Posted: January, 28, 2013
By Mike Janssen
Decades ago, Karl Schmidt occupied himself by staging elaborate award-winning works of theater for radio broadcast. At 90, he’s still weaving compelling stories on the air, but he’s down to a troupe of just one actor — himself. Continue reading →The man who put New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia on the radio, reading the comics during a newspaper strike — M.S. “Morrie” Novik — talked the other day about his first trip west of Chicago. That excursion to Iowa more … Continue reading
Failing to foster lasting Cooperation between commercial broadcasters and educators, but sticking to its rhetoric, NACRE covered up the fatal inertia that plagued U.S. educational broadcasting. Continue reading
The Depression created a demand for sober, public-service uses of radio. Seizing the moment, NACRE launched the most ambitious experiments in national educational broadcasting that had ever been tried in America. Continue reading
Rival lobbies fought for regulators’ nod “If you educators do not hold radio for yourselves,” Judge Ira Robinson told educational broadcasters in June 1930, “it is going to be so fortified by commercial interests that you will never get it.”[41] … Continue reading
Education had no ‘inalienable right to part of the air,’ said the spokesman for broadcaster-educator Cooperation in 1930. It would have to prove itself in the marketplace. The struggle had only begun… Continue reading
Educators never made up the ground they lost during the 1920s and 1930s. They were outspent, outmaneuvered in Washington and outproduced on the air. Continue reading
How did advertising-driven broadcasting establish itself as the dominant user of the airwaves in America? A crucial episode in the story occurred in the 1930s when commercial broadcasters argued successfully that they would put education on the air, and educators … Continue reading