A Companion to the History of American Broadcasting

A Companion to the History of American Broadcasting Wiley Blackwell Companions in Cultural Studies Advisory editor: David Theo Goldberg, University of California, Irvine This series provides theoretically ambitious but accessible volumes devoted to the major fields and subfields within cultural studies, whether as single disciplines (film studies) inspired and reconfigured by interventionist cultural studies approaches, or from broad interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary perspectives (gender studies, race and ethnic studies, postcolonial studies). Each volume sets out to ground and orientate the student through a broad range of specially commissioned articles and also to provide the more experienced scholar and teacher with a convenient and comprehensive overview of the latest trends and critical directions. An overarching Companion in Cultural Studies will map the territory as a whole. 1. A Companion to Film Theory Edited by Toby Miller and Robert Stam 2. A Companion to Postcolonial Studies Edited by Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray 3. A Companion to Cultural Studies Edited by Toby Miller 4. A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies Edited by David Theo Goldberg and John Solomos 5. A Companion to Art Theory Edited by Paul Smith and Carolyn Wilde 6. A Companion to Media Studies Edited by Angharad Valdivia 7. A Companion to Literature and Film Edited by Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo 8. A Companion to Gender Studies Edited by Philomena Essed, David Theo Goldberg, and Audrey Kobayashi 9. A Companion to Asian American Studies Edited by Kent A. Ono 10. A Companion to Television Edited by Janet Wasko 11. A Companion to African American Studies Edited by Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon 12. A Companion to Museum Studies Edited by Sharon Macdonald 13. A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies Edited by George E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry 14. A Companion to Latina/o Studies Edited by Juan Flores and Renato Rosaldo 15. A Companion to Sport Edited by David L. Andrews and Ben Carrington 16. A Companion to Diaspora Edited by Ato Quayson and Girish Daswani 17. A Companion to Popular Culture Edited by Gary Burns 18. A Companion to the History of American Broadcasting Edited by Aniko Bodroghkozy A Companion to the History of American Broadcasting

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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data Names: Bodroghkozy, Aniko, 1960– editor. Title: A companion to the history of American broadcasting / edited by Aniko Bodroghkozy. Description: Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, Inc., [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018013084 (print) | LCCN 2018013956 (ebook) | ISBN 9781118646052 (pdf) | ISBN 9781118646281 (epub) | ISBN 9781118646359 (cloth) Subjects: LCSH: Broadcasting–United States–History. | Television broadcasting–United States–History. | Radio broadcasting–United States–History. Classification: LCC PN1990.6.U5 (ebook) | LCC PN1990.6.U5 C66 2018 (print) | DDC 384.540973–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018013084 Cover image: Vintage radio from the 1930s – ©fstop123/ Getty Images; 1950s’ Console Television with rabbit ear antenna – ©Lokibaho/Getty Images Cover design: Wiley

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Contents

Notes on Contributors ix

Introduction 1 Aniko Bodroghkozy

Part I American Broadcasting in Historical Overview 25

1 Before the Broadcast Era: 1900–1910s 27 Susan J. Douglas

2 The Broadcast Radio Era: 1920s–1940s 47 Michele Hilmes

3 Television Before the Classic Network Era: 1930s–1950s 71 Michael Kackman

4 The Classic Network Era in Television: 1950s–1970s 93 Victoria E. Johnson

5 The Multi‐Channel Transition Period: 1980s–1990s 111 Bambi Haggins and Julia Himberg

6 Radio in the Television Era: 1950s–2000s 135 Alexander Russo

7 The Post‐Network Era: 2000s–Present 153 Amanda D. Lotz

Part II American Broadcasting in Historical Focus 169 Industry/Production

8 A History of Broadcast Regulations: Principles and Perspectives 171 Jennifer Holt vi Contents

9 Reviving the Technical in Television History 193 Susan Murray

10 Public Broadcasting 211 Josh Shepperd

11 Latino Broadcasting in the United States 237 Hector Amaya

12 Radio, Television, and the Military 257 Stacy Takacs

Part II American Broadcasting in Historical Focus 279 Programming/Genre

13 Radio Sitcoms: History and Preservation 281 Laura LaPlaca

14 The Rise and Fall of the Soap Opera 301 Elana Levine

15 Television Music 321 Norma Coates

Part II American Broadcasting in Historical Focus 347 Audiences/Reception

16 A History of the Commodity Audience 349 Eileen R. Meehan

17 Broadcast Activism 371 Allison Perlman

18 African Americans and Broadcasting 389 Robin R. Means Coleman

19 A History of Fandom in Broadcasting 413 Allison McCracken

Part III Doing American Broadcasting History: Reflections on Key Texts 443

20 Erik Barnouw’s Trilogy on the History of US Broadcasting 445 Gary R. Edgerton Contents vii

21 Susan J. Douglas’ Inventing American Broadcasting 455 Shawn VanCour

22 Lynn Spigel’s Make Room for TV 465 Aniko Bodroghkozy

23 William Boddy’s Fifties Television 475 Mark J. Williams

Index 485

Notes on Contributors

Hector Amaya is Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. He writes on globalization, Latino media studies, the cultural production of political identities, and Latin American film/media. He is the author of two books, Screening Cuba: Film Criticism as Political Performance During the Cold War (2010) and Citizenship Excess: Latinos/as, Media, and the Nation (2013). Dr. Amaya’s journal articles have appeared in Media, Culture and Society, Television & New Media, Studies in Hispanic Cinemas, New Cinemas, Critical Discourse Studies, Latino Studies, and Text and Performance Quarterly.

Aniko Bodroghkozy is a media historian and Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. She is author of Groove Tube: Sixties Television and the Youth Rebellion (2001) and Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement (2012), and is currently completing a third book project: Black Weekend: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy, Television News, and the Birth of our Media World. Her articles on film and television in the 1960s, social change movements, and the upheavals of that era have appeared in numerous anthologies as well as in journals such as Screen, Cinema Journal, Television and New Media, and The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics, and Culture.

