who were jockeying discs and covering sports back when both government and corporations assumed radio would be used only for point-to-point communication. Unfortunately, Engelman doesn't describe the amateur ether in detail. Instead, he passes along a few quotes from Susan Douglas's Inventing American Broadcasting (arguably the best history of the medium ever written) and other sources, then hurries on.

This is a loss. The ham subculture of the 1910s bore a striking resemblance to Bertolt Brecht's later demand for a radio system that "knew how to receive as well as transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him," one that would "step out of the supply business and organize its listeners as suppliers." The difference is that the socialist Brecht believed that "only the State can organize this." The early amateurs, by contrast, were a spontaneous, self-regulating subculture that emerged without the state's support or affection.

What does this have to do with the Three Tenors? Not much. Engelman's "fundamental distinction" between federal and community broadcasting seems more like a giant canyon.

Community radio - independently licensed, listener-sponsored, volunteer-run stations not married to any narrow programming format - was born in 1946, when Lewis Hill founded the Pacifica Foundation. Hill, a pacifist, had come to reject the state as an innately violent institution; he had dreamed up his radio project during World War II, while interned in a labor camp for conscientious objectors. Imbued with this anarchism, the first Pacifica station - KPFA-Berkeley, launched in 1949 - received no support from any level of government. In an unconscious echo of the hams' do-it-yourself ethic, KPFA relied on its listeners for money and on community volunteers for labor.