Radio's Civic Ambition: American Broadcasting and Democracy in the 1930s

Abstract

David Goodman contends that American radio, a “curious hybrid” of a commercial broadcasting system constrained by state regulators and influenced by liberal elites, succeeded in producing “an extraordinary range of civic, educational, and high cultural programming” during the 1930s (pp. xv, 33). Most historians of radio's golden age, according to the author, remain fixated on the “political economic questions of public or private ownership” or on commercial broadcasting's alleged efforts to secure a homogenized, passive audience. Turning these analyses on their heads, Goodman shifts attention “to cultural … questions about radio's civic role” (p. 7). The core of Goodman's analysis, the civic paradigm, rests on a series of interconnected premises. First and foremost, it holds that radio needed to represent a community's diverse opinions and that listeners had the right to hear such diversity. Listening to wide-ranging perspectives presumably would make radio audiences better citizens, especially if they listened in an active, rational, and critical manner, while tolerating and empathizing with others’ views. The radio industry and the state shared responsibility for presenting community perspectives to listeners (p. 70). Federal regulation or, more importantly, the threat of expanded government intervention (e.g., the establishment of a national public broadcasting system), propelled corporate radio officials to embrace this civic paradigm and to produce public-interest and cultural programs. This strategy operated, in Goodman's words, as an insurance policy; commercial radio created an array of classical music and public forum discussion programs, for example, as a way of politically legitimizing the private market system and precluding further reform or government control.