"VOICES OUT OF THE NIGHT": RADIO RESEARCH AND IDEAS ABOUT MASS BEHAVIOR IN THE UNITED STATES, 1920-1950

Abstract

In 1924, when American broadcasting was less than four years old, editor Bruce Bliven concluded that forecasts of the transformative effects of the new medium had been vastly overdone.1 Radio would not guarantee world peace, generate a global language, or enable every person on the planet to "have instantaneous communication with every other," as breathless visionaries had foretold. In fact, said Bliven, radio did not even figure to improve education or expose the public to new ideas. One reason was the control of broadcasting by commercial interests that were determined to make it "an organ of orthodoxy." But a more fundamental reason lay in the nature of the new medium. Inflated expectations of radio's power had arisen from the assumption that radio listeners would exhibit the restlessness and suggestibility that mark the psychology of people in crowds. Bliven pointed out, however, that the radio audience differed fundamentally from a crowd; it consisted of listeners distinguished more by their passive aloneness than by their excitable togetherness. Thus broadcasting had little capacity to serve the ends of demagogic politicians. Radio could touch the millions, Bliven suggested, but it could budge them in only trivial ways.