UNDERWRITTEN

On January 30, 2026, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting filed its Articles of Dissolution with the District of Columbia, ending fifty-eight years of federated American public broadcasting. The federation that produced Sesame Street, PBS NewsHour, Frontline, NOVA, American Experience, Masterpiece, and four decades of Ken Burns documentary work no longer exists.

UNDERWRITTEN is the first full institutional history of American public broadcasting from the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act to the 2026 dissolution. David Boles traces the federation's architecture across its operational life: the signing in the Johnson White House; the coastal flagships at WGBH Boston, WNET New York, WETA Washington, and KCET Los Angeles; the state networks that produced Great Performances at Nebraska ETV; the independent producers at Florentine Films, ITVS, and Sesame Workshop; the canonical programs that defined American cultural memory across three generations; and the five political campaigns that tested the federation before the sixth ended it.

The book closes with the post-dissolution landscape, the archive programs at WGBH and the Library of Congress, the rural and tribal communities whose emergency broadcasting went dark with the federation's coordination, and what the American experiment in public broadcasting proved and left unproved.

Underwritten is the third volume in David Boles's institutional autopsy sequence, following The Claimed Body on the American medical-legal apparatus and Carceral Nation on the expansion of the carceral state beyond prison walls. Together the three volumes examine the American institutions that made, held, and ended the twentieth-century federated subject.

David Boles is a New York-based author, dramatist, and publisher. He founded David Boles Books Writing and Publishing in 1975 and holds an MFA from Columbia University's Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Graduate Theatre Studies. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild, the Authors Guild, and PEN America.