Remarks as prepared for delivery on Thursday, August 18, 2022.
I’m delighted to join Shawn Turner, Prabu David, and all of you in this celebration of WKAR’s century of service to the people of Michigan.
Having worked at RCA – the original media company, which began life as the Radio Corporation of America – earlier in my career, I have a long-standing fascination with the history of media in this country.
And I know better than most just how much of a media pioneer WKAR and Michigan State University have been for the past 100 years.
When WKAR went on the air in 1922, it was one of 29 radio stations in all of America.
When Michigan Agricultural College – now Michigan State University – started teaching radio communications in 1922, it was one of two colleges in all of America offering such studies.
(The other was Tufts University in Boston.)
And when WKAR started broadcasting in 1922, the only person providing government oversight of the broadcasting industry was Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover.
The Federal Radio Commission wouldn’t come along until 1927, and the Federal Communications Commission as we know it wasn’t created until 1934.
In the more specialized world of public television, WKAR is also a hardy pioneer.
The oldest public television station in America is KUHT in Houston, established in 1952.
The second oldest is WKAR-TV in East Lansing, Michigan, established in 1954.
And would you care to guess which was the first public television station in America to receive an experimental license for the new ATSC 3 Next Gen broadcast standard?
WKAR-TV, in 2018.
This station and this university made a commitment long ago to harness the power of media for the public good, and no one has done it better.
In the 1920s, you launched The Farm Service Hour to expand the university’s agricultural extension service.
You were the first station to broadcast weather reports – an idea that caught on pretty well.
In the 1950s, you launched educational programming like Classroom 10, Better Farming and The Land Of Play.
It was programming like this that persuaded President Eisenhower, in 1958, that educational television – what we now call public television -- was worthy of financial support from the federal government.
The list of media innovations for which WKAR and Michigan State University are responsible is actually a good deal longer, and I don’t have time – although it is a great temptation – to recite them all this afternoon.
And the best thing of all is that you’re showing absolutely no sign of stopping now — even at your advanced age.
Your NextGen Media Innovation Lab is literally inventing the future of broadcasting, experimenting with all the exciting applications of the new broadcast standard:
--remote learning;
-- emergency alerting;
-- telemedicine;
-- precision agriculture;
-- autonomous vehicle navigation;
and more.
It’s simply extraordinary what a great media organization and a great university can do as partners in progress.
And WKAR and Michigan State have set a standard of collaboration and success that inspires public institutions everywhere in America.
My old friend Susi Elkins, the former general manager of WKAR and the former vice-chair of the board of America’s Public Television Stations, is responsible for much of this success, through a productive association with Dean Prabu David.
And my new friend Shawn Turner, the interim general manager, is carrying on this fine tradition very well indeed.
When you come to Michigan State and WKAR, you visit the future, and it’s so good to see how bright and full of promise and endless innovation that future is.
So, on behalf of the 336 public television stations across America whom I am honored to represent – all of which stand in awe of what you have done here on this campus -- I say “congratulations” on your hundredth anniversary.
And here’s to a hundred more years of inventing the future and serving the people of Michigan in ever more extraordinary ways.
###