Norma Coates is Associate Professor at Western University – Canada. Her research on popular music and identity, and popular music and television is published in several leading anthologies and journals of popular music topics and taught internationally. Her recent publications include an article about pioneering television rock and roll pro- ducer Jack Good and an analysis of the week that John Lennon and Yoko Ono co‐hosted The Mike Douglas Show. She is a former co‐chair of the Sound Studies Special Interest Group of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and was a visiting fellow at the International Institute of Popular Culture at the University of Turku, Finland in 2015.

Susan J. Douglas is the Catherine Neafie Kellogg Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan and former Chair of the Department. She is author of The Rise of Enlightened Sexism: How Pop Culture Took Us from Girl Power to Girls Gone Wild (2010); The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How it Undermines Women (with Meredith Michaels, 2004); Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination (1999), which won the Hacker Prize in 2000 from the Society for the History of Technology for the best popular book about technology and culture; Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (1994); and Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899–1922 (1987). She served on the Board of the George Foster Peabody x Notes on Contributors

awards from 2005 to 2010, and in 2010 was selected as Chair of the Board. She is the 2009 recipient of the Leonardo Da Vinci Prize, the highest honor given by the Society for the History of Technology to an individual who has greatly contributed to the history of technology through research, teaching, publications, and other activities.

Gary R. Edgerton is Professor of Creative Media and Entertainment at Butler University. He has published twelve books, including The Columbia History of American Television (2007) and more than eighty essays on a variety of television, film, and culture topics in a wide assortment of books, scholarly journals, and encyclopedias. He also co‐edits the Journal of Popular Film and Television.

Bambi Haggins is Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of California‐Irvine. Her work explores race, class, gender, and sexuality in American film and television, with a focus on comedy. Haggins received the Katherine Singer Kovács Book Award for her first book, Laughing Mad: the Black Comic Persona in Post Soul America (2007). Haggins’ work has been published in Cinema Journal, Framework, Ms., and the New York Times, as well as in several edited collections. Haggins wrote Showtime’s 2013 Why We Laugh: Funny Women. Currently she is working on an edited collection: Television Memories: Love Letters to Our Television Past as well as a single authored work: Black Laughter Matters, which explores blackness and comedy in the age of Obama and beyond.

Michele Hilmes is Professor Emerita at the University of Wisconsin‐Madison. Her research and publication focus on media history, with an emphasis on radio and sound studies and on transnational media flows. Her books include Radio Voices: American Broadcasting 1922–1952 (1997); Network Nations: A Transnational History of British and American Broadcasting (2011); Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States (4th edition, 2013); and most recently Radio’s New Wave: Global Sound in the Digital Era (co‐edited with Jason Loviglio, 2013). Current projects include co‐editing Contemporary Transatlantic Television Drama. A history of the American radio feature is in the research stage. Hilmes is also co‐editor of The Radio Journal: International Studies in Radio and Audio Media.

Julia Himberg is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at Arizona State University. Her work focuses on gender, sexuality, television, digital media, branding, and consumer culture. Her book, The New Gay for Pay: the Sexual Politics of American Television Production (2017) examines how the television industry constructs and rein- forces popular thinking and widely held beliefs about sexuality and identity‐based politics.

Jennifer Holt is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Empires of Entertainment and the co‐ editor of Media Industries: History, Theory, and Method (2009); Connected Viewing: Selling, Sharing, and Streaming Media in the Digital Era (2014); and Distribution Revolution (2014). Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies, including the Journal of Information Policy, Cinema Journal, and Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructure. She is also a founding member of the Media Industries journal editorial collective. Notes on Contributors xi

Victoria E. Johnson is Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine, where she is also faculty in African American Studies. Her Heartland TV: Prime Time Television and the Struggle for US Identity (2008) was the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ Katherine Singer Kovács book award winner in 2009. Her book, Sports Television is forthcoming.

Michael Kackman is Associate Teaching Professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Citizen Spy: Television, Espionage, and Cold War Culture (2005), and co‐editor of Flow TV: Television in the Age of Media Convergence (2010) and The Craft of Criticism: Critical Media Studies in Practice (2018).

Laura LaPlaca is an archivist and historian of American radio and television broadcasting. She is currently Director of Archives & Research at the National Comedy Center in New York, and has designed and implemented media preservation projects at the Library of Congress, the Warner Brothers Archives, the Paley Center for Media, and other institutions. From 2015 to 2017, she managed the Northwestern University Radio Archive Project and served on the board of the Radio Preservation Task Force. Currently a PhD candidate in Northwestern University’s Screen Cultures Program, she is completing her dissertation, “Show Rooms: Domestic Sitcom Architecture.”

Elana Levine is Professor in the Department of Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies at the University of Wisconsin‐Milwaukee. She is the author of Wallowing in Sex: the New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television (2007), and co‐author of Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status (2012). She is currently writing a history of US daytime television soap opera.

Amanda D. Lotz is a Professor in the Departments of Communication Studies and Screen Arts and Cultures at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Cable Guys: Television and American Masculinities in the 21st Century (2014), The Television Will Be Revolutionized (2007; rev. 2nd ed. 2014), and Redesigning Women: Television After the Network Era (2006), and editor of Beyond Prime Time: Television Programming in the Post‐Network Era (2009). She is co‐author, with Timothy Havens, of Understanding Media Industries (2011; 2nd ed. 2016) and, with Jonathan Gray, of Television Studies (2011).

Allison McCracken is Associate Professor of American Studies at DePaul University. She is the author of the award‐winning book Real Men Don’t Sing: Crooning and American Culture (2015), which centers in large part on the early years of radio broadcasting in the 1920s and 1930s.

Eileen R. Meehan is Professor Emerita in the College of Mass Communication and Media Arts at Southern Illinois University and the author of Why TV Is Not Our Fault (2006). She also co‐edited Sex and Money: Feminism and Political Economy in Media Studies (2002). Her research has been published in such journals as Critical Studies in Media and Communication, International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics, Journal of Communication, and Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media and in numerous anthologies. In 2015, she was spotlighted and interviewed in the volume, Key Thinkers in Critical Communication Research: From the Pioneers to the Next Generation. xii Notes on Contributors

Robin R. Means Coleman is a Professor in the Departments of Communication Studies and Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan. Prof. Coleman is the author of Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present (2011) and African‐American Viewers and the Black Situation Comedy: Situating Racial Humor (2000). She is co‐author of Intercultural Communication for Everyday Life (2014), editor of Say It Loud! African American Audiences, Media, and Identity (2002), and co‐editor of Fight the Power! The Spike Lee Reader (2008).

