Neil Postman's Missing Critique: a Media Ecology Analysis of Early Radio 1920-1935
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University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Open Access Dissertations 5-13-2011 Neil Postman's Missing Critique: A Media Ecology Analysis of Early Radio 1920-1935 Donna Lee Halper University of Massachusetts Amherst, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/open_access_dissertations Part of the Broadcast and Video Studies Commons Recommended Citation Halper, Donna Lee, "Neil Postman's Missing Critique: A Media Ecology Analysis of Early Radio 1920-1935" (2011). Open Access Dissertations. 368. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/open_access_dissertations/368 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Open Access Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. NEIL POSTMAN’S MISSING CRITIQUE: A MEDIA ECOLOGY ANALYSIS OF EARLY RADIO, 1920-1935 A Dissertation presented by DONNA LEE HALPER Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2011 Communication © Copyright by Donna Lee Halper 2011 All Rights Reserved NEIL POSTMAN’S MISSING CRITIQUE: A MEDIA ECOLOGY ANALYSIS OF EARLY RADIO, 1920-1935 A Dissertation presented by DONNA LEE HALPER Approved as to style and content by: ________________________________________ Jarice Hanson, Chair ________________________________________ Erica Scharrer, Member _______________________________________ Olga Gershenson, Member ___________________________________________ Lisa Henderson, Chair Communication DEDICATION I dedicate this work to my late parents, Bea and Sam Halper, who taught me to love and appreciate books; and to the late Dr. Robert DeLancey, who believed in me at a time in my life when nobody else did. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many people contributed to making this dissertation a reality. I would like to first thank my committee, Olga Gershenson, Erica Scharrer, and committee chair Jarice Hanson (who was always patient and helpful, no matter how many questions I asked). I also want to thank Michael Morgan and Briankle Chang of the Communication Department at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst, who believed in me and admitted me to the PhD program. I am grateful to Bruce Logan, Associate Dean at Lesley University in Cambridge, for encouraging me during the last two years of the process. And I am forever indebted to Bryan Benilous at Proquest Historical Databases and Brett Kolcun of Newsbank/Readex; each provided access to numerous historical newspapers, and made my research easier to do. I am grateful to Frank Bequaert, whose New Hampshire bookstore was an excellent resource for rare magazines from the 1920s and 1930s. Thanks also to Henry Scannell and the staff of the Boston Public Library’s microfilm room, as well as the reference librarians at the Thomas Crane Public Library in Quincy, the Emerson College Library in Boston and the DuBois Library at UMass/Amherst; I couldn’t have done my research without you! And of course, I am eternally grateful to my husband Jon Jacobik, who understood what achieving this goal meant to me, and never complained about how long it took for me to write the dissertation. v ABSTRACT NEIL POSTMAN’S MISSING CRITIQUE: A MEDIA ECOLOGY ANALYSIS OF EARLY RADIO, 1920-1935 MAY 2011 DONNA LEE HALPER, B.A. NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY M.A., NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY Ph. D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Jarice Hanson Radio’s first fifteen years were filled with experiment and innovation, as well as conflicting visions of what broadcasting’s role in society ought to be. But while there was an ongoing debate about radio’s mission (should it be mainly educational or mainly entertaining?), radio’s impact on daily life was undeniable. To cite a few examples, radio was the first mass medium to provide access to current events as they were happening. It allowed people of all races and social classes to hear great orators, newsmakers, and entertainers. Radio not only brought hit songs and famous singers directly into the listener’s home; it also created a new form of intimacy based on imagination -- although the listeners generally had never met the men and women they heard on the air, they felt close to these people and imagined what they must really be like. Radio was a medium that enhanced the importance of the human voice-- vi politicians, preachers, and performers were now judged by their ability to communicate with the “invisible audience.” My dissertation employs a media ecology perspective to examine how the arrival and growth of radio altered a media environment that, until 1920, was dominated by the printed word. Neil Postman, a seminal figure in Media Ecology, wrote that this field of inquiry “looks into the matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, feeling, and value.” Radio certainly exemplified that description: it not only affected popular culture and public opinion; it affected the other media with which it competed. My research utilizes one of those competing media-- print journalism. Using content and discourse analysis of articles in thirty-three newspapers and sixteen magazines of the 1920s and early 1930s, I examine how print and radio interacted and affected each other. My dissertation also analyzes the differing perceptions about radio as expressed in print by fans, reporters, and such interest groups as clergy or educators. And finally, my research explores some of the critiques of the programs, and compares the reactions of the critics at the mainstream press with those who worked for the ethnic press. