< 'Broadcasting' has its roots in agriculture. Here's how it made its way into media

October 15, 20255:00 AM ET

'Broadcasting' has its roots in agriculture. Here's how it made its way into media

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Here at NPR, our business is broadcasting, right? So for this week's installment of Word of the Week, our series on the origins and evolution of words, we are going to examine the word broadcasting itself. The term actually comes from agriculture, and NPR's Rachel Treisman examines the word's journey to the airwaves.

RACHEL TREISMAN, BYLINE: Long before broadcasting meant media, it was used to describe a method of planting seeds.

LEO LANDIS: Broadcasting comes into common use in the 1700s, and it connects to planting small grains especially, like wheat and oats and rye.

TREISMAN: That's Leo Landis, the director of public history at the Wisconsin Historical Society.

LANDIS: And it comes from the way that you would plant it on a prepared field, where you would scatter it broadly across the ground.

TREISMAN: Broadcasting is still one of the main planting methods today, but we tend to associate the word with spreading news and entertainment, not grain seeds.

MICHAEL SOKOLOW: It describes something that the government has technical and engineering standards for.

TREISMAN: That's Michael Sokolow, a media historian at the University of Maine.

SOKOLOW: But it also describes something that we all talk about and we all live with, which is our radios and our televisions.

TREISMAN: He says the term broadcasting was first widely applied to radio in the 1920s. That decade saw the creation of the first major networks, NBC and CBS, which broadcast programs to stations across the country. It was also the first time that more Americans lived in urban areas than rural ones. And as the price of radios dropped, they became a household fixture.

SOKOLOW: Really, by the end of the 1930s, when you used the word broadcasting, Americans all knew it meant radio broadcasting.

TREISMAN: The medium continued to evolve, from comedy shows and President FDR's fireside chats to live news during World War II. In the 1950s, radios moved into cars and TV sets took over American homes. And it wasn't just commercial. In the 1960s, Congress created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, paving the way for NPR and PBS. President Trump and Congress cut its federal funding over alleged liberal bias this summer.

SOKOLOW: Broadcasting became so ubiquitous as a word in the late 20th century that it came to stand for everything.

TREISMAN: The government defines broadcasting as the transmission of radio and TV signals for the general public. But these days, people tend to use it - inaccurately - to describe platforms like social media, streaming services and cable news.

SOKOLOW: It's very interesting that the concept of broadcasting has remained, even though the technologies have changed and it isn't broadcasting as it was understood for most of the 20th century.

TREISMAN: Sokolow predicts TV and radio broadcasters will keep evolving to appeal to younger audiences. It wouldn't be the first time.

Rachel Treisman, NPR News.

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