NER, Public Broadcasting Act, 1968-1969 (1968-1969)

Record Details:

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OEO/ORA John Walker Powell November, 1968 Rural America: Communications vacuum Nearly half of all Americans live in small cities, small towns, and rural areas. The cliche that 70% are urban rests on the antiquated and misleading assumption that any town of 2500 or over is ’’urban.’* Correcting this to make 50,000 or over the urban base, together with the immediate suburbs, we find that 46.5% of our people are really rural.* If the 1965 population figures are corrected for this base, there are 88 million rural Americans. Of that number, 22 million - one in four - are below the poverty level. ** Broadly taken, this means poverty of all l^inds: hunger; bad housing; poor medical care, or none; poor and abbreviated schooling. In addition, the whole rural population is badly under-served by the important media of information and communications. The map of educational radio stations shows them concentrated in and around the great metropolitan complexes of the East and West Coasts and the Great Lakes cities. The immense barrens of the Great Plains, from Alberta and Saskatchewan to MexicoJ Alaskai and a broad belt of the South, are totally without service from educational or public radio. State ETV systems in some States relieve this drought for school children. But the rural adult is severely handi¬ capped by a meagre and impoverished^ press and a variety of useless com¬ mercial radio stations - both of them cdpsule copies of the most inane features of urban radio and press. These millions are, in short, utterly excluded from the main stream of the National Conversation. *Based on Professor Harold Wblman’s article in the October 25, 1968, COMMONWEAL. ** The People Left Behind , Report of the President’s National Advisory Committee* on Rural Poverty. September, 1967.