Radio Active: Advertising and Consumer Activism, 1935-1947 (review)

Kathy Newman's book Radio Active explores the paradoxical role that radio played both in promoting consumerism and mobilizing consumer activism. Newman departs from scholars who have "read" radio as a force that "pacified" listeners by using case studies to explore how the radio audience was "activist" although not necessarily "radical." The book has a strong theoretical foundation and is meticulously researched but refreshingly readable. It is not often one finds a book which is both rigorous and this engaging.

She explores "the ironic and counterintuitive possibility that radio might have helped to produce the very consciousness among radio listeners which they needed to fight radio itself" (p. 2). On the one hand, advertisers helped provoke negative reaction on the part of consumers who objected to it. On the other hand, "radio helped the consumer movement adopt a positive notion of what it meant to be a consumer" (p. 3). Radio listeners came to use this power to both resist advertising and argue for their rights as consumers. She builds on Dallas Smythe, who argued that the "audience," rather than the radio programs themselves, is the commodity that is being bought and sold. Newman proposes a dialectical relationship between radio advertising and emerging consumer movements. Commercials both reinforced the relationship between buyer and seller and promoted resistance in the form of consumer movements.

While Newman finds little evidence that oppressive "cultural" conditions—such as excessive radio advertising—stimulated the resistance of the listener to the point of promoting massive boycotts against radio sponsors, she argues that that "activism" need not be "radical." The forms of "radio activity" ranged from letter writing, radio critics, and consumer boycotts.

The first part of the book maps the terrain of cultural criticism in the age of radio. Emerging "audience" intellectuals included communications scholar Paul Lazarsfeld, who "studied" audiences in an effort to help make advertising more effective, and the "consumer" intellectuals, such as Hadley Cantril, who objected to the "poisons, potions, and profits" being foisted on unsuspecting listeners. "Consumer" intellectuals included James Rorty, a recovering ad man and left-leaning poet/radical; Ruth Brindze, a well-known consumer activist; and Peter Morell, a playwright who focused on giving artists more democratic access to the airwaves. While they were unsuccessful in the short term, they laid the ground for subsequent battles to alter the economic structure of the medium and make it more democratic.

The second part of the book offers three detailed case studies to illustrate moments in "radio activity" during the period. The boycott of Philco, led by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), illustrated the vulnerability of a single sponsor programs. Even though such boycotts were rare, their specter helped enhance the influence of the consumer movement. The controversy over radio soap operas is a case that mobilized women, who made 85 percent of the household purchases during the period, and fueled the consumer movement. Critics focused on soap operas because they dominated daytime radio and their audience was believed to be particularly vulnerable to the evils of advertising. Defenders argued that soap operas helped relieve the drudgery of women's lives and even performed an educational function. Newman's final case concerns Consumer Times, a program designed to help the average American "save, salvage, and share" during hard economic times. The producer Donald Montgomery resigned in protest over government inaction and joined the Consumers' Counsel, which helped build a sustainable consumers' movement in the United States.

In her concluding chapter, Newman notes that "the year 1946 marked the peak of radio's profit and popularity—but also the beginning of its demise as the dominant mass-medium in American culture" (p. 171). The intensity of consumer criticism propelled the Federal Communications Commission to take action with the report "Public Service Responsibility of Broadcast Licensees." It condemned advertising's excesses and warned that license renewals would need to respond...