Abstract
The history of radio and television communications in the United States does not reflect a simple path to the dominance of mass media. It was and still is the site of a prolonged struggle over the public obligations of media. The airwaves were considered public property and not owned but only licensed by operators, but public obligations in the United States came to be defined primarily in commercial terms. Still other groups lobbied for more extensive public obligations including reserving licenses for nonprofits—though their efforts were unsuccessful. They sought to direct the power of the new media of radio for democratic and educational purposes. The first wave of broadcast regulation culminated in the formation of the FCC in 1934 in which commercial interests predominated. Though there were some challenges to this in the early 1940s the next wave of activism arose in the 1950s with the movement for Public Educational Television. This was largely an elite-driven movement for “quality programming” in reaction to the low quality of network programming and the total lack of children’s programming on television. It led to the formation of PBS. The other significant initiative arose in the 1960s when the critique of network television extended to its virtual ignorance of minorities the poor or any group other than the white suburban nuclear family. The large networks largely conformed to the image of conformist media that Horkheimer and Adorno criticized. They did not do enough to promote discussion of controversial issues or to educate the public. The social movements of the times along with severe social conflicts also lend greater urgency to the need for democratic practices to spread throughout society.
The idea of public access influenced and was influenced by ideas of participatory democracy that arose with the new left. Democracy required extensive citizen participation both to involve all in political deliberation and also to strengthen community and existential commitment. New technologies also allowed individuals to easily create programming. PEG channels then were not simply a forum for individual expression but a creation of political community.
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Notes
- 1.
For the notion of counter-publics, see Michael Warmer, Publics and Counter Publics, New York: Zone Books 2005.
- 2.
Robert McChesney, Telecommunications, Mass Media and Democracy: The Battle for the control of US Broadcasting, 1927–1935. New York: Oxford 1993: 252l; Thomas Streeter, Selling the Air: A Critique of the Policy of Commercial Broadcasting in the United States, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1996, disagrees with McChesney’s assessment. He thinks that the prior regulatory regimes for the telephone and railroad set the stage for the corporatist model.
- 3.
Ralph Engelman, Public Radio and Television in America: A Political History, Thousand Oaks: Sage 1996: 12.
- 4.
Eric Barnouw, A Tower in Babel: A History of Broadcasting in the United States to 1933 vol 1, New York: Oxford 19.
- 5.
Susan Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting: 1899–1922, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1989.
- 6.
Susan Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting, pp. 299–303.
- 7.
For this and the discussion in the next several paragraphs, see Robert Britt Horowitz, The Irony of Regulatory Reform: The Deregulation of American Telecommunications, New York: Oxford 1989: 65–76.
- 8.
Horowitz, The Irony of Regulatory Reform: 73.
- 9.
John Mark Dempsey and Eric Gruver, “‘The Public Interest Must Dominate’: Herbert Hoover and the Public Interest, Convenience, and Necessity,” Journal of Radio & Audio Media vol 19 no 1 2012: 96–109; John Mark Dempsey and Eric Gruver, “The American System”: Herbert Hoover, the Associative State, and Broadcast Commercialism,” Presidential Quarterly Studies vol 39 2 June 2009: 226–244; Engelman, Public Radio and Television in America: A Political History: 19.
- 10.
For the Following on Hoover, see Thomas Streeter, Selling the Air A Critique of the Policy of Commercial Broadcasting in the United States, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1996: 41–45. Streeter draws on the analyses of Hoover’s version of corporate capitalism by William Appleton Williams. The Contours of American History, Brooklyn, NY: Verso 2011.
- 11.
Eric Barnouw, A Tower in Babel: A History of Broadcasting in the United States to 1933 vol 1, New York: Oxford op.cit.
- 12.
See McChesney, Telecommunications, Mass Media and Democracy: The Battle for the Control of US Broadcasting, chapters 3 and 4 for an account of the debates over the character of radio.
- 13.
Thomas Streeter, Selling the Air: A Critique of the Policy of Commercial Broadcasting in the United States, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1996.
- 14.
Streeter, op.cit.
- 15.
Cited in McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times, New edition New York: New Press 2015.
- 16.
John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, Swallow Press: 1954
- 17.
Programming on the Networks is well documented in Eric Barnouw The Golden Web: A History of Broadcasting in the United States vol 2 1933–53 New York: Oxford University Press 1968.