Susan Murray is Associate Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. She is the author of Bright Signals: a History of Color Television (2018); Hitch Your Antenna to the Stars: Early Television and Broadcast Stardom (2005) and a co‐editor with Laurie Ouellette of Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture (2004, 2009).

Allison Perlman is Associate Professor in the Departments of Film and Media Studies and History at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Public Interests: Media Advocacy and Struggles over US Television (2016) and co‐editor of Flow TV: Television in the Age of Convergent Media (2010).

Alexander Russo is Associate Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. He is the author of Points on the Dial: Golden Age Radio Beyond the Networks (2010), as well as articles and book chapters on the technology and cultural form of radio and television, sound studies, the history of music and society, and media infrastructures.

Josh Shepperd is Assistant Professor of Media and Communication Studies at the Catholic University of America. He is also Director of the Library of Congress’ Radio Preservation Task Force, and is a Sound History Fellow at the Library of Congress’ National Recording Preservation Board.

Stacy Takacs is Associate Professor and Director of American Studies at Oklahoma State University and a member of the faculty in Screen Studies. She is the author of Terrorism TV: Popular Entertainment in Post‐9/11 America (2012), and Interrogating Popular Culture (2014); most recently she co‐edited a volume on the history of military‐themed entertainment programming on US television called American Militarism on the Small Screen (with Anna Froula, 2015). She is currently writing a manuscript about the American Forces Television Service. Her work has appeared in such journals as Cultural Critique, Cultural Studies, Feminist Media Studies, and Quarterly Review of Film and Video.

Shawn VanCour is Assistant Professor of Media Archival Studies in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. He is author of Making Radio: Early Radio Production and the Rise of Modern Sound Culture (forthcoming) and has published articles on radio and television history, media archives, technology studies, and music and sound studies.

Mark J. Williams is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Dartmouth College where he also directs the Media Ecology Project. His book Remote Possibilities: A History of Early Television in Los Angeles is forthcoming. 1

Introduction Aniko Bodroghkozy

In 1989, CBS’s top‐rated newsmagazine show, 60 Minutes, heralded the arrival of television studies as an academic subject. A trio of scholars – Horace Newcomb, David Marc, and Robert J. Thompson – faced a somewhat derisive grilling from Morley Safer about the scholarly rigor and rationale for studying I Love Lucy, Gunsmoke, and Moonlighting. For the most part the scholars responded by appropriating the language of literature and aesthetics: sitcoms could be connected to the ancient Greek dramas; contemporary TV programming was “the literature of our age;” The Love Boat could be seen as “very good art;” and students could sharpen their skills in analyzing symbolism through studying Moonlighting or L.A. Law as well as they could through Shakespeare’s King Lear. And while the emphasis was largely on contemporary television, the scholars also highlighted the importance of historical analysis. To Safer’s skeptical query of why study The Dick Van Dyke Show, Brandeis University’s David Marc answered that it was an artifact of the Kennedy era and evoked the changes America was undergoing in that period.1 For scholars and students of media studies, and especially of American broadcasting, the episode is an amusing time capsule with academics attired in oversized glasses and the era’s boxy outfits laboring to convince a TV personality about something that in the twenty‐first century is somewhat more settled: television matters; it has been legitimated (Newman and Levine 2012). Nevertheless, the episode highlights a number of impulses that have long characterized the field: the focus is on contemporary television; history of the medium typically means the 1950s and early 1960s; only American prime‐time network programing counts; radio is absent. More than a quarter century after that broadcast, the scholarly field of American radio and television history is a vibrant, mature, and expanding area within media studies, with equally important contributions coming from such cognate fields as American studies and journalism. One purpose of this anthology is to mark that maturity. Another is to argue for the necessity of broadcasting history as a more central component of media studies, a field often preoccupied by the contemporary: the shiny objects of “new media.” A third purpose is to signal to non‐media studies historians that their field, especially twentieth‐century history, needs to take account of radio and television and engage with the scholarship produced by media studies academics. Cultural, social, and even political histories of the United States in the twentieth century without a nuanced consideration of the role of radio and television are akin to histories

