My first reporting job out of college was for the TV industry trade publication Electronic Media, which sent me to Washington, D.C., to cover the Federal Communications Commission, Congress and public media. It was a heady time handling that beat, right after the passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which deregulated media ownership and set the stage for the outsize growth of today’s media behemoths.

During that short stint in D.C., I learned a lot about the value of public media — and predicted even back then that hometown pubcasters would become more important to the communities they served as consolidation took local commercial TV and radio stations and made them part of large, faceless national chains.

On that job, I learned about the intricate inner workings of the Corporati

See Full Page