The Citizen Machine: Governing by Television in 1950s America (review)

Much has been written about the cultural and institutional history of television in the 1950s. Anna McCarthy's new book draws together a rich and fascinating set of sources to narrate an alternative history of television's early role in institutional politics. Tracing the rise of the "sponsor-citizen," McCarthy explores how these "philanthropoid" agencies used progressive political issues to craft television programs aimed variously at mending their corporate images, championing social causes, and providing cultural enlightenment. McCarthy's analysis of these programs and the historical contexts that produced them, offers a powerful picture of the rise of neoliberal ideals and the constraints they placed on television messages.

The programs and producers on which McCarthy draws offer a broad, if somewhat uneven, picture of philanthropic television in the 1950s. Among her sponsor-citizen groups are corporate sponsors, such as the DuPont Corporation, mega-philanthropoids like the Ford Foundation, the trade organization the AFL-CIO, and a group of St. Louis citizens who created and a distributed a discussion program. McCarthy avoids talking about the "effects" of the programs these groups created, focusing instead on their messages and the political, economic, aesthetic, and cultural debates that went into making them. "If television helped implant the neoliberal program in U.S. political culture," writes McCarthy, "it was not via its influence upon the so-called masses, but rather in its capacity to galvanize elites" (8). McCarthy finds tremendous similarities among the programs she discusses, despite the wide difference in their institutional aims. Ultimately, the "governing by television" that McCarthy traces is not a government of the masses by the elite. It is rather a self-governing ethos affecting mainstream elites themselves that has profound effects on the messages they create.

Among the governing values that McCarthy finds at work in these programs is the ideal of "balance." Addressing some of the most potent social justice issues of their day, each of the groups McCarthy analyzes created programs about civil rights. Because most of these programs were broadcast through mainstream television networks or their affiliates, dealing with these racial issues inevitably created concerns about southern audiences. This was the era of Emmett Till and Brown v. Board of Education. Before the program Omnibus portrayed a contemporary version of Uncle Tom's Cabin, the program's creators attempted to "balance" its perspective by showing a program entitled "The Four Flags of the Confederacy." Even still, the program received criticism for its portrayal of the South. The Newsfilm Project, under the direction of Robert Hutchins and the Fund for the Republic (like Omnibus, supported by the Ford Foundation), attempted to influence mainstream news coverage of civil rights by supplying television stations with politically progressive images of racial issues. In order to get stations to broadcast this footage, the group would often compromise their political position, as certain stations asked them to show "both sides" of the issue. After Hutchins became the target of House Un-American Activities Committee investigations for a comment he made about communism, the group would temper their rhetoric still more. In this neoliberal climate, norms of objectivity could serve to silent speech on politically important topics.

In McCarthy's discussion, Soap Box, a discussion program created by St. Louis citizens, demonstrates another set of possibilities and problems. In one episode that McCarthy analyzes, a group of people "role play" a conversation about race, each reading their position from a prepared script. The "wooden acting" produced as a result, McCarthy explains, was intended to stimulate further conversation, as communities were to watch these programs together, and then play their own role in the discussion. While this program and others like it created a space where everyday citizens could tackle important questions about race, it also created its own racial problems. McCarthy illustrates these tensions by looking at another scripted discussion film entitled The Cry of Jazz, which broadcast on Boston's WHDH-TV in 1959. "The Cry of Jazz took the...