Out of the Dark
A new history of rural radio pays insufficient attention to the regulations that shaped the stations.
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GoogleOut of the Dark: A History of Radio and Rural America, by Steve Craig, The University of Alabama Press, 228 pages, $42.
Steve Craig's Out of the Dark is, as its subtitle says, a history of radio and rural America. While the narrative reaches to the present day, the book's focus is on the years before World War II. Since then, Craig argues, the changes in rural life and rural broadcasting have been so dramatic that their “distinctive nature has all but disappeared.”
This is mostly a story of consumption, not production. A great proportion of the programming received by rural listeners in prewar years came from high-powered stations in distant cities and from regional affiliates of national networks, not from local programs on local stations. The reasons for that pattern lie in decisions made in Washington, DC, which Craig does a reasonably capable job of outlining, albeit with some curious omissions.
Thus Craig has a good discussion of the four radio conferences called by Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover in the 1920s, in which industry leaders pushed for rules that would favor a centralized commercial broadcasting system. But Craig's account of how the Radio Act of 1927 came to be is brief, and it takes the rationale for the new law at face value; he neglects Thomas Hazlett's scholarship suggesting that the legislation was both unnecessary and innately skewed toward the biggest and most politically powerful broadcasters. Craig does note that the new Federal Radio Commission's spectrum allocation plan favored commercial operations with a large coverage area over "the smaller ‘public’ stations run by land grant colleges and other educational institutions, nearly all of which were relegated to part-time operation."
This on-again, off-again attention to the political economy of broadcasting continues throughout the book...
The rest of this article
can be read at the Journal of American Studies, where it
originally appeared.
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G-d Bless Minnie Pearl.
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I dress like Minnie Pearl!
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I gave her a pearl necklace.
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Obviously you missed the point of that story
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Jesse,
If you can get your hands on it, I highly recommend Milton Mueller's Universal Service: Competition, Interconnection and Monopoly in the Making of the American Telephone System, which skewers much of the mythology around "universal service." As I recall, he beat down a lot of B.S. about how only universal service/monopoly could get phone service to rural locations.
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Thanks for the recommendation. I like Mueller's work but I haven't ever seen that book.
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I used it in a study I did on the E-Rate back in the 90s. Really an eye-opening book. I had done some minor work on the Telecom Reform Act, and the assumptions about universal service (versus the reality) were distressing.
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Nice when you get to write about a topic you really care about, and Jesse definitely cares about radio and how regulation affected stations both operating inside and outside the regulations.
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Rural radio?
Swapper:"I've got a washer and dryer to swap, washer works, dryer don't. I'm lookin' for a pitbull puppie, maybe a brindle".
Hospital and funeral reports at the bottom of the hour. Want some serious news? Soybean and corn futures on the business report. No mention of the Dow or NASDAQ however.
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You know, I wanted to email Jesse an old story I read 7 yrs back about KCDX-FM 103.1 Florence (in the unmentionable, diabolical, not-to-be-named state where all evil things hold sway--avert your eyes, children)
But it may not be "rural" enough to merit a real libertarian's attention... if you can just explain the difference between MOR and AOR one more time, I would be pretty happy with that
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MOR = Christopher Cross, Lionel Richie
AOR = Foreigner, Led ZeppelinAnd yeah, sure, please send me the article. I blogged a New Times piece about KCDX some years back -- was that the one?