It was heartwarming to learn on July 9 that Patsy Smullin, the owner and president of California Oregon Broadcasting, the parent company of our local NBC-affiliate, KOBI-TV, has been selected to be honored as a “Giant of American Broadcasting and Electronic Arts” by the Library of American Broadcasting Foundation. The award will be presented in New York City on Nov. 12, 2024.

The award acknowledges “outstanding service” by individuals across the United States who perform on radio and television or who contribute by operating networks or station groups that live up to the mission for American broadcasting, first set forth by the Federal Communications Commission in 1934, “to serve the public interest.”

For about 50 years since 1934, the FCC operated independently in a manner that maintained our unique system of radio and TV stations. Stations were generally owned and operated by broadcasters who lived close to their local cities and regions.

The exception was the national networks that owned and operated stations in major cities, but those national entities were limited to owning no more than 7 radio stations and 5 TV stations each, so they could not shape how local broadcasting was conceived, formatted and packaged in most cities and towns.

Patsy Smullin’s father, William B. Smullin, who put on KOBI-TV in 1953, was an example of the kind of local entrepreneur who ran these community broadcast stations and lived nearby. Ms. Smullin followed in her father’s footsteps — staying in Medford to earn a living and using her family’s business to serve our community with plenty of focus on local news and public affairs programming.

In a press release, the Library of American Broadcasting Foundation summed up her attitude this way: “I love broadcasting,” she once told an interviewer. “I love the localism side of it, the power of the tube to help communities.”

But to do that Patsy Smullin has had to buck the trends of broadcasting over the past 40 years to preserve the localism aspect of this vital community asset.

Since the mid 1980s, Congress and the White House have been carving away the FCC rules that kept broadcasters focused on their communities, and they’ve opened the floodgates to allow nearly unlimited, out-of-town station ownership.

As a result, these influential community businesses — the nation’s vast system of free radio and TV broadcasting stations — that reflected local life and documented local interests have been disappearing. Local ownership is being replaced by mega-company owners who operate on bottom-line-only rules while local needs and values are neither served nor even recognized.

So, if you happen to see Ms. Smullin at the supermarket, in church, or at a Rotary meeting, in addition to congratulating her for receiving national recognition for this distinguished award, please thank her for sticking around and “using the power of the tube” to serve this community.