of the Protestant Reformation that ignore the role played by Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press (Eisenstein 1979). Let me start with non‐media studies historians. In a volume on “doing recent history,” (Potter and Romano 2012), David Greenberg surveyed a group of well‐regarded political histories of the United States since the 1950s, including books on the rise of modern conservatism, impeachment crises around Watergate and the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal, Ronald Reagan and the end of the Cold War, and even his own book on the image of Richard Nixon: none gave much consideration to television. Similarly, while researching my book on the civil rights movement and television, Equal Time (Bodroghkozy 2012), I noticed much the same in the historiography of the civil rights movement. In all these cases, the impact of television was undeniable and consequential. Most civil rights historians at least make nods toward television’s impact, but typically go no further to actually examine how the medium engaged with movement activists, how news producers framed and packaged their coverage, or how viewers, black and white, northern and southern, made sense of what they were seeing on their sets. Television is understood, at most, as a neutral mirror. In Greenberg’s examples, he points out the oddness of historical work about Watergate and the Bill Clinton–Monica Lewinsky case, which he notes “were nothing if not long‐running television spectacles,” while totally ignoring television as a medium (Greenberg 2012: 186). Likewise, how can political historians of Richard Nixon’s and Ronald Reagan’s presidencies – both were exquisitely attuned to the political uses of the medium – presume to understand the impact of their subjects without accounting for how they interacted with television, were represented by the medium, or attempted to bend it to their will? “All of this adds up to a collective methodological blind spot of major proportions,” declares Greenberg of his fellow historians of the recent past. “Although we may seek insight from television, we rarely think of television programs as evidence, as we do with printed documents” (Greenberg 2012: 187). The same can, of course, be said about radio. Historians of the 1950s may note the rise of rock ’n’ roll and its impact on the burgeoning baby boomer generation without considering the evolving structure of American radio in that era as the broadcast networks abandoned their radio webs and shifted their programming to their new television interests, leaving radio a more decentralized, localized medium reliant on cheap programming – like recorded music. Without an awareness of radio as a medium and an industry, the rise of youth‐ oriented music and the rock ’n’ roll culture it to helped cultivate seem to arise from nowhere. Greenberg goes on to outline the difficulties and challenges of using broadcast materials as historical documents; I will do so as well in this introduction, as do some of the contributors in their pieces for this volume (see, for instance, Douglas, Murray, Levine, Coates, and LaPlaca). Nevertheless, the work is necessary if historians are to produce scholarship adequate to historicizing the twentieth century and beyond. Media studies as a field (especially radio, television, and digital media scholarship) has had its own blind spots when it comes to its objects of study. Paddy Scannell notes a long‐standing concern with the “newness” of new media since the 1930s when radio was the fresh shiny object. The first scholars to explore radio (Cantril, Merton, Lazarsfeld, etc.) were specifically concerned with the immediate, short‐term effects of the new medium. With the rise of serious scholarship on television, researchers concerned themselves with its ideological implications (Hall, Fiske, etc.); and then with A Companion to the History of American Broadcasting 3 the internet and social media, a new crop of scholars who now see radio and TV as “old” and “traditional,” have shifted their analytical gaze again (Scannell 2009: 220–221). “In all three moments,” Scannell argues, “academic engagement with the new media of the day has been absorbed in and by the politics of the present, which also attends to significant events in the contemporary world and to upcoming phenomena as they emerge in the here and now” (221). One of the dilemmas of trying to understand new media when it is new is that one cannot determine whether contemporary phenomena or events will have lasting significance. But, as Scannell points out, only by attending to the long term and to historical questions can we see which studies of new media and their contemporary concerns “have any claim to long‐lasting relevance and significance” (221). In 1994, for instance, media scholars became transfixed by two US media events that shone searing spotlights on questions of class, gender, race, and mediated representation. One involved a scandal around two Olympic female skating stars: Tonya Harding (with her working‐class, unfeminine affect) accused of ordering the kneecapping of her rival, the glamorous, upper‐class‐appearing Nancy Kerrigan; the other involved former African American football hero and Hertz rental car pitchman O. J. Simpson, who was accused of brutally murdering his white wife and her friend (see, for instance, Baughman 1995; Fiske 1996; Glynn 2000; Williams 2001; Kellner 2003). Both events, which received wall‐to‐wall saturation media coverage, also generated significant amounts of instant analysis and discussion by top media and television scholars. Did either media scandal deserve all that academic attention? In the short term, it was hard to say: were scholars getting swept up in the soon‐to‐be‐forgotten preoccupations of the here and now? Were they distracted by the shiny new object of 24/7, satellite‐enabled, live TV news and the new tabloid‐style environment it was creating? Twenty years later, the answer seems clearer with the renewed focus on the Simpson case in 2016 by a duo of probing, popular, and critically acclaimed mini‐series: an ESPN multi‐part documentary and a basic cable docudrama, along with continuing interest by scholars.2 John Fiske’s instant analysis in his 1996 book Media Matters (whose production was delayed so that the preeminent television and cultural studies scholar could hastily tack on an epilogue about the still‐ongoing Simpson case for the volume’s paper- back release) has been historically vindicated by the ongoing scholarly and, now resur- gent, pop culture interest in the legacy of the case. As a media event, O.J. mattered, but only the longer perspective and vantage point that historical reflection provides makes that clear. Such cannot be said about the Harding–Kerrigan case, which produced at least one thick anthology with articles by eminent media scholars (Baughman 1995). But this suggests why media researchers who engage in the precarious work of contemporary media studies – skating on the thin ice of the now and the new, as it were – benefit so much from the more long‐range perspectives and approaches provided by historical work. Scholars of new media and of the contemporary moment need media historians, just as the latter need the former. Historians can help to validate the long‐term significance and value of “here and now” media scholarship; and research on new media inevitably, as the decades go by, provides resources, data, and perspectives for future historians exploring the no longer “new” media. When media and non‐media historians begin to construct histories of the 1990s, Fiske’s Media Matters should be an essential text, as much as Hadley Cantril’s Invasion from Mars (1940) is for historians of the United States in the 1930s and the run‐up to the Second World War. 4 Introduction

Broadcast media matters – and broadcast media history matters in making the case for why.

In presenting this volume and its rationale, it is necessary also to trace and reflect upon the origins and development of the field of broadcasting history in the United States. In the following sections, I examine the individuals, scholarship, institutions, and – with particular note – the archives that have participated in its flowering over the past few decades. And, while one of the impulses of this volume is to avoid siloing radio off from television, as is often the case with scholarship in media studies, I will – paradoxically perhaps – first discuss the development of US television as a field of historical inquiry, and then the rise of radio history. The fields did develop more or less distinctively from each other, if not entirely separable, considering that both radio and television history and historiography share many of the same scholars and institutions.

