The Institutional “Effects” of the Federal Communication Commission’s Sixth Report and Order of 1952 upon the Development of Communication Studies and Public Broadcasting

This presentation reexamines the commonly held assumption that U.S. public and private media have developed along segregated paths. I argue that beginning in the 1930s, commercial and noncommercial media interests engaged in a complex give-and-take relationship resulting in the creation of multiple hybrid post-war institutions, including the academic discipline of communication studies and public broadcasting.

As noted by media historians, the Communications Act of 1934 standardized broadcast day length, aesthetic approaches to radio, and required maintenance of facilities through a “public interest” mandate. By default, these requirements favored commercial network interests, nearly eliminating educational approaches to broadcasting by 1935. Reformers persisted, however, in pursuing initiatives to prove the effectiveness of educational broadcasting. As a result, in the late 1930s Princeton and CBS analysts developed “media effects” research to gauge demographic reception to programming using hybrids of advertising metrics and social psychology techniques. Media effects were tested and appropriated during WWII by the military, commercial networks, and educational reform advocates.

The major post-1934 communications regulation, the Sixth Report and Order of 1952, reorganized frequency allocations to provide protected noncommercial channels for radio and television, as long as noncommercial entities could ensure that public interest mandates were met. This created a need to continuously examine reception to educational content, resulting in the creation of communication departments to conduct reception research, as well as train information analysts and broadcast practitioners. To finance these departments, educators turned their attention to the general study of reception to media messages, now associated with public policy research, and worked closely with commercial broadcasters to prepare students for employment in the industry. The result was that educational broadcasting, the prototype for public broadcasting, built a decentralized “network” of content production out of communication departments and university stations.  This became the fundamental structure of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.