Abstract
The precarity of public media in the United States has become a pressing concern for those who care about how communities access substantive and trustworthy local news and information. But as budget shortfalls, organizational politics, and audience engagement problems remain unresolved, public media’s future looks dim. Fortunately, Shadow of the New Deal: The Victory of Public Broadcasting makes a timely contribution that can enhance ongoing efforts to reconceptualize, retool, and rebuild a robust public media system in the United States. It offers many valuable historical lessons that public media proponents working in academic and nonacademic spaces should heed.
In Shadow of the New Deal, Josh Shepperd, assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and director of the Sound Submissions Project at the Library of Congress, draws from a deep well of archival materials (everything from office memos to institutional ledgers to published reports) to recount the conditions, strategies, and decisions that defined U.S. public media’s foundational growth period, spanning from the 1930s to 1950s. Despite the Great Depression, which caused a chilling economic shock from 1929 to 1939, there was an exceptional convergence of community activists, policy advocates, academic researchers, grassroots practitioners, and philanthropic supporters that emerged after the Communications Act of 1934. Rooted in activism, a coalition grew and became intent on developing a noncommercial, democratized educational radio system in a highly commercialized modern media landscape. Early noncommercial radio experiments, supported by academic and philanthropic institutions, expanded into a long-term series of coordinated efforts that, in the 1960s, gave birth to the country’s national Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB).
Shadow of the New Deal highlights and contextualizes the significance of the federal pressures, shifts in activists’ strategies, and new academic research that influenced public broadcasting’s development. Most of the movement’s early momentum was gained in the “shadow” and ethos of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s progressive New Deal program. To analyze the movement’s progress, Shepperd uses a themed approach highlighting five perspectives: advocacy, funding, infrastructure, research, and policy. The thorough, plain-stated introduction and the logical arrangement of subjects in each chapter make it easy to pinpoint relevant insights throughout the book. Keeping track of all the acronyms, time sequences, and contextual references requires some notetaking and diagramming, but the rendered perspective is worth the effort.
There are many rich historical lessons that academics and nonacademics will find appealing and valuable while reading Shadow of the New Deal. Chapter 1, apt for movement-aligned readers, focuses on how public broadcasting, starting as a grassroots activism, evolved into a coordinated, institution-connected media reform movement. Chapter 2 is ideal for readers who want to understand how public/private funding models supported early experiments in noncommercial media. This chapter’s historical perspective correlates with contemporary debates about how to fund local journalism in so-called “news deserts.” Chapter 3 might interest systems-oriented practitioners. It details how limited resources were used to create a democratic distribution infrastructure (“bicycle network”) that local practitioners used to share and build educational programming collections nationwide. Chapter 4 dives into a fascinating history of how early media effects research became a productive lobbying tool, an interesting perspective for action-oriented researchers. Chapter 5, which explains the broad policy arc from the Communications Act of 1934 to the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, might appeal to readers interested in noncommercial media policy reform strategies. Heeding insights from this final chapter is a must for anyone involved in making policy decisions that affect the future of public media.
While Shadow of the New Deal offers many excellent points and fascinating vantages, three essential takeaways should be noted. First, the educational radio movement was influenced by an impressive variety of experts, including the critically observant Charles Siepmann from the BBC, the dedicated grassroots practitioner Carl Menzer at the University of Iowa, the New Deal era Commissioner of Education, John Studebaker, and media studies pioneers like Theodor Adorno and Paul Lazarsfeld. As Shepperd argues, success was achieved through cross-sector collaborations that enabled groundbreaking institutional, regulatory, and cultural experiments. Influencers representing various sectors shared a unifying belief—they were motivated to understand how communication technology could democratize informational access and ultimately reconcile social inequities. Shepperd, furthermore, emphasizes that this movement was not an overnight sensation. Progress was slow but possible, mostly when abstract ideals were successfully translated into scalable practices. When participating in what Shepperd calls “long advocacy” work, the complicated task is reconciling epistemological and methodological differences while building a decentralized concept-driven multisector movement.
Finally, Shepperd’s historical observations remind readers to keep a keen, critical eye on the superficial intentions of the commercial media industry. Early on, commercial broadcasters dabbled in creating educational radio programs and provided expertise that aided noncommercial practitioners’ technical proficiencies. Commercial networks, however, became divested when educational programs failed to generate profitable audience metrics. With this observation, Shepperd echoes the sentiments of notable public media scholars like Victor Pickard, Allison Perlman, Robert McChesney, and Ralph Engelman. Shepperd ultimately reminds readers that while the commercial sector can drive technological innovation and standards, society cannot depend on commercial media, nor philanthropic interventions, alone to sustain long-term, diversified educational programming that is good for democracy.
