Tripping Down the (Media) Rabbit Hole: Radio Alice and the Insurgent Socialization of Airwaves

This article illustrates the case Radio Alice, a “free radio” active in late 1970s Italy, which challenged traditional forms of thinking and doing broadcasting. The author discusses how the station utilized the airwaves first to constitute an alternative arena in which different voices, experiences, and social groups utilized radio as a 2-way communication device; second, to convey a new political sensibility and sense of sociability resembling a contemporary social network site. Ultimately, this case illustrates how radio can be understood as a modality of social interaction in its own right, rather than a mere distributor/amplifier of messages.     

Radio and African rural communities: Structural strategies for social mobilization

This paper reevaluates and questions some of the assumptions that have been made about the efficacy of radio broadcasting in rural Africa—the target of most domestic and international social change programs. Among other possibilities, the paper suggests that the inexpensive availability, portability, and nonliterate accessibility of rural audiences to radio are necessary conditions but are insufficient to maximize the medium's potential utility for social mobilization. Using an existent tripartite concentric cultural diameter as the basis for argument, the paper reemphasizes the claim that the rural African community is distinct from the suburban and the urban. Recommendations are offered, on that basis, for a restructured radio network that would reflect the uniqueness of rural communities and the changing phase of Africa's marginalized population.     

Educational Radio,Listening Instruction,and the NBC Music Appreciation Hour

This article examines the educational and social impact of an instructional radio program, called the Music Appreciation Hour (MAH), broadcast on the NBC network from the 1920s to the 1940s. Walter Damrosch, who came from a musical family and had previously conducted the New York Symphony, envisioned the possibility to use radio to teach music to American schoolchildren by tapping into its aural and emotional qualities. Through archival materials, including correspondence, teachers’ manuals, student notebooks, and program evaluations, it is argued that while Damrosch positioned himself with a new progressive movement that espoused student-centered education, he instead became an appealing on-air “personality” to student listeners and the network. This research serves as an important example of some of the ongoing tensions between education, entertainment, and the mass media.     

A Social Democratic Vision of Media: Toward a Radical Pre-History of Public Broadcasting

The Public Broadcasting Act’s 50th anniversary provides an opportune moment to reassess justifications for creating a noncommercial media system. This commemorative occasion coincides with a particularly precarious moment for public radio and television’s future, adding some urgency to revisiting and reasserting its normative foundations. With this in mind, it is instructive to look back at public broadcasting’s long history to recover some of the original arguments for establishing an alternative to commercial news media. These earlier visions suggest a social democratic ideal for broadcast media, one clearly recognizing that a market-driven system cannot provide for all of democratic society’s communication needs.     

Regulating the Radio Monopoly: Ewin Davis and his Legislative Debates, 1923-1928

Ewin Lamar Davis is frequently cited as an influential lawmaker known for promoting antimonopolistic practices during the development of radio broadcasting through the 1920s. He believed monopolistic practices threatened fair business practices, program diversity, localism, and noncommercial radio. His work helped shape early radio legislation, including the Davis Amendment, which attempted to equalize the distribution of radio stations throughout the US. However, little research has been done to clearly articulate his role in the development of radio legislation. This paper uses Congressional records to trace Davis' involvement in legislation leading to the Radio Act of 1927 and the subsequent Davis Amendment.     

Radio Archives and Preservation in Latin America: A Preliminary Overview

This article surveys efforts at preservation and diffusion of archival radio in Latin America. The region’s largest radio archives are housed within large sound libraries in Brazil and Mexico. Mexico’s Fonoteca Nacional, for example, houses the archives of XEW/Televisa Radio, the nation’s most important radio network. In countries like Argentina and Chile, radio preservation and diffusion has been a component of efforts to document and preserve the public memory of revolution and dictatorship during the Cold War era. While much remains to be done to secure the region’s radio patrimony, Latin American radio preservation has advanced significantly in recent years.     

Sports-Talk Radio Symposium—Introduction

In 1928, the fledgling National Broadcasting Company hired Boston-based marketing consultant Daniel Starch to conduct the first wide-ranging survey of the national radio audience. Starch oversaw more than 5,000 interviews of U.S. radio families living in states east of the Rocky Mountains. The survey's findings provide a glimpse of the early network radio audience prior to the Federal Radio Commission's 1928 reorganization of frequency and power allocations and the industry's subsequent expansion. This paper examines Starch's findings and places them within the historical context of the developing radio industry.     

Ed Bliss-Words for Murrow An Interview

Michael C. Keith's most recent book is Queer Airwaves, coauthored with Phylis Johnson. His forthcoming book, Sounds in the Dark, examines the role of all-night radio in American life. He is this journal's feature editor.     

The Place of Library Science in the System of Knowledge: A Russian Perspective

ABSTRACT

The author examines the question of where library science fits in the general system of scholarly disciplines. He argues that it is a social science, and more particularly, a social communications science.     

Undervaluing Mutual: The FCC’s Missed Opportunity to Restructure Radio Broadcasting in the New Deal Era

This article reexamines the Federal Communications Commission’s investigation into monopoly practices by the “chain” or network radio broadcasters in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The FCC targeted NBC and CBS and eventually succeeded in forcing NBC to sell its Blue radio network. But the Commission ultimately failed to prevent network domination of affiliates. I argue that the Commission missed an opportunity to recognize that the Mutual Broadcasting System offered an alternative, cooperative model for organization of the industry that could have better served the FCC’s goals of harnessing the power of chain broadcasting and promoting localism in broadcasting.     

