The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications (review)

Envelopes and postage stamps are not the first things that come to mind under the heading of modern communications technologies. Yet neither invention came into use until the mid-nineteenth century, Paul Starr tells us in his magisterial new history, The Creation of the Media. That was when the U.S. Congress, in two acts in 1845 and 1851, directed the post office to charge by weight rather than by the sheet and to reduce rates to a bargain-basement three cents per half-ounce. Together with the introduction of a discount postal rate for books—an extension of the heavy subsidies for the mailing of newspapers in place since 1792—these changes were deliberately intended to accelerate the spread of news, information, and culture across the expanding continental republic. They stand in sharp contrast to policies in countries which taxed the distribution of newspapers. And they are therefore excellent examples of what Starr calls "constitutive moments"—turning points reached many times in the past four centuries when legislators, regulators, investors, and inventors made fateful choices affecting the way new methods of communication would be deployed in different countries.

Starr is a professor of sociology at Princeton University and the author of the 1984 Pulitzer Prize-winning history The Social Transformation of American Medicine. In his view, human choices—much more than any intrinsic architectural aspects of the technologies themselves—determined who would control and benefit from the diffusion of technologies of the public sphere, including newspapers, the postal system, the telegraph, the telephone, cinema, and broadcasting. "As a new technology emerges, so do new choices about the purposes and organization that will guide its development—whether, for example, they will primarily be military or civilian, governmental or private, or non-profit or commercial," Starr argues. "Architectural choices are often politics by other means, under the cover of technical necessity."

To historians of technology, it may seem that Starr has chosen a straw man—technological determinism—as the foil for his argument. Few scholars today would try to claim that the mechanics of technologies such as telegraphy or radio dictated how they would be used, particularly when the course of their development was so clearly different in Europe (where governments maintained centralized control) and the United States (where private-sector investment with mild government oversight was the main dynamic).

But Starr's book remains hugely valuable simply for the richness of the stories he tells about these technologies—and for the significance of the master narrative into which he weaves them. Starr's broadest message is that the rise of the American media, the planet's most variegated and influential communications culture, can be traced to choices made (or rather, political struggles resolved) by Americans as far back as the colonial era in favor of freedom of the press, universal education, private enterprise, and moderate government regulation. Britain and France, meanwhile, consistently favored government control and high barriers to private participation, and they developed relatively tame and meager media cultures to prove it.

A case in point is the emergence of radio broadcasting for news and entertainment. Britain banned such uses of radio in 1920, fearing interference with military communications. But in the United States, despite the military's attempt to retain control of radio after World War I, the government essentially threw open the spectrum, with an election-eve broadcast from Pittsburgh's KDKA in November 1920 kicking off a booming era of privately produced broadcasts. One key figure: Herbert Hoover, who served as secretary of commerce under two presidents before winning the presidency himself. In 1923 Hoover, with the support of fellow engineers and corporate executives but without explicit legal authority, began reallocating spectrum in ways that favored private broadcasters. In 1927 Congress handed authority for regulating radio to an independent commission—the forerunner of the Federal Communications Commission—but the industry had grown so fast during the intervening period that "much of what Hoover ordered illegally...