July 2, 2008 at 10:30:18

The Hidden History of US Broadcasting

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By Bruce Dixon (about the author) Page 2 of 3 page(s)

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The BBC and CBC models guaranteed a substantial revenue stream and up to a point, insulated the broadcaster both from commercial and political pressures. The “sponsorship” driven model of noncommercial broadcasting was more problematic because it forced noncommercial stations into direct competition for ad revenue with commercial stations. When the latter model won out, it made noncommercial stations even weaker compared to their for-profit counterparts. To please advertisers, they had to refrain from competing for audience share with commercial stations, and limit themselves to the kinds of material for-profit broadcasters would not touch, like what McChesney calls “elite cultural programming”. This is neatly explains how, eighty years later, you can have cases like the noncommercial station owned by the Atlanta public school system, in a city that's been majority black city for more than a generation broadcasting nothing but NPR news and classical music 24 hours a day.

The Federal Radio Commission was a temporary measure. In 1934, Congress passed the Federal Communications Act, which created today's Federal Communications Commission, the FCC. This legislation made its way through Congress during the same weeks as the major bills which constituted the New Deal. In the course of pushing the New Deal through Congress, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt made himself the blood enemies of almost every newspaper publisher in the nation. The president calculated that he could not afford to antagonize the all-powerful commercial broadcasters too. So the White House failed to weigh in, either before its passage with useful amendments, or afterward with mechanisms to enforce the few positive provisions of the law.

The Federal Communications Act of 1934 enshrined into statute the notions that the airwaves are scarce public property, and that broadcasters hold their licenses only on condition that they serve the public interest. But the law provides no schedules, procedures or other specific means to enforce the obligations of public service upon broadcasters. In the years since, an enormous weight of judicial precedent, administrative law and more statues have been built up which in effect recognize a license holders, not the public, as real owners of the broadcast airwaves, in stark contradiction to the provisions of the 1934 law.

To this day, more than seventy years later, no more than three successful challenges have ever been mounted to the renewal of broadcast licenses, despite scores or hundreds of attempts. And a radio or TV station licensee pays less for an extraordinarily lucrative radio or TV station license than a human citizen pays to license a used car.

McChesney concludes that

“...whereas many other democratic nations had extensive public hearings and debates before determining the types of broadcasting systems they eventually established, in the United States, these decisions were made quietly, behind closed doors, by self-interested elites with minimal public participation.”

Competition and the “free market” had nothing to do with it. Democracy had nothing to do with it.

By 1938, its hostile takeover of the broadcast spectrum complete, Big Media was rewriting its own history, declaring its rule the only sensible outcome. McChesney recounts RCA president David Sarnoff telling a nationwide NBC audience that

“...'Our American system of broadcasting is what it is because it operates in an American democracy. It's a free system because this is a free country.' CBS president William S. Paley informed a group of educators in 1937 that 'he who attacks the American system of broadcasting attacks democracy itself.'”

And thus the conventional lore of how the broadcast regime came to be has been handed down to us. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration insulated broadcasters further against public interest challenges to their licenses by lengthening the period between license renewals from three to eight years, and shortening the number of questions asked so that the renewal form could fit on a postcard. And the Clinton-Gore administration passed the Federal Communications Act of 1995, which permit almost unlimited consolidation of radio stations, cable TV networks, newspapers and broadcast TV stations nationwide and in individual markets, leading directly to the rise of Clear Channel and Radio One, among other atrocities.

Sports and Mass Media

“Media Made Sport: A History of Sports Coverage in the United States” is another essay in The Political Economy of Media dissecting the central role of sports coverage in mass media. Inasmuch as mass media determine the stuff of public consciousness and public conversation, sports coverage, containing as it does the drama of conflict in a trivial context that offends or threatens nobody, makes ideal content in commercial mass media. Nineteenth century magazines carried extensive baseball coverage, and played an important role in publishing and standardizing the rules of the game. When daily newspapers too over much of their trade, they continued these practices, and often organized baseball teams and leagues.

Mass circulation newspapers invented spectator sports as we know them, with the extensive coverage that enables one who is not an actual participant to follow the games and the careers of those who are. Newspapers gave birth to sports sections, and sports writing as a branch of journalism.

Sportswriters and daily newspapers across the country made baseball “the national pastime”, the World Series a national event, and Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey into folk heroes. When broadcast radio came along, it picked up the baton from the daily newspapers. The emergence of college football as a mass attraction was entirely due to many thousands of breathless pages of newspaper, and later, radio coverage. Sports coverage played a major role, McChesney asserts, in legitimizing early commercial radio.

“When the Dempsey-Tunney championship bout was broadcast in 1927, it was estimated that it generated sales of over $90,000 worth of radio receivers I one New York department store alone.”

When television came along, it picked up where radio left off. Early TV popularized boxing and wrestling, since it required only a single camera trained on the two participants, along with baseball and college football. With the 1960s advent of slow-motion, color TV and instant-replay technologies, and the lifting of anti-trust regulation that allowed entire leagues like the NFL to negotiate with broadcasters, professional football grew from almost nothing in the early 1950s to a multibillion dollar industry.

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