In the United States, the Radio Act of 1927 created a government agency, the Fed- eral Radio Commission (later the Federal Communications Commission, or FCC), to regulate the emerging industry, allocate the spectrum of frequencies, and develop a core standard for broadcasting—namely, that radio must operate “in the public interest, convenience, and necessity” in order to gain and renew broadcast licenses. This established a long-running pattern in the United States in which radio would be an advertising medium with programs designed primarily to deliver ears to corporate sponsors and networks granting some public service airtime to groups they deemed
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appropriate. Programming that fell outside this model had a much harder time gaining a foothold, but never disappeared entirely.
During its “golden age” from 1923 to the mid-1950s, radio was the single most powerful and popular medium in America. Radio crossed social lines and, by the 1930s, could be found in nearly all homes, even those that lacked electricity or indoor plumbing. Golden age radio included news, music, variety and comedy, children’s shows, soap operas, sitcoms, dramatic series, and sports, as well as reli- gious programming. The four main radio networks and their local affiliates broadcast religious programs as either public services on “sustaining” time or by selling com- mercial time to churches directly. The National Broadcasting Company (NBC), the first radio network, decided early on to award its public service sustaining time solely to the Federal Council of Churches representing mainline Protestant denomi- nations, denying commercial time to individual religious broadcasters. The Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) developed a decorous Church of the Air program series that gave only well-established Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish religious bodies their turn at the microphone. The Mutual Broadcasting System in the 1940s specialized in selling airtime to Evangelical and fundamentalist Christian broadcasters outside the Christian mainstream. Some denominations and religious groups founded their own stations in the 1920s and 1930s, such as the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod’s KFUO in St. Louis, and Pentecostal evangelist Sister Aimee Semple McPherson’s KFSG Los Angeles, voice of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel (Erickson 1992: 120–21; Hangen 2002: 66).
One of the cultural tensions on radio in these decades was between national identity and the standardization of tastes on the one hand, and political, ethnic, and religious diversity on the other. Even as popular entertainment on radio instructed Americans how to speak, spend, and think, and appealed to them mainly as mid- dlebrow white consumers, the medium could not help but mirror the nation’s more complex social and demographic realities. The example of Jewish radio personalities and programs might illustrate this point well. Gertude Berg developed, wrote, and starred in The Rise of the Goldbergs, carried on NBC from 1929 to 1934 and then on CBS as The Goldbergs until 1948, when it briefly transitioned to television. The popular series followed the everyday adventures of an immigrant Jewish American family in New York City, signaled on the air by their tenement neighborhood, their Yiddish-accented English, and amusing malapropisms. The show satirized and yet universalized the assimilation experience, with its exploration of universal family themes and tensions arising from the practice of Judaism in America; in so doing it introduced millions of Americans to Judaism and its traditions (Siegel and Siegel 2007: 24). NBC’s stately and long-running Message of Israel program (1934–86) became the official voice of Reform Judaism in the United States, originating from Central Synagogue in New York City each Sunday. As Ari Y. Kelman describes, dozens of Yiddish-language educational programs, and programs of cantors singing, helped multilingual Jewish immigrants define their place in society, in part by con- stituting themselves as a recognizable radio audience and therefore as a distinctive American sub-culture (Kelman 2009).
Another of the tensions that religious radio programming evoked was what could (or should) be said aloud in a democratic society. By the 1930s, “controversial
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broadcasting” was practically synonymous with certain religious broadcasters. One notable example was John Romulus“Doc” Brinkley, who gained notoriety by pro- mising virility through human transplantation of goat glands and who founded the rogue Mexican-border blaster megawatt station XERF, opened to a cacophony of unregulated hawkers, preachers, and hillbilly musicians. Another was Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic radio demagogue whose “Union for Social Justice” political party and increasingly right-leaning radio screeds garnered vast audiences of con- servatives outraged by what they saw as the New Deal’s savaging of American free- doms. By 1939, the National Association of Broadcasters banned“editorializing” on the air, a policy upheld in the FCC’s 1941 “Mayflower Decision,” which stipulated that broadcasters could not advocate anything on the air. In the early 1940s, the Institute of Education by Radio opposed paid religious broadcasting of any kind, arguing that it could be dangerous, especially in wartime. In response to what they saw as the muzzling of a principled religious witness, Christian broadcasters were instrumental in founding the National Association of Evangelicals in 1942 and the National Religious Broadcasters in 1944, both of which remain important lobbying groups advocating for the freedom of religious speech (specifically, that of Christian Evangelicals) in the broadcast media. The mainline Protestant denominations like- wise established their own Joint Religious Radio Committee, which in 1948 declared in its manual for religious radio writers that radio necessitated“becoming ministers to the total community” and that it needed to be used as an “agent of democracy” (Parker et al. 1948: ix–x).
