Points on the Dial: Golden Age Radio Beyond the Networks by Alexander Russo (review)

Histories of American radio broadcasting often privilege a “golden age” of national network coverage that was dominated by the shared experience of nationally produced and commercially sponsored programming. In Points on the Dial: Golden Age Radio beyond the Networks, Alexander Russo effectively challenges this common-held belief by arguing that between 1926 and 1951—the “network era”—radio “as a cultural form in the United States was not the homogenously constructed ‘imagined community’ that is inscribed in popular memory” (2).

Russo, influenced by the work of Susan Douglas, takes issue with the idea that network radio constituted a monolithic imagined community that united the nation through one shared experience. Instead, he emphasizes how radio also produced regional imagined communities. In addition to drawing upon national network feeds, radio stations pulled from a wide range of programming sources, including sound-on-disc transcription recordings and locally performed scripts. The book’s arguments stem from the combined “interpretive methodologies of social, cultural, and broadcasting history” and media theory, in order “to account for interactions within the production and reception of technologically based aural representations.” This methodology provides an interdisciplinary perspective that is useful for understanding the complexity of interwar and postwar radio (6). Questions regarding the long-term historical developments of radio inspire this work, specifically those that were formed well in advance of the introduction of television.

Points on the Dial is a well-written book with a continuous argumentative flow that enters a number of rigorously researched examples into the cultural history of radio. In each of the book’s five chapters, a particular “gap” in the story of the national networks is exposed, revealing how a diverse assortment of practices were implicated in the development of radio and its meanings. In Chapter 1, “The Value of a Name: Defining and Redefining National Network Radio,” Russo explains that certain segments of the broadcast advertising industry were interested in niche audiences at a time when most were focusing on reaching the “mass.” For instance, spot broadcasting allowed national advertisers to locate or “spot” a more specific location and time during the week for which to run a commercial announcement. Spot broadcasting “reflected the newfound importance of segmented markets, segmented programs, and segmented audiences to postwar broadcast advertising” (35) and it employed a “different articulation of the national and the local,” with national advertisers looking to localize their messages (34–35). Central to this national–local relationship were station representatives, who acted as liaisons between stations and advertising agencies and who provided knowledge of local markets to advertisers. By doing so, they also promoted the “idea of segmented and localized broadcasting” (37).

In Chapter 3, “Brought to You via Electrical Transcription,” Russo points to another gap or complication in the cultural memory of “golden age” radio. Sound-on-disc recordings, particularly transcriptions, challenged dominant norms of live network broadcasting. As Russo states, “Freed from the dictates of network policy and infrastructure, transcriptions made possible a more complicated and fragmented set of radio programs and advertisements” (79). Recorded sound sparked debate and discussion around quality and fidelity, where “liveness” was said to be superior, though listener and advertiser perceptions would shift over time to accept pre-recorded content. As the book progresses, the reader is reminded of the connections between the various examples highlighted throughout. Transcriptions, for instance, are discussed in reference to the earlier examples of station representation, regional networks, and spot sales to emphasize that the networks’ efforts at co-optation point to an American system of broadcasting that proceeded from social choices, rather than proceeding naturally from radio technology (113–114).

Readers who are already familiar with the existing literature on early American radio will likely get the most out of Points on the Dial, as it privileges those with an understanding of how certain narratives have come to dominate the...