Cultural Authority and Canadian Public Broadcasting in the 1930s: Hector Charlesworth and the CRBC

Abstract

The Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission (CRBC), created as Canada’s first public broadcaster in 1932, struggled throughout its short existence to establish its legitimacy and authority as a cultural and social force in a North American environment dominated by entertainment-oriented commercial broadcasting. This study focusses on the views of Hector W. Charlesworth, the chairman of the commission, in order to tease out his vision of the organization’s cultural mission. Charlesworth believed it possible to use a modern medium of mass communication like radio to uplift the life of the nation in the Arnoldian sense. While the CRBC failed institutionally by 1936, Charlesworth was successful enough in defining the national and social goals of public service broadcasting that the project was not abandoned but refined and reorganized under the aegis of a new cultural authority, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.