Name Harrison Summers Role Historian | Died 1980 | |
Books Broadcasting and the Public, How to Debate: A Textbook for Beginners | ||
Harrison Boyd Summers (1894-1980) was a broadcast historian, educator who conducted audience surveys of radio listeners.
After several years as an advance man for the Chautauqua circuit, Summers was awarded a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Missouri in 1931. His first academic post was Kansas State College (now University) where he began conducting in 1937 large-scale radio audience surveys.
He soon joined the industry he had been studying, holding positions in New York City radio and serving as a member of the Radio Research Council (1937–46). He was director of public service programs for NBC's Eastern Division from 1939 to 1942 and manager of the public service division of the Blue Network (later American Broadcasting Company) from 1942 to 1946.
In 1946, Summers joined Ohio State University's speech communication program where his teaching and research centered on station and network programming, policy and regulation of broadcasting, and audience research.
Summers edited Radio Censorship (H.W. Wilson, 1939, reprinted by Arno Press, 1971) and the landmark reference work A Thirty-Year History of Programs Carried on National Radio Networks in the United States, 1926-1956 (Ohio State University, 1958; reprinted by Arno Press, 1971). He co-authored Broadcasting and the Public (Wadsworth, 1966), an introductory survey text, with his son, Robert.