Carnegie’s philanthropic funding of the commission, the political ability and connections of the commissioners, and the timing of its establishment all allowed things to move quickly. The Commission’s report – published as an instant trade book – advocated for the establishment of a new Corporation for Public Television and for increased federal support of quality broadcasting. The report was distilled almost immediately into a bill (S. 1160) that quickly in turn became Public Law 90-129 (81 Stat. 365): the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. At the signing ceremony where he turned the act into law, President Johnson said, “We rededicate a part of the airwaves – which belong to all the people – [. . . ] for the enlightenment of all the people.” “We must consider,” he said, “new ways to build a great network for knowledge – not just a broadcast system, but one that employs every means of sending and storing information that the individual can use.” The system, he said, “will be free, and it will be independent – and it will belong to all of our people.” It became the system of public television and public radio and American public media that we know today. Other work and reports on the future of media would come later, funded by Carnegie, the Sloan Foundation, the Twentieth Century Fund, the Knight Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Open Society Institute, and more, but it was Carnegie I, as the work of this Commission came to be known, that paved the way for the revolution in knowledge transmission and which matured into our invaluable public broadcasting service. In the assessment of New York Times columnist James Reston, the report was “one of the transforming occasions in American life.”[3]
The market orientation of the key commercial networks that Murrow and Minow described was dangerous enough to think about all those years ago; but now we have entire national television and radio networks and enormous and well-funded media ecosystems dedicated to propagating big lies about our core political institutions, science, medicine, and more. There are and indeed have been since World War II powerful private interests, including not insignificant numbers of private philanthropies, purposely fueling misinformation as well – all to audiences as large as those that both Mannheim and Goldhagen were concerned about.[4] During the Trump presidency those forces were tied to – even harnessed by – state power.
One place to focus philanthropic attention on, now as a half century ago, is education, and specifically our knowledge institutions – universities, libraries, museums, and archives – which are key actors in the sociology of knowledge. The power of these institutions to affect change in thinking remains significant – indeed, with the weight of their presence online now, more powerful than ever.