Samuel C. O. Holt

Holt received the Edward R. Murrow Award (Corporation for Public Broadcasting) in 1983.

National Public Radio launched in 1970 following many of the recommendations made by Holt in his Public Radio Study. In 1977, Holt joined NPR as Senior Vice President for Programming and directed its Programming Division until 1983. There, he created new shows including A Prairie Home Companion, NPR Playhouse, The Sunday Show, and NPR Plus.

In 1967, Holt began teaching at Harvard and through a television-based course at WGBH-Boston. He became a protege of Hartford N. Gunn Jr. (president of WGBH) and was hired by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to be project director of the Public Radio Study and principal author of the program's 1969 report which “outlined a course of action followed by CPB in developing a national system of public radio.”

Samuel C. O. Holt (born January 18, 1936) is a radio and television executive who made significant contributions to the early development of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio. As the first programming director at PBS, Holt helped created such programs as Masterpiece Theatre and The MacNeil-Lehrer Report (now PBS NewsHour). When NPR was formed in 1970, the leadership of the network followed many of the recommendations in Holt's report, Public Radio Study, which urged noncommercial radio stations to “think about being something other than ... a classical music turntable.”

Holt was born in Alabama on January 18, 1936. His family owned interests in several local radio stations. He studied European history at Princeton University, where he played wingback on the football team and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1958. As a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford, he studied Anglo-American diplomatic history and was a classmate of musician Kris Kristofferson. He received a Bachelor of Philosophy degree in 1960 from Oxford and completed non-thesis doctoral work in military history in 1961.