The American Midwest: An Interpretive Encyclopedia

Media and Entertainment

Media and Entertainment SECTION EDITORS James Schwoch and Mimi White 26414_U13.qxd 7/7/06 11:03 AM Page 933 Overview 935 Advertising 937 Broadcasting 939 The Chicago School of Television 942 Children’s Programming 942 Corporate and Sponsored Film and Video Production 944 Foreign-Language Radio 945 Major Radio Stations 945 The Mutual Broadcasting System 946 The National Barn Dance Radio Program 947 The Rise of the Radio Disk Jockey 947 The Rise of the Talk Show 948 Soap Operas 949 WCFL and Labor Radio 949 Cinema 950 Cinema Exhibition: Picture Palaces, Movie Houses, and Drive-ins 952 Directors 953 Essanay Film Studios 955 Feature Film Production 955 Film Festivals 957 Film Reviewing 957 Minority and Alternative Cinema 958 Movie Stars 959 Screenwriters 961 Mass Media 962 Agricultural Journalism 965 Alternative Journalism 966 Cartoons and Cartoonists 967 Ebony Magazine 968 Hugh Hefner and Playboy 969 Major Mainstream Urban Newspapers 969 Meredith Corporation 972 Small-Town Journalism 973 Media Education 973 Blacklight Film Festival 975 Facets Multimedia 976 Films, Incorporated 976 Garrison Keillor (b. 1942) 977 Newton Minow (b. 1926) 977 The Museum of Broadcast Communications 978 Public Radio 978 Public Television 978 Religion and Mass Media 979 Swank Motion Pictures, Inc. 980 The Video Data Bank 980 The WHS Media Collection 981 Women in the Director’s Chair 981 Media Personalities 982 Phil Donahue (b. 1935) 984 Paul Harvey (b. 1918) 985 Irv Kupcinet (1912–2003) 985 Oprah Winfrey (b. 1954) 986 Roots of Recorded Music 986 Section Contents 26414_U13.qxd 7/7/06 11:03 AM Page 934 Overview If the Midwest has a distinctive identity, it is not immediately clear that this readily extends to the area of Media and Entertainment. Indeed, for most people, the idea of media and entertainment immediately conjures up a range of individuals, texts, and artifacts that transcend regional identity to resonate at a national, even global, level. Moreover, in the United States, the most prominent center of media production is identi- fied with Hollywood, California, the primary signifier of American film and television production, with New York holding an equally important, if less iconic, role. From this perspective, what the Midwest furnishes are the middle-American consumers of mainstream media produced elsewhere; the Midwest also represents American audiences through such typifying social science –based studies as “Middletown” (Muncie, Indiana ), the implications of the classic question “Will it play in Peoria?”, or the status of Columbus, Ohio, as a primary test market for consumer products. The MidMedia and Entertainment v 935 west has been a popular locale for feature films and TV series, from Home Alone, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Hoosiers, and American Splendor to That 70’s Show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and Picket Fences. In addition, for many people, media and entertainment have a sort of temporal immediacy—panoplies of contemporary stars, films, songs, programs, ads, and buzzwords that ceaselessly stream through commercial media channels , lacking any historical past and stripped of the particularities of regional production or reception. But some important aspects of media and entertainment are significantly regionalized in terms of the Midwest, and this regionalization has its own history. Identifiable organizations, individuals, and practices, such as Chess Records, Michael Moore, or agricultural journalism, emerge from a distinctly regional context but have the capacity to influence within and beyond those boundaries. If we think of New York and Hollywood as housing our most visible media celebrities and institutions, the Midwest, more than any other region of the United States, has been the historical key to circulating, distributing, and networking those celebrities and institutions into national and global prominence. The major cities of the Midwest—Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Des Moines, Detroit, Indianapolis , Kansas City (Kansas and Missouri), Milwaukee , Minneapolis–St. Paul, Omaha, St. Louis, Wichita , and above all others, Chicago—have served as the most important transportation and communication hubs for the transmittal of goods, services, and information throughout the United States and, indeed, all of North America. Chicago as a media metropolis is a special case, and it probably is closer to New York and Los Angeles in terms of media history and national impact than it is to any other midwestern city. Like New York and Los Angeles, Chicago was at one time the undisputed center of film production; like New York and Los Angeles, it is the only other city in the U.S.A. that has always...