Don’t Give the Public What It Wants; Give the Public What It Needs

James T. Bennett ()
Additional contact information
James T. Bennett: George Mason University

Chapter Chapter 2 in The History and Politics of Public Radio, 2021, pp 5-27 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract The exigencies and opportunities of wartime typically result in a vast expansion of governmental power. This was particularly true of the United States during the First World War, and as discussed in this chapter, the infant technology of radio was targeted by powerful actors within the government, led by the Secretary of the Navy, for nationalization. That campaign fell short, although in Europe, especially under the totalitarian regimes in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, centralized governments would employ radio as a principal means of the spread of propaganda. In the early years of the New Deal, advocates of educational radio in the United States attempted to reserve a portion of the federally issued licenses for themselves. Though frustrated by a lack of support from the Roosevelt administration, they made a serious push for license reallocation, arguing that only noncommercial radio could meet the intellectual, cultural, and scientific-educational needs of the listening audience. This effort failed, though it may have planted the seeds of later federal support of such stations.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:stpchp:978-3-030-80019-2_2

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783030800192

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-80019-2_2

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Studies in Public Choice from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().