THE HISTORY AND POLITICS OF PUBLIC RADIO.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: BOOK

Public radio is much older than NPR. As early as the 1910s, universities were transmitting weather reports to farmers and, in one historian's words, "esoteric jokes" to themselves. In the 1920s, as New York's municipally owned WNYC started operation, one of its founders argued that the government should establish big outlets in each region while "cutting out poorer and weaker stations which broadcast inferior programs."

Drawing on both original research and earlier scholarship (including--full disclosure--my own work), James T. Bennett's The History and Politics of Public Radio surveys those two strains of noncommercial broadcasting, one scrappy and bottom-up, the other centralist and elitist, with an eye on the subsidies and regulations that...