Who speaks for the public?: The Debate over Government or Private Broadcasting in Newfoundland, 1939-1949
Bibliographic record
Abstract
AFTER MARCONI’S RECEPTION OF THE FIRST transatlantic radio signal at Signal Hill in 1901, Newfoundlanders realized that radio broadcasting could perform a great public service by bringing information and entertainment to remote communities. Neither the government nor business, however, took much advantage of the technology until the 1930s as, until that time, fledgling commercial broadcasters served the public and marketed products while the government was preoccupied by fiscal crises. When the democratically elected Newfoundland government was replaced by a British-appointed Commission of Government in 1934, it became possible for the state to take a more active role. The government pursued a bold agenda of economic reconstruction and social reform, including the creation of a government-owned broadcaster in 1939 and it, in turn, wanted the Broadcasting Corporation of Newfoundland (BCN) to publicize the government’s activities and to encourage the public to participate in its reconstruction projects. This initiative to develop a non-commercial broadcaster in Newfoundland, and similar efforts elsewhere in Canada and in the United States, provoked conflict with the privately owned industry and a substantial amount has been written on the Canadian and American experiences in this regard during the 1920s.1 The early debate over the structure of radio broadcasting in Newfoundland, however, which came more than a decade later, has not been studied. This essay seeks to fill that void by examining the relationship between the state-owned VONF and the privately owned VOCM in Newfoundland. In the 1940s the commercial competition between these two broadcasters was matched by an ideological struggle over whether government or private ownership best served the public interest. There was little disagreement over the meaning of “public service”: both broadcasters agreed that providing news and entertainment to isolated rural listeners was vital and that radio
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.042 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".