Making Early American Broadcasting's Public Sphere: Radio Fortune Telling and The Demarcation of Private and Public Speech

Abstract

Discussion of the regulation of program content in the early years of radio has most often been framed in the context of First Amendment rights and freedom of speech. This however removes from view one of the most potent and pervasive forms of censorship exercised on early American radio – the regulatory attempt to banish personal and private matters from the air as almost by definition not in the public interest. Charged with defining the public nature of broadcasting, in order to license stations whose programs served the public interest, the Federal Radio Commission (1927–1934) urgently needed to define what was public and what was private in broadcast communications. The regulatory war on radio fortune tellers from 1931, hitherto scarcely noticed by historians, provides evidence for an archivally-researched case study of the regulatory construction of early American radio’s public sphere, and illuminates it in a much sharper way than the usual recital of the colorful Brinkley, Baker and Shuler de-licensing cases. Establishing radio’s public sphere required identifying, and then outlawing, private uses of the new medium. The article follows Nancy Fraser in identifying different elements in the subordinated private sphere, and shows how meanings of private as commercial and private as personal both ran through early broadcasting policy discourse.