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………………………… v ABSTRACT …………………………………………………………………… vi CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………… 1 II LITERATURE REVIEW……………………………………………………… 42 III. METHODOLOGY…………………………………………………………… 78 IV. EARLY RADIO AND LINGUISTIC CHANGE…………………………… 98 V. READING ABOUT RADIO …………………………………………………163 VI. ANALYSIS OF DISCOURSES IN THE POPULAR PRESS …………...245 VII. RADIO AND ITS CRITICS………………………………………………….355 VIII. CONCLUSIONS …………………………………………………………….465 APPENDIX: RADIO ARTICLES,1920-1923 ….……………………………..494 WORKS CITED …..…………..…………………………………………………..501 viii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION According to many of today’s media critics, radio is now obsolete, having been replaced by iPods, the internet, and television. In fact, long before the internet age, some scholars had already dismissed it. In 1977, one professor wrote, “Radio... is a medium whose time in the sun of social importance has come and gone” (James A. Anderson, qtd. in Rubin 281). These days, the common wisdom is that young people no longer care about radio (Tucker 9), and that even among adults, radio’s influence is minimal. But studies compiled by Arbitron, PBS, and the Pew Research Center contradict the belief that radio is yesterday’s technology. In fact, these studies conclude that it’s too soon to write radio’s obituary. Radio listenership may be less than it was several decades ago (understandable in a fragmented media landscape that offers so many choices), but formats like news/talk, religion, and sports continue to have millions of fans, and even some music formats are still prospering (Perse and Butler 2005; “Public Radio Today” 2009; Janssen 2009). And as for the alleged decline in radio’s impact on public opinion, political talk radio has repeatedly shown that it can influence voters and arouse indignation (Hertzberg 2009; Jamieson and Cappella 2008; Holbert 2004), while fans of one particular Christian talk show, James 1 Dobson’s “Focus on the Family,” sent him so much fan mail that he ultimately required his own zip code (Gilgoff and Schulte 2005). If we look back on the late 1940s, the formative years of television, we find that the critics were making similar predictions about radio: now that TV was finally here, they expected radio to disappear, relegated to the pages of history books. But somehow, radio reinvented itself and survived (Hilmes, Only Connect 150-151). And in 2011, despite rumors of its impending demise, radio remains alive and well. This brings up some interesting questions for those of us who are media historians: Why do some mass media adapt and endure while others cease to matter? What can be learned from studying how old and new media affect each other? And how does each new medium change the way we communicate? One way of analyzing the impact of a mass medium is to utilize a media ecology perspective. Neil Postman, who gave this field of study its name, explained that media ecology “... looks into the matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, feeling, and value; and how our interaction with media facilitates or impedes our chances of survival... The word 'ecology' implies the study of environments: their structure, content, and impact on people. Media ecology is the study of media as environments” (Postman, qtd. in Eurich 1970). 2 In this dissertation, I examine the formative years of radio (1920- 1935), using a media ecology perspective to do so. I have chosen this period of time because it is surprisingly under-researched by scholars. Academic journals offer numerous scholarly articles about early television, yet early radio has never attracted as much scrutiny. Even today, a database search of the major scholarly resources, such as JSTOR and Project Muse, shows that modern academic researchers are increasingly interested in the role of the internet, and they continue to analyze television. But radio, once again, is considered less important. This should not be the case. There are many important lessons that can be learned from studying radio, and the medium’s first fifteen years are a good place to begin. Radio’s early years were filled with experiment and innovation, as well as conflicting visions of what radio’s role in society ought to be. And by studying what happened during those formative years, we can not only see how a new medium is introduced and how the public becomes familiar with it, but how social attitudes about it develop and evolve.