Entity | Charles Siepmann

Charles Siepmann (1899–1985) was a British-born media scholar and policy advocate who spent much of his career in the United States where he was a professor at New York University's graduate communication program for over two decades. Siepmann was instrumental in drafting the FCC document "Public Service Responsibility of Broadcast Licensees", which became known as the "Blue Book" for its distinctive colour. Though he was an academic, Siepmann remained an advocate for the democratic potentials of radio and television and was "overtly political and engaged with media policy interventions" during his career. His advocacy was met with a "storm of protest in the [broadcast] industry" and he was frequently red-baited for his views. Siepmann was born in 1899 in Bristol, England and served in the First World War. After the war he began working for the BBC where he advocated and developed educational programming. He succeeded Hilda Matheson as head of Talks in 1931. In 1937, after twelve years at the BBC, where he had "fallen foul of power struggles in the upper echelons of BBC management", Siepmann left for the United States. As part of a Rockefeller Foundation grant to study educational broadcasting in the United States, Siepmann "visited key educational broadcast stations across the country". Subsequently, he was offered a job at Harvard University where he worked until 1942, at which point he left to join the US Office for War Information.