(Residual) Public Music Radio in the Streaming Era: Listening for Diversity and Frequency on CBC Music

The aim of this article is to assess whether and how the CBC’s music radio programming reflects the corporation’s mandate of showcasing a diversity of music and culture. I argue that a program logic that privileges an international corporate music industry strategy persists (particularly during the peak morning and afternoon drive time programs) and limits the capacity for public radio to imagine and project alternative musical trajectories. My aspiration is to imagine CBC Music’s over-the-air radio as a residual broadcast service, one that presents novel opportunities at a time when digital and online streaming music is dominant.     

“Salúd,Amigos”: Negotiating Border History in Rural and Farm Radio of the Rio Grande Valley

The southernmost area of Texas, known as the Rio Grande Valley, is largely absent from histories of early radio. The social, political, and economic history of the Valley from 1848 to the 1950s prompts the authors to approach the region’s broadcast history from the context of rural and farm radio. The papers of broadcaster Bradford Smith, housed at the Margaret H. McAllen Memorial Archives at the Museum of South Texas History, provide an entryway for Valley radio to become part of the larger body of rural and farm radio scholarship. Smith’s radio reports emphasize the centrality of localism for remote communities, and they provide competing narratives about the region’s modern identity and its Mexican roots.     

Public Radio at a Crossroads: Emerging Trends in U.S. Public Media

While useful in establishing U.S. public media, the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 is an imperfect instrument for moving public radio to a secure future. Policies governing public broadcasting are insufficient to address the economic, political, social, and technological changes upending media organizations, both commercial and non-commercial. The urgent need is for more flexible structural arrangements as public radio and public television stations merge, partner with non-profit media entities, and seek funding that builds on the strength of the local public radio network as well as responds to the demand for imaginative, on-demand content from national networks.     

The “Most Thrilling Invention Since the Radio Itself!”: The Evolution of the Radio Remote Control in the 1920s and 1930s

This article examines the early history of the media remote control, focusing on the technical development of radio remotes in the 1920s and 1930s. Using a co-evolutionary model of technical change, it considers the technical and social conditions that served as the foundation for the first radio remotes. Drawing on patent records, it then examines the development, firstly, of wired radio remotes and, secondly, of wireless radio remotes, offering evidence of a direct patent-based link between the latter and the earliest successful wireless television remote of the 1950s.     

The Beginnings of Radio Communication in Germany, 1897–1918

This article surveys the prehistory of broadcasting in the German Reich. It focuses on wireless telegraphy, where the Telefunken Company succeeded internationally with its quenched spark system on the eve of the war. Telefunken's system was developed as an efficient military technology between 1905 and 1908, and it soon became the core of Telefunken's successful attempt to break Marconi's monopoly in maritime radio communication. Encouraged by this success, Telefunken started to establish wireless transoceanic connections to build a global German radio network. The properties of radio broadcasting as a possible new mass medium only gradually became evident before 1918.     

Anatomy of Canada's largest broadcast failure: The all‐news radio story

The CKO Radio Network was the only privately owned English language news and information radio network in Canada. CKO held a one‐of‐a‐kind package of licenses to build, own, and operate 12 stations in the largest Canadian markets but built only nine of them. The network launched in 1977 and survived until 1989 when it was shut down by its owners under a staggering $55‐million debt. This paper chronicles Canada's largest broadcast failure and examines the broadcast regulatory agency's role in CKO's demise. It will also consider the legacy of CKO in the context of the current Canadian radio landscape.     

An Intimate Voice from Afar: A Brief History of New York's Chinese-Language Wireless Radio

Based on original oral history and archival research, this historical study details how the development of wireless immigrant community radio has related to the Chinese American experience. It examines (1) the social, political, and economic conditions in which Chinese- language radio emerged in the diaspora; (2) the development of Sinocast, a Cantonese-language station in New York City, as a case study in immigrant community radio; (3) the change and continuity in Sino- cast's radio programming during the past three decades, with a focus on news, community service, drama, and music programs; and (4) a summary analysis of the implications of Sinocast's experience in reference to recent developments of Chinese American ethnic radio at the turn of the 21st century.     

Examining the emergence of broadcasting in the 1920s through magazine advertising

This paper focuses on the emergence of radio receiver technology and its use by the American public as revealed in 1,725 magazine display advertisements in 12 general circulation and women's magazines from 1920 through 1929. It explores how the complicated wireless telephone receiver was adapted to usability for the decidedly nontechnical public. The study also explores how the “new”; radio — broadcasting — became useful to the general public in various aspects of daily life by the end of the decade. From a technical and social novelty in 1920, radio had evolved to a place squarely‐ on the path to social and cultural integration with American society by 1929.     

Ghiglione,CBS's Don Hollenbeck: An Honest Reporter in the Age of McCarthyism,and Radio's Revolution: Don Hollenbeck's CBS Views the Press

This paper evaluates the evolution of community radio in postapartheid South Africa where a three-tier broadcasting system—public, commercial, and community—has replaced the monopoly of a state-run behemoth, the South African Broadcasting Corporation. The paper commences with an overview of South Africa's institutionalized culture of exclusion in the broadcasting sector and in other social spheres. A conceptual review of participatory communication precedes and provides foundation for the examination of the operations of two community radio stations located in two of South Africa's previously marginalized and disenfranchised communities. Although South Africa's adoption of community radio answers perpetual questions about the sustenance of community radio, the ongoing experience poses a few challenges.