In the 1930s and 1940s, cultural theorists and critics were also concerned about radio’s reach and communicative power. Initially, they were interested in measuring radio audiences for both social scientific and marketing research. Methods of deter- mining audience size and rating program popularity included Hooper Ratings, in which people were called on the telephone and queried about what they were lis- tening to at that moment; Nielsen surveys, which installed an automatic device on the radio set; and Arbitron ratings, which relied on self-reported radio consumption recorded in a diary. Each of these methods was designed mainly to elicit raw data on what was being heard, but not necessarily by whom or why. Others also estimated audience size from volume of mail received, as well as gauging response to promo- tional offers (Parker et al. 1948: 20–24). In the late 1930s, the Princeton Office of Radio Research, headed by Viennese psychologist Paul Lazarsfeld, published several volumes dealing with the methodology of audience measurement and the psychology of radio listening, assessing various marketing techniques and pioneering content analysis in media studies. As Daniel Czitrom argues, their approach (“who says what to whom with what effect”) became “the dominant paradigm defining the scope and problems of American communications research” (Czitrom 1982: 132).
Generated in the 1930s by the Frankfurt School of cultural theorists—including Theodor Adorno, among others—market research and audience psychology were part of a broader debate over the potential dangers both to and from the values of mass culture. Although their work was not widely available in translation until the 1960s, the Frankfurt School theorists crafted a pointed Marxist critique of com- mercial mass culture, especially of radio, decrying the “reign of advertising over culture” (Apostolidis 2000: 40). For Adorno, radio generated passive listening modes
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which inhibited resistance, ensured mass conformity, and even permitted the rise of fascism. For all his concern with the industrial underclass, Adorno was uninte- rested in—or not convinced of—the capacity of radio audiences to reinterpret and resist hegemonic messages, but he cogently argued that the voices of political oppo- sition and high art should be allowed to disrupt the narcotizing commercialflow of radio.
Adorno’s critiques proved all the more prescient regarding television, whose structure of commercial broadcasting and network dominance was inherited directly from radio. Network variety programming migrated to television at the same time that FM broadcasting developed, in the late 1940s; radio transitioned from being the main source of family entertainment to becoming an individual companion, the realm of national playlists of Top-40 music and“format” stations that programmed all-music, all-sports, and all-talk. It also disconnected from cabinet-style living room radios to portable transistor radios and car radios, taking advantage of post-war innovations in circuitry and plastics. The rise of television, the proliferation of format FM radio, and the post-war decommissioning of European and Asian short- wave frequencies opened up new opportunities on the AM dial for religious and paid-time broadcasters, including for-profit listener-supported ventures like KRDU in Fresno, California (1946) and KEAR “Family Radio” in Oakland, California (1958). As Hal Erickson describes, President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles “gave wholehearted endorsement to high-powered, international reli- gious broadcasts as part of his master plan to ‘Christianize’ Europe and deflect the influence of Communism” as one element in America’s Cold War policy (Erickson 1992:10).
By the 1960s, some legal room had been carved out for religious programming, which could solicit on-air for funds and donations and advocate for one religious perspective without being subject to the requirements of the FCC’s Fairness Doc- trine, which required most broadcasters to cover controversial issues of public importance by airing differing viewpoints (Brennan 1989). But religious broadcasters could still overstep; in 1964, right-wing radio evangelist Billy James Hargis raised FCC ire when he accused an anti-Goldwater author of being an atheist Communist sympathizer. Denied free airtime to rebut the charges on a Pennsylvania station, the author appealed to the FCC, which ruled in his favor. The Supreme Court upheld the FCC’s ruling, and the so-called “Red Lion” decision suggested that some reli- gious broadcasting could fall under the same legal scrutiny as political speech or network editorializing (Erickson 1992: 11–12).
In fact, the only broadcaster to lose his license for violating the Fairness Doctrine was a religious one: the year was 1973, and the broadcaster was Carl McIntire of the Twentieth Century Reformation Hour, who had built a career and the Pennsylvania radio station WXUR around his particularly uncompromising strain of Christian anticommunism; Randall Balmer called him“the P.T. Barnum of fundamentalism.” As Heather Hendershot explained:
McIntire and his cohorts flew in the face of what the FCC and the NCC [National Council of Churches] believed to be the true purpose of religious broadcasting: explicitly, to send positive messages and promote a general
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idea that religion was good, and implicitly to do public relations for a few denominations.
(Hendershot 2007: 387, 383) Protestant fundamentalism in the 1960s and 1970s deliberately confronted the values of midcentury liberalism with the very technologies that it claimed to police in the interest of“fairness” and the public interest.
In America, the field of media theory also matured during the era of network dominance of the communication channels, especially with the work of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan, for whom “systems of communication were technological extensions of human mind and consciousness, and therefore the key to a civiliza- tion’s value, sources of authority and organization of knowledge” (Czitrom 1982: 155). McLuhan believed the electronic media were“retribalizing” humanity; he was particularly interested in“the impact of media technology on the human sensorium” and on the complex and fecund interactions between the human and machine worlds (Czitrom 1982: 175–78). Content was less important to McLuhan; “the medium is the message,” he famously (and cryptically) wrote (McLuhan 1964).
For cultural scholars, one implication of McLuhan’s observations is that studying the network era of radio has meant examining the totality of the cultural text that is radio: not just the words, but the music, sound effects, vocal characteristics, rheto- rical style, and qualities inherent in the medium itself and in the myriad technologies of its capture, from transcription disk to magnetic tape to digital formats. Obsolete technologies make playback and archiving critical issues as scholars seek to access and study radio’s vanishing past. So much of what happened on radio happened live and unrecorded, and thus is beyond our direct grasp. Nonetheless, we can trace the many imprints it left on popular culture back when sound ruled the broadcast media.