A History of TV History

The scholarship on the history of American television begins with Erik Barnouw. In 1970 he published The Image Empire, the final volume of his trilogy on the history of American broadcasting. That third addition to Barnouw’s opus, as Gary Edgerton notes in his contribution to this anthology, was subsequently condensed into Tube of Plenty, which first appeared in 1975 and would become a staple textbook in television studies classrooms for decades to come. Horace Newcomb’s anthology Television: The Critical View followed fast on the heels of Tube of Plenty, with its first edition appearing in 1976. However, this text, which would also become a mainstay in college classes, had nothing to say about television’s history. Reflecting the contemporary bent that would continue to characterize the developing field, the first edition included articles on high‐profile 1970s TV shows like All in the Family, The Waltons, and An American Family (and some with less staying power like Kung Fu). Contributors included journalists and cultural critics rather than scholars and the volume reflected Newcomb (who was a scholar) and his concerns with aesthetics. By the anthology’s third edition in 1982, more scholars and greater theoretical sophistication were in evidence (with pieces by Todd Gitlin, John Fiske and John Hartley, and David Thorburn). History crept in with one article on the “golden age of TV drama.” The piece, written by a film studies scholar and originally published in the non‐academic, but influential journal, Film Comment, is a useful early example of television historiography. The author, after waxing nostalgic about his boyhood memories of 1950’s non‐Golden Age programming, discusses the challenges for historians in studying live TV drama from this era. He notes the problem of access to material and the dearth of archival holdings (Kerbel 1982). However, with this notable exception, the perspective one gets from Newcomb’s anthology is that “the critical view” of television was a fundamentally “presentist” one. The following year, another major anthology appeared and this one put American television history and historiography front and center. John E. O’Connor’s American History, American Television (1983) was the first scholarly volume to take the project of pursuing the medium’s history seriously.3 O’Connor explored television as a historical artifact and laid out various lenses through which the historian can approach it: TV news and documentary as primary evidence of historical events; television as social and A Companion to the History of American Broadcasting 5 cultural history; the history of television as an art form and an industry; television programming on historical topics as interpreters of history (xxvii–xxxvii). Arising from a series of Columbia University seminars on “cinema and interdisciplinary interpretation,” held at the Museum of Modern Art and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, O’Connor and fourteen scholars, most new to the historical study of television, presented their preliminary efforts at constituting a new field of study. Seven of the fourteen essays emphasized subject matter from the 1950s: Edward R. Murrow and See It Now; Amos ‘n’ Andy; Milton Berle; anthology drama; Cold War documentary; and Richard Nixon’s TV image up to the first presidential debate in 1960. Two of the volume’s essays were not “historical” at all: Robert C. Allen’s semiotic analysis of a very contemporary iteration of the soap opera The Guiding Light and an analysis of television news coverage of the almost current 1980 campaign by Edward Kennedy for the Democratic presidential nomination. The 1960s are represented by one solitary article about the controversies around The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. The 1970s get better representation with pieces about the advent of the made‐for‐TV movie; television news, Watergate and the 1972 presidential election; CBS’ contentious documentary The Selling of the Pentagon; and the mini‐series blockbuster Roots. From the vantage point of the early 1980s, the previous decade might not quite constitute “history,” but it is curious that the tumultuous 1960s receives so little attention, despite the fact that by the early 1980s the first histories of the era were beginning to appear (see, for instance, Evans 1979; Viorst 1979; Gitlin 1980; Carson 1981). The 1960s would remain fertile but uncultivated terrain for television historians for quite some time. American History, American Television’s field‐defining qualities are most manifest in its extra features: a detailed, if not comprehensive, chronology of the medium and a smartly annotated bibliographical essay by Daniel J. Leab that maps out the popular and scholarly landscape of published works on the medium. Of particular use for would‐be historians is a guide to audio‐visual and manuscript archival resources. The volume highlights institutions that, then and now, loom large: the UCLA Television Archive; the Museum of Broadcasting (now the Paley Center for Media); the Library of Congress Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division; the Vanderbilt Television News Archive; and the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. I will have more to say about archives and the development of broadcasting history in a later section of this chapter. The early to mid‐1980s was a productive period for the emerging field of television studies, beyond the published volumes I have highlighted. There was the theoretical work coming out of the British Cultural Studies tradition at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Culture at the University of Birmingham and John Fiske’s challenging and provocative, but also accessible writings from Australia. He would soon leave Australia for the American Midwest and academic stardom. While scholars who wanted to study television from a humanistic tradition were largely shut out of learned societies such as the Society for Cinema Studies, the Popular Culture Association would prove more welcoming, if not particularly discriminating. The year 1985 was particularly key for bringing TV studies scholars together, according to Robert J. Thompson. The University of Iowa, Michigan State, and Hofstra University all hosted conferences on television that year. Scholars like Jane Feuer, David Marc, David Thorburn, and Thompson showed up at all of them, meeting up with Stuart Hall, John Fiske, and John Hartley at Iowa. To Thompson it felt like a field had “coagulated.”4 But it was not notably 6 Introduction

