In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • U.S. Television as Cold War Cultural Missionary
  • Kathleen A. Feeley (bio)
James L. Baughman . Same Time, Same Station: Creating American Television, 1948-1961. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Illustrations, notes, essay on sources, and index. $35.00.
James Schwoch . Global TV: New Media and the Cold War, 1946-69. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. Illustrations, notes, selected bibliography, and index. $25.00.
Lynn Spigel . TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Illustrations, notes, and index. $27.50.

Audrey Meadows, who played Alice Kramden on The Honeymooners, framed her "'five years on the carousel of early television'" as a period of "making mistakes, making rules, and making quality entertainment" (Baughman, p. 3). Making history should be added to that list of accomplishments as demonstrated by the books under review, which contribute to and deepen—albeit in very different ways—the scholarship on the development of U.S. television from the late 1940s through the early 1970s. Using differing methodological approaches and source materials, these three authors enrich our understanding of television as cultural, political, and economic broker in mid-twentieth-century America. In Same Time, Same Station, James Baughman provides an exhaustively researched overview of the institutional, regulatory, social, and technological history of television from the late 1940s through the early 1960s that now stands as the finest comprehensive narrative on the subject. Lynn Spigel, in TV by Design, uses the compelling concept of "everyday modernism" to illustrate how early television was both shaped by and helped to shape modern art, design, and architecture. In the process, television served as a tool of Cold War cultural and political nationalism. Spigel's monograph is an important cultural and media history that rejects the notion of commercial television as a "cultural wasteland" and instead demonstrates that "television was the mid-twentieth-century centerpiece of deeply social and political struggles over art, commerce, taste, and everyday visual forms through which publics are [End Page 506] both amused and informed" (Spigel, p. 297). James Schwoch's Global TV—a potent synthesis of communication studies and Cold War history—reframes television and the other new electronic media of the early Cold War as crucial tools in the political, military, ideological, and diplomatic battles waged both within and beyond the traditional nation-state by the United States and the Soviet Union. In the development of and struggles over television and electronic networks, Schwoch finds the origins of globalization theory and the concept of world citizenship.

Rooted in his body of work on the mass media, Baughman offers a definitive, wide-ranging, encyclopedic look at the battleground that was early television. 1 His central argument is that the earliest architects of U.S. television—network programmers, advertisers, writers, producers, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and performers—had competing visions of the shape television should take. On one side of the argument were those (including NBC's fabled head of programming Sylvester L. [Pat] Weaver Jr., who held the post from 1949 to 1956, and venerable CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow) who believed television offered an opportunity to uplift and challenge programmers and viewers alike—in other words, to serve as a "cultural missionary" (p. 108). Conversely, CBS chairman William Paley and many others preferred an "imitative," "risk-averse" approach to television, using preexisting radio and film practices and delivering popular serials, game shows, and other familiar entertainment (p. 3). As Baughman's title indicates, popular, familiar, and risk-averse programming not only prevailed, but ultimately the major networks were able to abdicate all official responsibilities for educational, nonprofit-centered programming with the passage of the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act that created PBS.

Baughman begins with a readable and concise overview of the programming, regulatory, and institutional structures and practices established by radio, "the mother of television" (p. 8). There was never any doubt that the television industry would adopt the so-called American model of broadcasting, a private, for-profit, commercial system with governmental intervention and regulation in the form of the FCC, as pioneered by the radio industry. Television would also inherit the need to attend to the "public interest," at least as defined...

pdf

Share