Radio Utopia: Postwar Audio Documentary in the Public Interest (review)

In Radio Utopia, Matthew Ehrlich makes an excellent contribution to the now-burgeoning field of revisionist radio scholarship. Much recent scholarship has largely explored the cultural aspects of fictional programs, so Ehrlich’s attention to documentaries produced by network news departments in the postwar era fills a significant gap in the historical record. He argues that the brief heyday of this aural narrative form represented both the highest utopian hopes for broadcasting in the public interest and the structural limitations imposed by commercial institutions, conditions of technological possibility, and national political mood. In so doing, Ehrlich argues, they are important for illuminating the moment of their creation but also for their long-term impact on future radio and television incarnations of documentary form.

In seven roughly chronological chapters, the book examines the emergence of the postwar documentary in the network news operations during World War II; the idealistic hopes for global unity that informed the work of Norman Corwin’s 1947 One World Flight; documentaries aimed at domestic reform; the shift from reconstructed realistic docudramas to actuality-inflected realistic documentaries; and the deleterious impact of centrist and far-right anti-communists on liberal-leaning documentary producers. Basing his argument on archival materials, trade journals, and memoirs, many of the well-known figures are here—Edward Murrow, Norman Corwin, Robert Saudek—but it is a testament to Ehrlich that he is able to reframe and reinvigorate this story and use a narrow study to illuminate far larger issues.

Ehrlich combines approaches from history of journalism, documentary studies, and radio studies to reposition postwar radio news documentaries in terms of agency and power. Radio documentaries served corporate interests by demonstrating a modest commitment to public affairs that shielded the companies from possible regulatory action. At the same time and for just a brief moment, documentaries were able to actualize a utopian commitment to the possibility of a better world by a “reformist Left” linked to but distinctive from the cultural front of the 1930s. Ehrlich sees them as sincere efforts to facilitate public dialogue within the mainstream of institutional power structures (pp. 5–7). The book’s relatively truncated periodization allows Ehrlich to address a wide range of issues, including the relationship between technology and journalistic practice (the actuality), the idea of a civic public, idealism and oppression in postwar politics, the possibilities and limits of “liberal” critique, and fear-mongering in the red scare.

There are some limitations to Ehrlich’s interdisciplinary approach, particularly for those interested in the interplay of technologies, institutions, and cultural forms. He rightly points out that forms of news change “in response to shifts in the . . . economic, technological, and cultural environment and that those changes are not preordained or invariably in the name of progress (p. 154).” But he only touches on the difficulties faced by Cor-win and others who used wire-recording technology, as well as the possibilities for actuality-based programs generated by magnetic-tape technology by pioneers like Murrow in Hear It Now. However, I suspect that readers of Technology and Culture would like to see greater attention given to the development of production techniques as producers encountered and became familiar with the new equipment. How did these recording devices get adopted? What were the decisions involved in gathering and using sound “actualities?”

In addition, the author makes regular use of Variety and New York Times reviews to provide context but ignores other trade journals like Broadcasting, Radio Daily, or Sponsor. Given that one thread of Ehrlich’s argument charts how business decisions impacted documentary production, omitting these trade journals and their perspectives lessens the strength of the argument. Likewise, Ehrlich frequently draws on the published memoirs of his main protagonists to inject some colorful insider accounts. However, at no point does he critique or problematize these accounts and the retroactive commemoration of the journalists who wrote them. This is a shame in that there are unexplored (but potentially fascinating) parallels between...