historically minded. The continued focus on the contemporary was reflected in the fourth edition of Newcomb’s Television: The Critical View (1987). There were articles on Lou Grant, The Love Boat, and other 1980’s phenomena that had been garnering either praise or consternation, but little that was overtly historical. The volume featured an excerpt from David Marc’s Demographic Vistas (1984) and two of the articles featured in O’Connor’s anthology; however, neither of the choices was historical in meth- odology or overarching question. Seven years later, in 1994, when the fifth edition of Television: The Critical View appeared, a sea‐change was evident: now history mattered. As my contribution to this volume’s Key Texts section points out, the later 1980s and early to mid‐1990s witnessed a mini‐explosion of rigorously researched, archive‐based, book‐length histories of the medium, albeit continuing the tradition of seeing television’s history as comprising a period bounded by the late 1940s to the early 1960s. With the demise of the three‐ network oligopoly, that phase of American television was now visible as history, as “the past.” Along with Lynn Spigel’s (1992) innovative and much‐discussed work on how television entered into the gendered space of the 1950’s suburban home, there was Michael Curtin’s (1995) groundbreaking look at late 1950’s/early 1960’s Cold War era television documentary programming, Chris Anderson’s (1994) exploration of the Hollywood film industry’s relationship with television in the 1950s, William Boddy’s Fifties Television (1990), and Mary Ann Watson’s (1990) look at television in the Kennedy years. Along with this publishing cornucopia, the solidifying of a humanistic field in television studies with a strong historical grounding was manifest in the 1989 founding of the scholarly organization with a punning name: “Console‐ing Passions.” While this non‐membership society, which hosted its first conference in 1992, was specifically oriented to the study of gender and sexuality in relation to television, three of its original board members – Lynn Spigel, Mary Beth Haralovich, and Lauren Rabinowitz – were film and television historians.5 The Console‐ing Passions book series published by Duke University Press and edited by the group’s founders, has comprised a significant number of books focused on television history, including my own work on 1960s television and the youth movement (Bodroghkozy 2001), Steven Classen’s Watching Jim Crow (2004), which also mines the 1960s, examining race, the civil rights movement, and television in Jackson, Mississippi within the context of the WLBT‐TV case, and Elana Levine’s Wallowing in Sex (2007), on network television’s response to the sexual revolution and the more sexualized culture of that era. Other volumes devoted entirely to US historical subjects or with significant chapters or sections on historical themes include: Hendershot (1999), Sconce (2000), McCarthy (2001), Spigel (2001), Parks (2005), Forman (2012), and Desjardins (2015). Console‐ing Passions, while not having a specific mission for building a scholarly literature around television history has, nevertheless, functioned as a key incubator and platform for the field’s flourishing. Field‐building – and the push for scholarly acceptance – continued with the establishment in 2000 of a television studies interest group in the Society for Cinema Studies.6 Television as an object of study had been tolerated, if not entirely embraced, within this key humanities‐oriented learned society since the mid‐1980s. But TV scholars and historians began to push the organization, which for many was their main scholarly home, to more fully include other forms of media to reflect both the convergence of media forms and practices in the digital era, and also the legitimacy of A Companion to the History of American Broadcasting 7 other forms of “screen” studies.7 In 2002, the organization finally obliged and “Media” was added to its name. Another venue for the further development of television studies as a field was inaugurated in 2004 with Flow – a scholarly, but informal online journal mostly about television (“flow” being Raymond Williams’ 1974 characterization of how television programming elements all work together to carry audiences along through their viewing experience). Organized by graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin and housed in the Department of Radio‐Television‐Film, the journal also hosts a biannual roundtable conference. The recurring impulse of the field to emphasize the contemporary manifested itself in the early days of Flow. The inaugural conference had only one roundtable panel on the medium’s history (I organized it) and early contributions to the online journal rarely treated historical topics. By the 2010s, however, history’s footprint in the field was getting larger in some places while shrinking in others: the 2016 Flow conference had numerous roundtables and events on historical questions suggesting that scholarly concerns about the medium’s history were less “the unfashion- able niche area” I viewed it to be in a grumpy polemic I penned for Flow’s online journal following the first conference (Bodroghkozy 2006).8 On the other hand, Mary Desjardins in an informal survey noted that the number of historical topics at the “Console‐ing Passions” conferences that had so energized historical television studies, especially with a feminist orientation, in the 1990s had plummeted by the new millennium (Desjardins and Haralovich 2015). In the 1990s, US television history had a moment of intellectual “coolness”: it was the exciting place to be for young media studies scholars. While that did not last, by the 2010s, the depth and breadth of rigorous scholarship produced by this generation of researchers means that the next generation of historians, both within media studies and outside the field, have a solid foundation upon which to pursue their questions in an area that, I would suggest, is still wide open.

A History of Radio History

If Barnouw helped to jump‐start broadcasting history, especially with the student‐ friendly version of his broadcasting trilogy’s third volume, his work did so only for the television part of broadcasting. The first volume, A Tower in Babel, came out in 1966 and did nothing in the following two decades to galvanize a scholarly field in radio studies. Radio had become a largely forgotten medium as far as critical analysis and scholarship were concerned, as Michele Hilmes noted in the Radio Reader, an anthology she and Jason Loviglio edited. This volume, coming out in 2002, helped to signal that the medium was in the process of being rediscovered and remembered by scholars (Hilmes and Loviglio 2002). A few years earlier in Radio Voices, a foundational text that helped jump‐start a wider scholarly interest in American radio history, Hilmes made similar observations, suggesting that radio has functioned as “the ‘repressed’ of television studies” (Hilmes 1997: xv). An academic field for the study of radio was born a mere decade following the establishment of network radio as a mass medium in the United States with Paul Lazarsfeld’s Office of Radio Research, initially established at Princeton University in 1937, but later housed at Columbia University. Empirical, quantitative (usually), positivist, and concerned with audience and effect, this scholarly approach soon led to 8 Introduction

the establishment of communications departments in universities around the country, but it was not particularly fertile ground for historical questions and projects. With the advent of network television in the late 1940s those communications departments and researchers promptly turned their survey questionnaires and empirical research tools to the new medium, abandoning radio even as the networks themselves did so. American radio historiography did not really get going, as Susan J. Douglas explains in her contribution to this volume, until the mid‐1980s. In particular, the works of Hugh G. J. Aitken – his technological history of the development of wireless (1976) and his 1985 follow‐up book, The Continuous Wave – were influential in the establishment of the history of technology as a field. Aitken influenced Douglas’ own work and her resulting book Inventing American Broadcasting (1987), as Shawn VanCour discusses in his piece in this volume, further helped solidify this area of study. Douglas was able to do something that is rather challenging: explain fairly complicated technological contrivances and processes in ways that non‐engineers and electricians could grasp. Histories of technology, while a burgeoning field, present challenges to historians, as Susan Murray points out in her chapter in this volume: most historians do not have engineering training or direct experience of interacting with the material basis of the mediums in their earlier incarnations. Michele Hilmes points to another direction historians could pursue in rediscovering the forgotten medium: “What if, instead, we regard radio not as a collection of wires, transmitters, and electrons, but as a social practice grounded in culture, rather than in electricity?” (Hilmes 1997: xiii). Her history of American radio in the network era did that by examining how programming constructed a sense of nation out of the polyglot diversity of listeners. Susan Douglas followed up a couple years later with her own culturally grounded history of the medium, and she echoed Hilmes on the problem of radio’s neglected status. But if Hilmes ended her history with the advent of television, Douglas brought hers up to the end of the 1990s with the rise of talk radio and the shock jocks, right‐wing radio, as well as the flowering of NPR (Douglas 1997). These volumes did what Barnouw’s massive tome did not: they energized a new generation of US radio history scholars. On the heels of these books came field‐building: the establishment of scholarly journals: first in 1992 with the Journal of Radio Studies (now, Journal of Radio and Audio Studies) and in 2003, The Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcasting and Audio Media. In 2012, a radio studies interest group formed within the Society of Cinema and Media Studies. Since the early 2000s, a small but growing and stimulating literature, much of it influenced by Hilmes’ trailblazing work, has developed, including: Jason Loviglio’s Radio’s Intimate Public (2005), which shows how American network radio blurred the dichotomy between public and private; Kathy Newman’s Radio Active (2004), dealing with the same time period and exploring anti‐commercial activism around the new medium; Alex Russo’s history of “Golden Age” radio beyond the networks (2010); Elana Razlogova’s (2011) examination of how radio listeners as engaged fans participated in and helped to create the medium, its programming, and its operations; Neil Verma’s (2012) aesthetic history of radio drama as “a theater of the mind;” and Smith and Verma’s (2016) anthology on Norman Corwin as a “radio auteur.” With the advent of the Radio Preservation Task Force (RPTF), spurred by the Library of Congress, which in 2013 announced its plan to coordinate the saving, cataloging, and preservation of radio and sound recordings held in institutional, corporate, and private A Companion to the History of American Broadcasting 9 collections around the country, a potential explosion of radio history scholarship was in the offing. At its inaugural conference in 2016, the RPTF brought together broadcast historians, archivists, librarians, and radio practitioners in an unexpectedly large gathering at the Library of Congress to discuss the no‐longer forgotten medium. For radio historians, perhaps even more so than for television historians, archives matter – and to that subject we now turn.