- 18.
See Michael C. Keith, “Writing About Radio: A Survey of Cultural Studies on Radio in Radio Cultures,” in Radio Cultures: The Sound Medium in American Life, New York: Peter Lang 2008: 305.b. For a discussion of the use of radio in World War II, see Gerd Horton, Radio Goes to War: The Cultural Politics of Propaganda During WWII, Berkeley: University of California Press 2002.
- 19.
See Bruce Lenthall, Radio’s America: The Great Depression and the Rise of Mass Culture, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2007.
- 20.
Adorno, “On Popular Music,” in Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, New York: Institute of Social Research 1941: IX 17–48.
- 21.
Leo Lowenthal and Norman Guterman, Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator, New York: Harper 1949.
- 22.
C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, New York: Oxford University Press 2000: 302–303.
- 23.
The Power Elite op.cit.
- 24.
C. Wright Mills’ “Letter to the New Left,” is considered one of the founding documents of the movement in New Left Review No. 5 September–October 1960. Accessed at https://www.marxists.org/subject/humanism/mills-c-wright/letter-new-left.htm. For a useful discussion that traces Mills’ trajectory toward the New Left, see Daniel Geary, Radical Ambition: C. Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Thought, Berkeley: University of California Press 2009.
- 25.
Victor Pickard, America’s Battle for Media Democracy; The Triumph of Corporate Libertarianism and the Future of Media Reform, New York: Cambridge University Press 2015.
- 26.
Pickard, America’s Battle for Media Democracy 4.
- 27.
Pickard, America’s Battle for Media Democracy 7.
- 28.
Engelman , Public Radio and Television chapter 5 for an account.
- 29.
John D.H. Downing, “KPFA, Berkeley and Radio Free Berkeley,” in Downing ed. Radical Media: Rebellious Communication and Social Movements, Thousand Oaks: Sage 2001: 325–344.
- 30.
For an account of these movements, see Robert J. Blakely, To Serve the Public Interest: Educational Broadcasting in the United States, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press 1979.
- 31.
For the influence of the Eastern establishment, see Blakely, To Serve the Public Interest, but also Engelman, Public Radio and Television chapter 6
- 32.
Blakely , To Serve the Public Interest 21–22.
- 33.
G William Domhoff, “The Ford Foundation in the Inner City: Forging an Alliance with Neighborhood Activists,” https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/local/ford_foundation.html.
- 34.
Engerman, Public Radio and Television 141.
- 35.
Blakely, To Serve the Public Interest, Chapter 4 provides an account.
- 36.
Kellner, Television and the Crisis of Democracy, 41ff.
- 37.
Newton Minnow, “Television and the Public Interest,” accessed at http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/PDFFiles/Newton%20Minow%20-%20Television%20and%20the%20Public%20Interest.pdf.
- 38.
Dwight Macdonald, Masskult and Midkult: Essays Against the American Grain, New York: New York Review Books 2011 also see David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character rev ed., New Haven: Yale 2001. Although he did not, in the end, endorse the Frankfurt School’s critique of culture, Riesman’s debt and his connections to the Frankfurt School were direct. He was both an analysand and student of Erich Fromm. Riesman to be sure did not take his critique in the radical direction of the Frankfurt School.
- 39.
James R. Killian et al., Public Television, A Program for Action, Report and Recommendations of the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television, Basic Books 1967.
- 40.
Andrew Blau, “The Promise of Access,” The Independent April 1992: 22–26.
- 41.
See, for example, David Barsamian, The Decline and Fall of Public Broadcasting: Creating Alternative Media, Boston: South End Press 2001; James Ledbetter, Made Possible By … The Death of Public Broadcasting in the United States, London: Verso 1998.
- 42.
See Engelman, Public Radio and Television in America, especially chap. 10 for a discussion of the further decline of PBS under Reagan, Alternative programming became oppositional programming.
- 43.
FAIR, “All the Usual Suspects: MacNeil/Lehrer and Nightline,” May 27, 1990 summary accessed at https://fair.org/press-release/all-the-usual-suspects-macneillehrer-and-nightline/.
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Caterino, B. (2020). Public Interest Standards from Radio to Public Television. In: The Decline of Public Access and Neo-Liberal Media Regimes. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39403-5_3
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