Why Does Public Radio Exist?

• Author: Leef, George

The History and Politics of Public Radio: A Comprehensive Analysis of Taxpayer-Funded US Broadcasting

By James T. Bennett

133 pp.; Springer, 2021

National Public Radio (NPR) endeavors to report the news, but sometimes it becomes the news. That was the case earlier this year when long-time NPR Supreme Court reporter Nina Totenberg reported that Justice Soma Sotomayor had asked her colleagues to wear masks when they were together, but then participated in a proceeding remotely because Justice Neil Gorsuch declined to wear one. The story generated public backlash against Gorsuch, resulting in the two justices putting out a joint statement denying the story, as did Chief Justice John Roberts. Nevertheless, Totenberg stuck by her reporting.

For Americans who have grown up listening to NPR, such politically freighted stories are no surprise. NPR has been part of the national fabric for more than 50 years; some people love it and others hate it. Either way, George Mason University political economist James Bennett's book The History and Politics of Public Radio will be of interest. Exactly how did we get where we are with governmentally supported radio? Is there a case for it? Would privatization be better? This slender volume is packed with a great deal of information and argumentation.

Broadcast licensing I Radio transmission hit the world in 1912, followed soon after by the question of whether government should play a role in overseeing it. Writes Bennett:

This being the Progressive Era, the government was not about to allow the new medium to develop without a guiding hand, especially since more than 1,000 amateur ham radio operators were fiddling around in their garages and makeshift laboratories, far from the oversight of officialdom. This was a bottom-up phenomenon, unregulated and in its nerdish way, unruly. It needed regulation, or so the authorities believed. The result was the Radio Act of 1912, which required that all radio transmitters be licensed by the U.S. secretary of commerce and labor. Most of the early licensees were educational institutions. But when President Woodrow Wilson decided the United States would enter the Great War, his administration took complete control of radio. The few commercial stations were taken over and amateur operators ordered to cease transmitting, all in the name of national security. Moreover, some of Wilson's minions pushed for a permanent government monopoly over radio and all other means of...