Rockefeller Archive Center

Rockefeller Archive Center Research Reports are created by recipients of research travel stipends and by many others who have conducted research at the RAC. The reports demonstrate the breadth of the RAC's archival holdings, particularly in the study of philanthropy and its effects. Read more about the history of philanthropy at resource.rockarch.org. Also, see the RAC Bibliography of Scholarship, a comprehensive online database of publications citing RAC archival collections.

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Rockefeller Underwriting of Local, Regional, and National Educational Broadcasting Experiments, 1934-1940

January 1, 2013

Several publications and recent reports have chronicled John Marshall's decisive place in communication history. Reports by Buxton, Kridel, and Tobias, have examined the Rockefeller Foundation's (RF) crucial role in the formation of educational media in the 1930s, which has included the study and basis of media effects research. As this report will show, Rockefeller initiatives in the 1930s also served as an essential foundation for the development of American educational broadcasting, the precursor to public broadcasting. The RF archives reveal that the origin of noncommercial broadcasting methods and organization commenced as an advocacy response to the Communications Act of 1934, which privatized radio frequency allocations. Experiments between 1934 and 1940 were designed to determine the most effective spatial organization for a non-profit approach to broadcasting. Ultimately educational proponents settled on a national model, influenced by the success of and the Office of Education's Federal Radio Education Committee suggestions.

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