The Listener's Voice: Early Radio and the American Public

Abstract

The thesis of The Listener's Voice is that radio listeners “participated in the formation of radio” in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s. The book offers a different emphasis in American radio history. It goes beyond business and legal histories, and also audience histories, to show how the latter affected the former previously overlooked ways, perhaps precisely because they were informal and unorganized and thus not explicitly documented. Even so, Elena Razlogova has found them by reading numerous listener letters in a new light. The book documents a range of ways audiences affected the shape of radio in these decades. Razlogova effectively shows that large corporations did not have their way unimpeded. Instead, she describes multiple ways listeners at first countered the concentrated power of radio corporations and networks, as well as the Federal Radio Commission, in efforts to influence radio development. In the 1910s and 1920s audiences provided feedback to experimental broadcasters to help them develop better technologies. In the 1920s local stations welcomed and responded to listener letters about their programs. When the 1927 Radio Act reallocated broadcast frequencies and licenses from small to large stations and networks, listeners wrote to support local stations and protest the changes. Radio magazines for radio amateurs in the 1920s, like local radio stations, forged a mutual relationship with their readers. Eventually, they were displaced in the 1930s by fan magazines published by large “pulp” houses, more interested in leading than listening to readers. Still they retained letter-to-the-editor columns where listeners could voice their opinions. Radio serial writers attended to listener letters and drew from them ideas for scripts. However, Razlogova finds that by the late 1930s radio's moral economy broke down as network concentration and audience measurement took hold. But the story did not end there. After the war, the arrival of television, and the decline of network radio, there was a revival of listeners' voices and of local stations listening to those voices.