Jack Mitchell - Wisconsin on the Air: 100 Years of Public Broadcasting in the State That Invented It

Wisconsin on the Air

100 Years of Public Broadcasting in the State That Invented It

J ack M itchell

WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY PRESS

Published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press

Publishers since 1855

The Wisconsin Historical Society helps people connect to the past by collecting, preserving, and sharing stories. Founded in 1846, the Society is one of the nations finest historical institutions.

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2016 by the State Historical Society of Wisconsin

E-book edition 2016

For permission to reuse material from Wisconsin on the Air: 100 Years of Public Broadcasting in the State That Invented It (ISBN 978-0-87020-761-7; e-book ISBN 978-0-87020-762-4), please access www.copyright.com or contact the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. (CCC), 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400. CCC is a not-for-profit organization that provides licenses and registration for a variety of users.

Photographs identified with WHi or WHS are from the Societys collections; address requests to reproduce these photos to the Visual Materials Archivist at the Wisconsin Historical Society, 816 State Street, Madison, WI 53706.

Front cover: WHA microphone detail, WHI IMAGE ID 42114

Cover design by Andrew J. Brozyna, AJB Design

Typesetting by Wendy Holdman Design

20 19 18 17 161 2 3 4 5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mitchell, Jack W., 1941 author.

Title: Wisconsin on the air : 100 years of public broadcasting in the state that invented it / Jack Mitchell.

Description: Madison, WI : Wisconsin Historical Society Press, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015046195 (print) | LCCN 2016001122 (e-book) | ISBN 9780870207617 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780870207624 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Public broadcastingWisconsinHistory

Classification: LCC HE8689.7.P82 M57 2016 (print) | LCC HE8689.7.P82 (e-book) | DDC 384.5409775dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015046195

For my grandchildren, Jonah, Eli, Nina, and Cecily

Wisconsin on the Air: 100 Years of Public Broadcasting in the State That Invented It tells the story of what we now call Wisconsin Public Radio and Wisconsin Public Television. The University of Wisconsin put station 9XM, now WHA, on the air in 1917. The State of Wisconsin followed a few years later with the station now called WLBL. While WHA may have stretched the truth a bit in calling itself the oldest station in the nation, it is certainly the oldest and most committed not-for-profit radio station in the nation. Wisconsin invented tax-supported broadcasting in the public interest, while American broadcasting in general sold commercials to generate private profit. Wisconsin on the Air explores the people and the ideas that made tax-supported broadcasting happen here.

For forty-nine of its one hundred years, I have been a close observer of public broadcasting in Wisconsin, and from 1976 to 1997 I played a central role as director of Wisconsin Public Radio. As such, biases may lurk in the story I tell, biases that a less involved chronicler might have avoided. For example, I admit to having more interest in radio than in television, and to caring more about public broadcastings service to democracy than to instruction, although I recognize the importance of both. With those biases, however, I bring insights, I hope, not available to those who have not spent a half century thinking about the purpose of these institutions and how to realize those purposes in practice.

My mentor, Ron Bornstein, says the story of public broadcasting nationally is less about a unified movement than about the clash of individual egos and fiefdoms that popped up in different places over the years. Wisconsin is something of an exception, which may explain why its public broadcasters have maintained national recognition throughout its one hundred years as other players have come and gone. Wisconsin has certainly had its share of large egos and empire buildersBornstein and myself among thembut unlike other places, Wisconsin has benefited from an underlying philosophy that transcends personalities to give purpose, legitimacy, and continuity to our efforts. That philosophy is the Wisconsin Idea. It is a philosophy of public service that distinguishes the University of Wisconsin from its peers and the state of Wisconsin from its neighbors. This book begins and ends with the Wisconsin Idea. That idea weaves its way through one hundred years of influential individuals and events that created the Wisconsin Public Radio and Wisconsin Public Television that exist today.

Ive been asked why I included television in this story, since 2017 marks the one hundredth anniversary of public radio. Wisconsin had no noncommercial television until 1954 and no statewide television network until 1974. I see the two media as intertwined, however, each helping shape the other. Educational television grew directly out of educational radio. It simply added pictures to the philosophy and practice of the older medium. But it was television that drove the national Public Broadcasting Act in 1967, fifty years after 9XM first broadcast voice and music in 1917. That legislation stripped instruction from public broadcastings national mission and attempted to democratize a service that was seen as elitist. Noncommercial television in Wisconsin embraced the approach with enthusiasm in the late 1960s. Radio took some time to follow televisions lead, but then absorbed the democratic approach more thoroughly than the visual medium. In other words, for the first fifty years, educational radios philosophy shaped television, while in the next fifty, public televisions mission shaped radio.

My greatest regret in telling the one-hundred-year story of public radio and television in Wisconsin is all the significant people I do not mention. Most are simply lost to history, their contributions unnoted but undoubtedly important. Others I had to omit to tell a manageable and coherent story. Please regard those I do discuss as representing the thousands I do not. I also tell less of WPTs and WPRs recent history, since only time will test the impact of current innovations. I hope someone will write a sequel to my story in a hundred years or less.

The packrat tendencies of WHAs early leaders are either a blessing or a curse to anyone trying to tell their story. Perhaps they knew they were making history and that every scrap of paper they handled might someday have significance. I confess to not even trying to plow through all of the McCarty and Lighty papers at the Wisconsin Historical Society archives. Rather, I relied most heavily on the manageable, but still voluminous, WHA station files in the University of Wisconsin Archives. I appreciate the good cheer with which David Null, Cathy Jacob, and other staff carted countless boxes from the archives basement to the fourth floor for my use.