Selling the Air: A Critique of the Policy of Commercial Broadcasting in the United States by Thomas Streeter

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 173 is persuasive, Irwin wrongly conceptualizes tourism during the 19th century by referring to it as “mass” tourism. Even with an increasing number of Americans engaging in recreational travel during the 1850s, tourism for the vast majority of Americans could only exist as a mental exercise in an era before the widespread institution of paid vacations for the middle classes. The multitude might read about magnificent attractions such as Niagara in books and maga­ zines but not experience the sublimity of either its technological or natural characteristics in the flesh. In fact, the era of mass tourism would not emerge until Niagara became fully ensconced in a kitschy commercialism framed by its majestic falls on one side and by the remnants of a storied but decaying industrial past on the other. This leads to a problem inherent in much cultural history: the assumption that the experiences and cultural attitudes of elites ulti­ mately became the source of a shared national mood. No doubt Ir­ win has ascertained a new development in the cultural world of highly educated visitors and writers, but he, like many other cultural historians, never addresses the question of their cultural power and its transmission. Was their perception of the falls a national percep­ tion or merely a class-based one? Did technology mean the same thing for the educated professional touring the falls as it did for the craftsman whose livelihood was being replaced by the combination of wage labor and technology in Niagara’s Shredded Wheat biscuit factory? We may never know. But it is important for historians to admit this rather than make broad claims about the formation of a national consciousness that their evidence only partially supports. Nevertheless, even with this shortcoming, Irwin has provided us with a convincing portrayal of the emergence of a class-based conscious­ ness of definite cultural import. Michael A. Berkowitz Mr. Berkowitz is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Columbia University. He is com­ pleting a dissertation on the making of mass tourism during the 20th century. Selling the Air: A Critique of the Policy of Commercial Broadcasting in the United States. By Thomas Streeter. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Pp. xvi+336; notes, index. $52.50 (cloth); $16.95 (paper). Selling the Air was not written primarily as a contribution to the history of technology. Nevertheless, because Thomas Streeter em­ phasizes the importance of historical analysis, his book should be taken very seriously by historians of technology. Streeter does not break new ground by mining previously unused primary source ma­ terial; his main aim is to use a wide range of interpretative frame­ works to gain a deeper understanding of the rise of commercial 174 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE broadcasting in the United States. The author calls his work a “cri­ tique of the policy of commercial broadcasting” because he wants to uncover preconditions and assumptions, not simply to assert that the current system is wrong or right. Streeter uses the theme of “corporate liberalism” as an organiz­ ing principle for his analysis. The people who helped establish broadcasting in the United States, he argues, were guided by corpo­ rate liberal habits of thought, including an emphasis on private own­ ership, economic freedom, and a faith that large corporations are essential for continuous technological development. By emphasiz­ ing the values and ideals that have guided leaders of industry, he hopes to underscore the contingent and constructed nature ofcom­ mercial broadcasting. The system was not an inevitable result ofmar­ ket forces existing in a state of nature; Streeter wants to show that a different set ofhistorical conditions could have produced a different kind of industry. The author also stresses that the success of corporate liberalism has been due in no small measure to its ability to adapt to changing circumstances. Corporate leaders have been able to co-opt key de­ mands of opposition groups in the name of moderate reform. But this flexibility points to important dilemmas and potential contradic­ tions that leave the system highly unstable. Twentieth-century liber­ alism thusjuxtaposes the potentially contradictory themes ofindivid­ ualism and corporate bureaucracy. Streeter further contends that leaders have often used...