Grubbing in the Archive

Can one do broadcasting history without engaging in archival research and working with primary documents? Broadcast programs certainly constitute primary documents themselves. Early television histories, notably the work of David Marc (1984, 1989) brought more literary and aesthetic methods to their work. J. Fred MacDonald was another pioneering broadcast historian who emphasized programming: in his case compiling one of the most extensive and important personal archives of radio, television, industrial, and instructional film in the United States. His groundbreaking histories of US radio (1979), Cold War television (1985), and African Americans on television (1992), relied significantly on the archive he created over many decades.9 In this way, MacDonald was the most high‐profile and academically credentialed member of a significant cohort of collectors of American popular culture materials. For radio scholars in particular, the “Old Time Radio” (OTR) community of collectors and fans has been particularly valuable, as Laura LaPlaca discusses in her contribution in this volume. Academic and institutional archives were late to the project of preserving the nation’s broadcasting heritage, especially for programming deemed less “important” or worthy of saving. For radio historians and scholars, the OTR community with its fan cataloguers, self‐published volumes on long‐neglected radio programs, its conferences, and its well‐organized infrastructure in the digital age for selling and also making freely available a large diversity of radio shows from the 1920s to the early 1960s, has been a much valued resource. The slowness of institutional archives to take radio and television texts seriously as materials to be saved is evident in the case of the Library of Congress. It was not until 1976 with the passage of the landmark revision to the US Copyright Act, that radio and television preservation as a national issue was even addressed. The 1976 Act mandated that the Library of Congress establish and maintain “a library to be known as the American Television and Radio Archives … to preserve a permanent record of the television and radio programs which are the heritage of the people of the United States (Barnouw 1996: 233). Two years later this archive was folded into the newly formed Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division, with the seemingly ubiquitous Erik Barnouw as its head until 1981. The need for such an archive was already being discussed before the passage of the 1976 Act. Barnouw, in his foreword to the O’Connor American History, American Television anthology, recounts a series of meetings he put together with sponsorship from the Ford Foundation in the early to mid‐1970s on establishing an American television archive (preserving radio appears not to have been part of the discussion). Barnouw assembled a group of historians for a day‐long brainstorming session in Washington with the question: “Just what should a historian or other scholar, forty 10 Introduction

