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By Joe Arney

If you get your headlines from NewsHour or stream Fresh Air on your ride to work, you have a little-known Colorado experiment to thank.

In the 1930s, the Rocky Mountain Radio Council wanted to reach every student working in mountain mines, to ensure they received the same public education opportunities as in Denver. The group hit on program transcriptions that could be relayed over the air—basically, pressing shellac records—so that a student working in remote Golconda Mine, in Hinsdale County, benefited from the same curriculum as his peers in Denver.

That local consortium eventually became the Public Broadcasting Service. And the focus on public education that gave it its start continues to differentiate the mission of public news networks.

“It was just by chance that I moved out here, and so I loved finding out that the inception moment for all noncommercial media was actually the mining communities,” said Josh Shepperd, an associate professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder’s College of Media, Communication and Information.

Last year, Shepperd published . It’s notable as the first academic attempt to present communication studies and public broadcasting as historically connected enterprises, and it comes at a time when criticism of the media—especially related to politics—is running especially hot. Shadow has since from the Broadcast Education Association and has been a finalist or runner up for prizes from four other organizations, including the American Journalism Historians Association and Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

Not necessarily better—but different

“This book isn’t about saying one mode of media is automatically better, or that public media is perfect or a corrective to commercial media,” he said. “But I do think public media is different because of its mission to provide a forum for every kind of voice.”

That’s different from most commercial media, “where the ethics are really tertiary to how the industry works. If there’s an audience for it, it’s good,” he said. “The idea that there is a necessity for every voice to be placed equally within a community is very important, even if I’m not sure that public media is always successful.”

In some countries, “public media” raises the specter of propaganda, like TASS or Xinhua. In the United States, PBS is insulated from such a threat, since affiliate stations don’t receive direct funding from the government.

“That doesn’t mean they aren’t political, because they are,” Shepperd said. But, he said, an endless news cycle revolving around politics and partisanship has warped the relationship between government and independent media: “Everyone keeps saying public media is too state based, but commercial media seems to be much more of a mouthpiece for politicians right now.”  

Spend a few minutes watching Fox News or MSNBC and you won’t disagree. For Shepperd, it’s another effect of a polarized media market “where people think through the abstractions of their gatekeepers’ framing, instead of just looking at what’s in front of them in their own lives,” he said. “We allow issues of public interest to become obscured by demographic affiliations as we increasingly become categories and brands instead of people.”

How we got to that point is part of Shepperd’s next project, which will examine the history of decision-making at media industries to better understand the mechanisms radio, television and digital players use to make tough calls about programming and advertising.

It’s a different thrust, but one that still hearkens back to his interest in uncovering and preserving the history of communication studies, which Shepperd called the only discipline that hasn’t completely traced its own history.

An accidental pathway

“You can’t have a discipline that doesn’t know why it exists,” he said. “Understanding that history gives us a sense of why we ask and answer the questions the way that we do, and helps us answer questions about the ethics of the discipline.”

Shepperd got into this work almost by accident. He was studying theories around public life and civil society when a professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison, where he earned his PhD, inspired him to pursue his nascent interest in public broadcasting.

“She told me it was good to think about these ideas, but that you could actually have evidence, too,” he said. “In other words, the idea that how it works is just as fair of a question as how it should work.”

He was able to put Wisconsin’s extensive archives to work for his thesis, which paved the way for the book project. Shepperd is now co-writing the official history of NPR and PBS for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

It’s fitting work, as before Shepperd dove into this subject in earnest, “no one in the history of film and media studies or communication studies had ever asked where public media came from in scholarship,” he said. Commercial media, by contrast, has been widely examined by experts and thought leaders, “and the idea that we wouldn't apply the same kind of investigation to the public system, I think, is an ideological issue that we need to face within communications research.”