Transmitting the Past: Historical and Cultural Perspectives on Broadcasting (review)

While this anthology has bright spots of illumination with respect to culture, communication, and society, it is heterogeneous in its approaches and variable in quality. By far the best essay is that by Matthew Killmeier, who explores the development of new radio content, new senses of space and time, and new patterns of culture fostered by the development of automotive and portable radio simultaneously with the expansion of suburbia during the 1950s. This essay fulfills most completely the spirit of James Carey's work in cultural studies that examine the interrelationships between communication technologies and culture, an approach the two editors claim to champion.

Another essay in this vein is by Samuel Brumbeloe and coeditor J. Emmett Winn that recounts the cultural and economic pressures that caused WAPI, the first radio station in Alabama, to alter its dedication to the interests of agriculture and education in order to serve those of entertainment and sports, resulting in the establishment of a sports culture focused on college football.

With respect to policy, a particularly valuable contribution is that by Fritz Messere, who shows how technical, political, economic, and social pressures on the Federal Radio Commission constrained it from achieving the aim of Congressman Ewin Davis's amendment of the Federal Radio Act of 1927 to distribute broadcast licenses, wavelengths, times, and power equitably among all regions of the country. Similarly, Douglas Ferguson sees in the movement during the late 1980s to colorize American motion pictures and syndicated television programs an illustration of the policy differences between Europe and the United States regarding the concept of "artistic copyright," embedded in the Berne Convention, and the principle of property rights, which was more highly regarded in the United States.

Michele Hilmes reveals the largely unacknowledged role of Lucille Ball, Joan Davis, Martha Rountree (the creator of Meet the Press), Eve Arden, Ann Sothern, Marie Wilson, Hattie McDaniel, and Judy Canova, mostly former Hollywood supporting actresses, in transforming prime-time radio and then television by creating new genres: the public-affairs interview program and the situation comedy.

Chad Dell aptly demonstrates how the National Broadcasting Company changed its prime-time television lineup in the late 1940s from such popular sports as boxing, wrestling, and roller derby to studio-based drama and variety shows, in the process wresting control over programming from advertisers and their agencies, who had largely determined the content of network radio over the previous twenty years.

The other three essays are comparatively weak with regard to the theme of the collection and seem removed from its organizing principle. Michael Brown recounts the transformation of the popular image of Guglielmo Marconi during the rise of broadcast radio in the early 1920s, attributable to his claims of having received radio messages from Mars. George Plasketes looks at Steven Bochco's failed attempt to meld the genres of Broadway musical and television police drama in Cop Rock and notes its implications for the development of later hybrid-programming genres and the adoption of singular "special episodes" in more conventional vehicles. And Heather Hundley does a content analysis of programs during the last season of the comedy series Cheers and draws inferences about their reflecting sexual double standards in society. The use of content analysis and genre theory sets these essays apart from the rest of the anthology and blurs its focus.

One also wonders why the editors need to posit a strict dichotomy between "objective" and "subjective" historiographical approaches, asserting that "[t]he essays contained in the first section of the book predominantly represent traditional objective history, while those in the second half exemplify cultural studies research" (pp. 5–6). The claim that there was ever a positivist method of historiography, as laid out in the introduction, is dubious and seems arbitrary in establishing the ground for Carey's approach to communication as culture, influenced by those of Robert Park, John Dewey, and Harold Adams Innis. Carey's...