Considering History: Public Broadcasting’s Origins Remind Us of Its Vital Role Today

This series by American studies professor Ben Railton explores the connections between America’s past and present.

In the year since Inauguration Day, January 20, 2025, a number of longstanding and venerable American institutions have faced serious federal spending cuts and/or have had their missions significantly altered or called into question, including the Smithsonian, numerous colleges and universities, the Center for Disease Control, and many more. Most of those institutions remain with us here in January 2026, while they certainly still face ongoing and even deepening challenges. However, one federal institution that is no longer with us is the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which was targeted by President Trump’s May 2025 Executive Order 14290 and which was formally dissolved by its board on January 5, 2026.

I don’t imagine that there are many Americans who aren’t familiar with at least one or another of the TV and radio shows produced and shared by the CPB through its two principal networks, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR). But the CPB’s 1960s origin, as well as the debates and advocacy that accompanied it, tell a more complete story of this institution’s vital role in American society, and why it remains important to fight for it here in 2026.

Formally created by the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, the CPB was very much part of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs and initiatives. Johnson intended this sweeping set of proposals to help us “build a great society, a place where the meaning of man’s life matches the marvels of man’s labor.” He announced that vision in his 1964 acceptance speech of the presidential nomination; the Democratic Party Platform ratified at that same 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City featured a $32 million program of grants to help establish non-commercial educational television stations.

That 1964 proposal culminated with the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, which passed Congress in September and was signed into law by President Johnson on November 7. In his accompanying remarks, Johnson noted the Act’s specific follow-ups to those 1964 goals, including “a major study of television’s use in the Nation’s classrooms” and the creation of a new institution: the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. But he also made clear that both the Act and the CPB had larger goals still, arguing that the law “announces to the world that our nation wants more than just material wealth; our nation wants more than a ‘chicken in every pot.’ We in America have an appetite for excellence, too. While we work every day to produce new goods and to create new wealth, we want most of all to enrich man’s spirit. That is the purpose of this act.”

That might seem to be an unequivocally positive purpose, but the CPB soon came under fire from conservative politicians for perceived liberal bias. That was especially the case after the 1968 election of Richard Nixon as president, with both Nixon and his Vice President Spiro Agnew consistently criticizing the CPB and its programming, including news shows such as Washington Week in Review (1967) and investigative documentaries such as Banks and the Poor (1970), as both anti-Administration and out of touch with the American people. In response to such critiques and with the continued goal of producing educational media that could reach Americans around the nation, the CPB shifted away from a federal model and into support for more local programs, creating PBS in 1970 and NPR in 1971 as networks through which to fund and share such programs.

Those networks certainly continued to produce news programs and documentaries, but their local connections and the artists and educators with whom they were able to work as a result also allowed for the creation of genuinely unique programs that truly reflected the vital role of public broadcasting. That list included

• Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, which built on the minister and author Fred Rogers’ long-running local-access show but had its national public TV debut in February 1968
• Sesame Street, the urban-centered children’s educational program that had been in development at the newly created Children’s Television Workshop and premiered on national public TV in November 1969
• Black Journal (later American Black Journal), the first nationally televised public affairs program to focus on Black Americans, which debuted in June 1968 and was produced and directed by the acclaimed Black documentary filmmaker William Greaves.

Distinct as they were, all three of those programs reflected public broadcasting’s ability to represent and engage with diverse American communities, and to bring that diversity into children’s classrooms, families’ homes, and all Americans’ perspectives.

No one better expressed such effects than Fred Rogers. Not long after Nixon’s 1969 inauguration, the president had proposed drastic cuts in funding for PBS, and one of the CPB’s principal Congressional allies, Rhode Island Senator John Pastore, invited Rogers to testify before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Communications. To say that testimony was successful is to significantly understate the case; Rogers’ biographer Maxwell King calls it “one of the most powerful pieces of testimony ever offered before Congress, and one of the most powerful pieces of video presentation ever filmed,” and it not only led to a dramatic increase in Congressional funding for PBS, but also to Nixon himself appointing Rogers chair of the White House Conference on Children and Youth.

Fred Rogers testifies before the Senate Subcommittee on Communications 1969 (Uploaded to YouTube by ATXG3)

At the heart of Rogers’ Congressional testimony was an eloquent vision of both his goals and the possibilities of public broadcasting that’s worth quoting in full:

This is what I give. I give an expression of care every day to each child, to help him realize that he is unique. I end the program by saying, ‘You’ve made this day a special day, by just your being you. There’s no person in the whole world like you, and I like you, just the way you are.’ And I feel that if we in public television can only make it clear that feelings are mentionable and manageable, we will have done a great service for mental health. I think that it’s much more dramatic that two men could be working out their feelings of anger — much more dramatic than showing something of gunfire. I’m constantly concerned about what our children are seeing, and for 15 years I have tried in this country and Canada, to present what I feel is a meaningful expression of care.

In her statement accompanying the recent dissolution of the CPB, its Chair Ruby Calvert noted that the goal remains for public broadcasting to find ways to endure, arguing, “even in this moment, I am convinced that public media will survive, and that a new Congress will address public media’s role in our country because it is critical to our children’s education, our history, culture and democracy to do so.” That role has been present and apparent since the CPB’s 1960s origins and is one for which we should all continue to fight.