National Public Radio (NPR) endeavors to report the news, but sometimes it becomes the news. That was the case earlier this year when long-time NPR Supreme Court reporter Nina Totenberg reported that Justice Sonia Sotomayor had asked her colleagues to wear masks when they were together, but then participated in a proceeding remotely because Justice Neil Gorsuch declined to wear one. The story generated public backlash against Gorsuch, resulting in the two justices putting out a joint statement denying the story, as did Chief Justice John Roberts. Nevertheless, Totenberg stuck by her reporting.

For Americans who have grown up listening to NPR, such politically freighted stories are no surprise. NPR has been part of the national fabric for more than 50 years; some people love it and others hate it. Either way, George Mason University political economist James Bennett’s book The History and Politics of Public Radio will be of interest. Exactly how did we get where we are with governmentally supported radio? Is there a case for it? Would privatization be better? This slender volume is packed with a great deal of information and argumentation.

Broadcast licensing / Radio transmission hit the world in 1912, followed soon after by the question of whether government should play a role in overseeing it. Writes Bennett:

This being the Progressive Era, the government was not about to allow the new medium to develop without a guiding hand, especially since more than 1,000 amateur ham radio operators were fiddling around in their garages and makeshift laboratories, far from the oversight of officialdom. This was a bottom-up phenomenon, unregulated and in its nerdish way, unruly. It needed regulation, or so the authorities believed.

The result was the Radio Act of 1912, which required that all radio transmitters be licensed by the U.S. secretary of commerce and labor. Most of the early licensees were educational institutions. But when President Woodrow Wilson decided the United States would enter the Great War, his administration took complete control of radio. The few commercial stations were taken over and amateur operators ordered to cease transmitting, all in the name of national security. Moreover, some of Wilson’s minions pushed for a permanent government monopoly over radio and all other means of electronic communication.

During the war, the administration used its authority to shape public opinion with the creation of the U.S. Committee on Public Information. It was headed by progressive journalist George Creel, who was enthused about using the medium for the “propagation of faith” — meaning faith in the government. The war ended in 1918, but the idea of radio as a vehicle for creating a “right thinking” populace remains with us today. Then as now, numerous intellectuals regard ordinary Americans as needing government guidance through publicly supported radio and other media.

Even during the generally laissez-faire Calvin Coolidge administration, the government would not leave radio alone. After a 1926 court ruling against the legality of federal regulation of radio, Congress passed and Coolidge signed the Radio Act of 1927 to license radio spectrum. The law was justified by the alleged need to prevent “chaos” in the scramble for spectrum space. Federal licensing thus was firmly entrenched, but radio was still a conglomeration of private stations. Arch-progressives were unhappy, pointing to Great Britain and Canada, where the people were (in their view) so much better served by the more enlightened programming of the BBC and CBC.

Broadcast freedom / Calls for a federal radio monopoly resumed in full force during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency. Leftists lamented that “advertisers held the whip hand” over broadcasting rather than public servants. They wanted radio to be included in FDR’s great plans for “economic rationalization.” Fortunately (from Bennett’s point of view), creating an American version of the BBC and wiping out private radio stations didn’t make the New Deal agenda. Nothing would disturb the status quo until Lyndon Johnson’s presidency.

In the intervening years, the airwaves were filled with a wildly eclectic mixture of stations. People who wanted to use radio for educational purposes could do so if they could find the necessary funds. Bennett points to Lewis Hill, who believed that radio should contain multitudes of voices and thus began Pacifica Radio, which largely featured commentary from the radical left, but also from the far right. He raised the money through subscriptions, hoping that enough listeners would choose to pay for what they could hear for free. It worked; when the stations were running short on funds, they’d announce a pledge drive and loyalists pitched in with enough to keep them going.

Hill exemplified the spirit of many visionaries who thought that radio should reflect the vast variety of America, with much of the programming geared to local interests. In the 1950s and ’60s, radio was pretty much wide open despite occasional heavy-handed efforts to silence voices that prominent politicians disliked. (Bennett unfortunately doesn’t tell the story of John F. Kennedy’s pursuit of Red Lion Broadcasting for its hostile coverage of his administration, which ultimately led to the Supreme Court’s 1969 ruling that the Federal Communications Commission could impose its “fairness rule” on radio licensees.)

Government broadcasting / Then, in the mid-1960s, the federal government got interested in radio again. With Johnson in the White House, people who wanted government funding for educational broadcasting bestirred themselves, seeing his “Great Society” program as a way to achieve their goals.

In the mid-1960s, however, the big medium was television, not radio. Legislation to create a Corporation for Public Television was introduced with the support of the administration. Its backers were not interested in including radio, but some avid educational radio supporters managed to get the words “and radio” included in the language of the bill. Bennett tells the amusing story of how the phrase was added, deleted by the TV-only forces, and finally slyly reinserted. In the end, the radio people got their way and the entity that emerged in 1967 was called the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Consequently, there would be federal money for radio, leading to National Public Radio, which went on the air in 1971.

But NPR wasn’t the whole story. Scattered around the country were many private radio stations with “educational” missions such as the Pacifica stations. They were now entitled to some of those federal dollars, provided they met certain standards in the law. A few of the radio entrepreneurs understood that taking the government’s money would in time mean the end of their independence, but most chose the money anyway. The result, Bennett laments, has been the loss of local vitality in radio, which has been replaced with the bland, Washington-centered, conventionally leftist focus of NPR.

That focus led, inevitably, to conflict when Republicans were in office. Richard Nixon wanted to cut off funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and in 1972 vetoed the bill that provided its subsidy. He later relented, in large part because of a memo from the general counsel in his Office for Telecommunication Policy, one Antonin Scalia, arguing that a pitched battle with the supporters of public broadcasting would end badly. There would be similar threats to pull federal support during Ronald Reagan’s administration and when Newt Gingrich took over as Speaker of the House in 1995. In neither instance was the federal money yanked, but NPR had a fundraising bonanza by telling listeners that conservatives wanted to take away their beloved programs.

Outmoded policy / That leads Bennett into an interesting question: does public radio need its federal money? Only 15% of the funding for NPR comes from the government, so why not rely entirely on donations? Oddly enough, the most leftist of all the people who have headed it, the McGovernite stalwart Frank Mankiewicz, set forth a goal of NPR becoming fully independent during the Reagan years. He later backed away from that. But what would happen if NPR stations had to operate the way Pacifica stations did years ago, looking exclusively to willing supporters for their funding? Bennett cites some interesting research concluding that the existence of federal subsidy does more to deter giving than to stimulate it.

It’s difficult to justify federal subsidies for radio that is popular with affluent listeners, as NPR is. The gadfly commentator Michael Kinsley hit a nerve when he wrote in 1983, “Why should the general taxpayer be subsidizing the entertainment of people who are thought to be likely customers of Piper Heidsieck, Gucci, and E. F. Hutton (the three original ‘enhanced underwriters’ at [New York City’s public TV] Channel 13)?”

The case for government funding is further weakened, Bennett argues, by the fact that radio today competes with a huge number of alternative providers of news, educational programming, and entertainment, such as podcasts. Observing that the number of podcasts available today is around 700,000, he writes, “Podcasters not only enjoy a freedom of outlook and subject not shared by NPR reporters, but they also enter a field without the enormous obstacles faced by would-be broadcasters: they don’t need a license and they don’t need a tower.”

If you think that government subsidies and regulation of radio are outmoded, you’re on Bennett’s wavelength.