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| PRESS KIT: A Brief History Of KQED Public Broadcasting |
In 1954, Jonathan Rice and Jim Day founded KQED, and, for the first six months, Rice's station wagon served as KQED's only office. Resourceful, imaginative and short on finances, the pair nonetheless found ways to create a quality program service that was the envy of other educational stations throughout the country.
When KQED went on the air over four decades ago, it was one of a handful of stations in a new field referred to as the "educational television movement." Conceived initially as a teaching tool, the station quickly broadened its scope to include entertainment and public affairs programming-designed to appeal, above all, to the viewer's intelligence.
From the start, and throughout the 1950s and 1960s, KQED was one of public television's torchbearers, drawing its vitality from the cultural renaissance going on in the Bay Area and from a dedicated, visionary corps of pioneers, both paid and volunteer.
Thriving on controversy, the young station made a name for itself by airing the famous Teller-Pauling debate on nuclear fallout as well as inquiries into homosexuality, racial prejudice, communism, and the link between smoking and cancer. Perpetually short on funds, KQED originated the idea of selling memberships, staging an annual auction and developing other fundraising methods that have become familiar throughout public television. During the 1968 San Francisco newspaper strike, KQED founded Newspaper of the Air (later to become Newsroom), public television's first daily news program.
Much of what defines public television today derives from the way KQED grappled, in its early years, with such questions as, can a station support itself through viewer contributions alone? Does corporate underwriting compromise a station's independence? And, what, precisely, is public television, and who is its audience?
To experience a detailed history of KQED visit kqed.org/about/history/.
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