A riveting narrative of the price of politics, money, and ambition, and an inspirational account of how ordinary people can prevail over powerful interests, Air Wars tells how a grassroots movement of concerned citizens at WQED in Pittsburgh was able to overcome enormous institutional influence in their quest for public accountability.

These citizens believed strongly in public television's unique mission to serve the diverse social and cultural needs of local communities. When their own station neglected this mission in the search for national prestige and bigger revenues, they felt profoundly betrayed.

Jerold Starr exposes the political and commercial pressures that made strange bedfellows of the top officials of public broadcasting, the Democratic Party establishment, Pat Robertson and the Christian Coalition, home-shopping and "infomall" king Lowell "Bud" Paxson, and billionaire right-wing publisher/philanthropist Richard Mellon Scaife.

What began as a bitterly contested local struggle that disturbed the serenity of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood later became front-page national news with revelations of presidential candidate John McCain's influence-peddling scandal on behalf of media mogul Paxson. This was followed by congressional resolutions attacking the FCC's authority to regulate noncommercial educational broadcast licenses. The "Pittsburgh case" promises to be in the news for some time to come.

Far beyond Pittsburgh, Starr looks at how the reform movement has spread to major cities like Chicago, Phoenix, Jacksonville, and San Francisco, where citizen activists have successfully challenged public stations to be more community responsive.

Finally, he outlines an innovative plan for restructuring the public broadcasting service as an independently funded public trust. Joining this vision with a practical strategy, Starr describes the formation of Citizens for Independent Public Broadcasting, a national membership organization with a grassroots approach to putting the public back into public broadcasting.

The Media Welfare State: Nordic Media in the Digital Era comprehensively addresses the central dynamics of the digitalization of the media industry in the Nordic countries—Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland—and the ways media organizations there are transforming to address the new digital environment. Taking a comparative approach, the authors provide an overview of media institutions, content, use, and policy throughout the region, focusing on the impact of information and communication technology/internet and digitalization on the Nordic media sector. Illustrating the shifting media landscape the authors draw on a wide range of cases, including developments in the press, television, the public service media institutions, and telecommunication.

New Deal Radio examines the federal government's involvement in broadcasting during the New Deal period, looking at the U.S. Office of Education's Educational Radio Project. The fact that the United States never developed a national public broadcaster, has remained a central problem of US broadcasting history. Rather than ponder what might have been, authors Joy Hayes and David Goodman look at what did happen. There was in fact a great deal of government involvement in broadcasting in the US before 1945 at local, state, and federal levels. Among the federal agencies on the air were the Department of Agriculture, the National Park Service, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Federal Theatre Project.

Contextualizing the different series aired by the Educational Radio Project as part of a unified project about radio and citizenship is crucial to understanding them. New Deal Radio argues that this distinctive government commercial partnership amounted to a critical intervention in US broadcasting and an important chapter in the evolution of public radio in America.
 

On a wintry evening in 1917, university professor Earle Terry listened with guests as the popular music of the day filtered from a physics laboratory in Science Hall into a receiving set in his living room. Little did they know that one hundred years of public service broadcasting had just begun. Terry’s radio experiment blossomed into a pioneering endeavor to carry out the "Wisconsin Idea," a promise to make the university’s knowledge accessible to all Wisconsinites, in their homes, statewide, a Progressive-era principle that still guides public broadcasting in Wisconsin and throughout the nation. In 1947, television was added to this public service model with Channel 21 in Madison, produced, like radio, from the University of Wisconsin campus. By 1967, when the Public Broadcasting Act created the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR), the Wisconsin stations had been broadcasting for fifty years. A history one hundred years in the making, Wisconsin on the Air introduces readers to the personalities and philosophies, the funding challenges and legislation, the original Wisconsin programming and pioneering technology that gave us public radio and television. Author Jack Mitchell, who developed All Things Considered for NPR before becoming the head of Wisconsin Public Radio, deftly maps public broadcasting’s hundred-year journey by charting Wisconsin’s transition from the early days of radio and television to educational broadcasting to the news, information, and music of Wisconsin Public Radio and Wisconsin Public Television.