Book Review: Radio Utopia: Postwar Audio Documentary in the Public Interest by Matthew C. Ehrlich

Abstract

Radio Utopia: Postwar Audio Documentary in the Public Interest. Matthew C. Ehrlich. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2011. 240 pp. $50 hbk.In the short span of time between the end of World War II and the 1951 premiere of television's See It Now, there is the story of radio documentary's heyday, complete with protagonists, conflicts, and a narrative arc. Ehrlich, a professor of journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has trained a magnifying glass on a sliver of the twentieth century that is an apt microcosm of the political, economic, and cultural environment of U.S. broadcasting and in the United States at large. He focuses on the historical context of audio documentary; the work of producer Norman Corwin and his peace-advocating World Flight; the specific documentary efforts of CBS, ABC, and NBC; the political climate and its effect on documentary production; and the lasting effects of the era on subsequent cultures of journalism and broadcasting. In describing events at the three commercial radio networks during this time period, Ehrlich sheds light on a wide range of issues, including government regulation and network economics, changing media technology, the cold war, journalistic ethics, and the era's complex cultural mind-set regarding patriotism, liberalism, and democracy.Despite radio's visual limits, it is a colorful piece of history (to wit, an alternative title could be The Blue Book and Red Channels) and, like the postwar period itself, this story is rife with muddy paradoxes. documentary, for instance, Living 1948, was referred to as a drama document, encapsulating the juxtaposition of fact with artifice therein describing much of the period's audio documentary style. With an engaging, jargon-free writing style, Ehrlich describes the rapid evolution of audio documentary from nonfiction dramatizations conceived of by to journalistic, actualities-style reporting exemplified (and then amplified on TV) by the likes of Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly. He presents a well-organized structure with a logical flow, if at times weighed down a bit by ample narrative detail. Likely to appeal to those who are already somewhat familiar with broadcasting history, this account may fill in some gaps in understanding the intricacies and nuances of the era, especially those relating to both patriotism and public service.Postwar radio programming was vulnerable to the suspicious gaze of anticommunists, and cold war monitoring practices affected many of those in the broadcasting industry. Red Channels, the 1950 entertainment industry blacklist, damaged the careers of documentary producers such as Robert Louis Shayon, and Morton Wishengrad, to name only a few of the desirables/undesirables who tended to embody the tenets of liberalism and produce programs covering progressive topics like peace and social justice. of the paradoxes that Ehrlich does a service in addressing is that of liberalism. Reform-minded though the documentary makers might have been in the bigger scheme, their implicit audience was ultimately elite, white, and male. Anticommunism presented itself via different faces, and herein lies another paradox: Ehrlich refers to one as the One World Liberal in the mold of [antifascist documentary writer Arnold] Perl and Corwin, and the other, like Morton Wishengrad, unalterably opposed to Communism and deeply suspicious of the Soviet Union. Such nuanced difference was but one characteristic of the era's cultural complexity and one with heightened implications in documentary production.The public service aspect of documentary ventured into another kind of monitoring. …