Radio and the Mass Media

By 1934, radio was well entrenched as a source of news and entertainment for the American public. In the 1920s, radio has been seen primarily as a budding vehicle for music, humor, and news, and music was the strongest programming form (McMahon 19). Radio was the first truly mass medium of communication, reaching millions of people instantly and altering social attitudes, family relationships, and people's relationships to their environment. Complaints about broadcasting and many of the solutions offered sound very much like controversies still raging today, though the focus has shifted from radio to television.

American radio as a commercial medium came into being in 1920 with the first broadcast of KDKA in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The first scheduled, non-experimental, public program broadcast on radio was an evening program of the results from the presidential election between Warren G. Harding and James M. Cox. As a result of this broadcast, technicians and executives of Westinghouse Electric Company were convinced that radio was commercially and scientifically feasible, and within 18 months radio was a national fad. Those first radios were crystal sets built by individuals all over the country, and by 1921 stores were selling factory-made radios.

The financial potential in opening a radio station caused many businesses, institutions, and wealthy individuals to acquire federal licenses and establish their own broadcasting facilities:

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assist in building a body of evidence with which to refute the criticism" (Denison 582) that radio was not fulfilling its public responsibilities. An editorial in the New Republic also cites a growing dissatisfaction in the country with the quality of radio programming: Not only is a large proportion of all time on the air devoted to blatant advertising, but even the so-called entertainment aspects of the programs are frequently such that no civilized person can listen to them without acute nausea. This is often the result of a deliberate policy on the part of the advertiser, who finds that people of low intelligence respond most readily to his commercial appeal, and therefore baits his trap with material intentionally designed to reach only those who are not quite bright ("For Better" 201). One proposal to control this system was made by Professor Jerome Davis of Yale, who suggested a system of taxation intended to discourage extensive advertising. The advertiser would be taxed according to how much advertising the company purchased, and the money so raised might be used to fund educational broadcasting ("For Better" 202). When the Federal Communications Commission came into being to replace the Federal Radio Commiss

Category: History - R