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

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.