Hugh Richard Slotten . Radio's Hidden Voice: The Origins of Public Broadcasting in the United States . (The History of Communication.) Urbana and Chicago : University of Illinois Press . 2009 . Pp. viii, 325. $50.00.

Abstract

Before Walter Lanier “Red” Barber began his career as the legendary voice of the Reds, Dodgers, and Yankees, he worked for an obscure, non‐commercial radio station at the University of Florida. Hugh Richard Slotten puts university‐affiliated stations like this one at the center of his account of radio's early days. He argues that stations such as WOI at Iowa State University and WHA at the University of Wisconsin in Madison played an important role in radio's history and provided an alternative model to the American system of broadcasting that began to prevail by the end of the 1920s. Not funded by advertisers “interested in selling commercial products to urban listeners” (p. 80), these stations sought both to disseminate useful information to farmers in rural areas and to serve as a source of education and social uplift. As an early radio commissioner put it, the stations cultivated “a taste for things worth while” (p. 125). “While commercial stations treated listeners as consumers, noncommercial state university stations increasingly treated listeners as citizens,” Slotten writes (p. 214).