Title: Fireside Politics: Radio and Political Culture in the United States, 1920-1940
Abstract: Douglas B. Craig, a senior lecturer in history at the Australian National University, charts the ideologically contested but institutionally smooth triumph of commercial radio in inter-war American political culture. Craig provides an impressively researched and useful study of how key players within the political and commercial arenas debated, regulated, and uti-lized—for their specific interests—commercial radio as a medium. He draws on a broad range of archival records to illustrate the ideological underpinnings of the commercial, political, and regulatory nexus he develops, including the broadcast networks (especially NBC), Congress, the federal regulatory commissions governing radio (the Federal Radio Commission, FRC, then the Federal Communications Commission, FCC), the Republican and Democratic national committees, the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations, and the National Association of Broadcasting. Against the inexorable growth of radio's commercial orientation and its political uses to legitimize Republican and Democratic party authority, Craig explores the fate of the linked ideas of “radio exceptionalism” and the “sovereign citizen.” This linkage promoted radio as a distinctive medium—“one possessed of a special destiny”—that, if wisely used, might produce a more informed, sovereign public and more enlightened politics. In the end he argues that these optimistic premises were negated by the cultural hegemony of major broadcasters who “limited the range of . . . choices to exclude voices and views that they considered to be destabilizing of the socioeco-nomic and cultural values underpinning the ‘American system.’” “In many ways,” he adds, “the story of interwar radio and political culture is a story of the skillful co-option of radio exceptionalism by broadcasters, politicians, and regulators to serve their own ends.”
Publication Year: 2002
Publication Date: 2002-06-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 43
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