or fifty years from now, be able to find in such an archive?” (O’Connor 1983: xi). First on the list, perhaps not surprisingly: network news, documentary, and special event programming. The historians also wanted samples of drama programs, but not full runs. They wanted talk shows, quiz shows (the response of contestants might be seen in the future as “a standardized tribal dance of the culture”), local and regional programming, commercials in context, and even typical days should be recorded in the entirety of their broadcast flow so that future researchers could have a sense of the total experience of what it was like to live with television as a part of the rhythm of daily life (ibid.: xi). Soap operas, however, did not generate much interest from these historians or from archivists, suggesting a particular gendering of the archive. Producing histories of this genre have, consequently, been a challenge, as Elana Levine notes in her contribution. Because the Library of Congress has received a significant amount of its collection from producers depositing for copyright purposes, the collection has been strongest in prime‐time entertainment programming and not so much for the talk shows and quiz shows that Barnouw’s group of historians requested. And the Library never engaged in off‐air taping (with the exception of WETA, PBS’s flagship station in Washington, DC). Alas, those early 1970s historians were, of course, correct that later television scholars, certainly those familiar with Raymond Williams’ foundational concept of televisual “flow,” would value access to those kind of TV documents. The Library of Congress quickly became the largest audio‐visual archive in the country, but it was not the first. The UCLA Film and Television Archive, second to the Library of Congress in volume of holdings, came to life in the mid‐1960s – and despite the fact that “film” precedes “television” in the archive’s name, its genesis was as a television repository. The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (the parent organization for the Emmys) originally partnered with UCLA Theater Arts Department in 1965 to create a television archive. Three years later the Film Department launched its own cinema archive and in 1976 the two joined forces. Notably radio and audio broadcast were never included within the archive’s parameters. Another major broadcast archive born in the late 1960s had a more surprising origin story. Nashville‐based insurance executive Paul Simpson was alarmed at what he con- sidered to be liberal bias in network news coverage. He remembered seeing a network news story in 1967 featuring Timothy Leary, the former Harvard psychology professor and LSD guru, and thought the coverage gave Leary a platform to encourage usage of the psychedelic drug. Simpson wasn’t sure, so he wanted to view the coverage again. He visited the three network news divisions only to discover, to his surprise and dismay, that none of the networks systematically saved their news coverage.10 Simpson knew that newspapers were microfilmed, and their full runs available in university libraries; he had assumed that since television news was now a more influential medium than print, something analogous must be underway with the new medium. Because of his pull with his alma mater, Simpson was able to convince the chancellor of Vanderbilt University to let him underwrite a pilot program to videotape off the air all three networks’ news programs. A contentious presidential election season was coming up and Simpson wanted the project up and running in time for the two parties’ nominating conventions (Marcum 2013; see also Simpson 1995). Thus was the Vanderbilt Television News Archive born on August 5, 1968, just in time for the Republican convention – and then, a few weeks later, the Democratic convention in Chicago. The latter convention, of A Companion to the History of American Broadcasting 11 course, would go down in history as among the most tumultuous in modern US history, with televised protest and violence in the streets as well as inside the convention hall. Considering that CBS’s star newsman Dan Rather was slugged by Chicago police while reporting on the convention floor, the fact that Vanderbilt was recording and preserving the television coverage seemed particularly apt. So while most broadcast archives came into being for more disinterested academic and preservation reasons, the Vanderbilt archive could trace its beginnings to a non‐scholar who wanted to monitor left‐leaning bias in TV news. The Vanderbilt archive achieved one of the goals that the historians gathered together by Erik Barnouw had sought: the taping of programming in their entirety: commercial messages and all. The archive indexes those ads as well as the news items, and according to a report on the sustainability of the archive: “The Library of Congress has a good number of researchers who find the commercial ads as important a research resource as the news programs” (Marcum 2013: 6). This herculean task – made all the more daunting with the arrival of CNN and Fox News – has made the sustainability and funding of the archive an ongoing issue.11 In 1980, the Library of Congress went into formal partnership with the Vanderbilt archive, providing tape, funding, and agreeing to preserve the ever‐growing collection. With the arrival of the digital age and digital storage, the dilemma has been how to fund the digital conversion and preservation of more than thirty years of videotape recordings. The advent of YouTube and other online audio‐visual platforms have provided an embarrassment of riches for both television and radio historians. The Internet Archive, www.archive.org, is probably the most comprehensive and stable site to access radio programming from the so‐called “Golden Age” of network radio, along with some ephemera and paratexts to help with contextualizing the programs. The Old Time Radio community maintains numerous websites for the sharing of programs and information about US radio from the 1920s to the 1950s. In general, sites such as www. radiolovers.com, www.OldTimeRadioFans.com, and www.old‐time.com are run by radio enthusiasts and fans who want to celebrate a bygone era seen as more innocent and wholesome. The Internet Archive also hosts television programs deemed to be out of copyright protection, but the main venue to find television material that is not behind a pay wall is on YouTube. And while it can sometimes seem that one can find almost anything on the site with a few well‐chosen keywords, a program or clip a researcher finds one day may, inevitably, have been taken down the next. YouTube is not a stable venue for research, nor is it comprehensive even when it can seem to be. YouTube and other online platforms such as Netflix and Hulu.com have spurred broadcasting history research somewhat similarly to the way that the appearance of commercial VHS tapes and then DVD box sets of old television programming did in the 1980s and 1990s. Researchers then were limited to the vagaries of the marketplace, however. If, for instance, you were doing research on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and the show, despite its obvious historical importance, was neither in syndication nor released to the home video market, you had no option but to hope it was available in its entirety in an archive – and that you could secure funds to travel to that archive.12 Even in the 2010s, the show is not in DVD release as aired, but only in a “best of” format. There are clips and a few episodes on YouTube, which can be fine for teaching purposes, but the show is not commercially available in a format suitable for rigorous research. 12 Introduction

For traditional (read: non‐media) historians, the gold standard for research is the manuscript archive of collected papers, documents, letters, memos, and other print material generated by individuals, organizations, groups, corporations, governments, and the like. US broadcast history began maturing as a field when researchers starting mining these kind of archives as well as the audio‐visual repositories. One of the most important archives of collected papers relevant to broadcast history scholarship hap- pens to be at the Wisconsin Historical Society in the state capital, Madison. The Mass Communications History Collection, as it is formally known, was established in 1955 and is most noted for housing the programming‐related corporate papers of NBC, including files from the company’s founding in 1926 to the late 1950s.13 Between 1958 and 1974, NBC pursued an unprecedented agreement with the Mass Communications History Collection to preserve materials from NBC’s files that were slated for destruc- tion. While not a complete corporate archive, the approximately 420 cubic feet of materials, constitute a treasure trove of documentation about the origins and development of radio broadcasting, the operations of a commercialized system, executive decision‐ making, the shift to television, and much more. In the wake of NBC’s donation, other broadcast industry personnel saw Wisconsin as an appropriate venue for their papers. Together with the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research (WCFTR) (it should have “broadcasting” in its name, but does not), which is housed in the Wisconsin Historical Society building and is also affiliated with the University of Wisconsin‐ Madison’s Department of Communication Arts, broadcast history researchers can find papers of radio and TV news stars like H. V. Kaltenborn, David Brinkley, Howard K. Smith, and Charles Collingwood, the papers of National Educational Television (NET: the precursor to PBS), TV producers, writers, and personalities like Ed Sullivan, Rod Serling, Hal Kanter, David Susskind, Irna Phillips, and Paddy Chayefsky. The WCFTR is also an important audio‐visual repository. Because of this archival richness, it is no surprise that many of the most significant broadcast historians who have appeared since the late 1980s have been affiliated with the University of Wisconsin‐Madison either as faculty (Lynn Spigel, Robert McChesney, James Baughman, Michele Hilmes) or as graduate students, such as Michael Curtin, Steven Classen, and Jeffrey Sconce. A significant number of contributors to this volume came through UW‐Madison’s Communication Arts Department: Aniko Bodroghkozy, Michele Hilmes, Michael Kackman, Josh Shepperd, Elena Levine, Norma Coates, and Shawn VanCour. Beginning with Spigel’s short stint at Madison (1987–1991) and then with Hilmes’ far longer ten- ure (she retired in 2015 after more than twenty years at the UW), Madison became the premier place for young scholars to train to become broadcast historians. If the NBC Papers are among Madison’s claims to fame for broadcast historians, the UW’s friendly rivals in the Department of Radio‐Television‐Film at the University of Texas‐Austin have seen the build‐up of a complementary archive of materials related to CBS. The Briscoe Center for American History has been amassing a collection of papers related to CBS television news with its CBS Evening News archive, the volumi- nous papers of Walter Cronkite, the papers of other CBS news stars like Harry Reasoner, Morley Safer, and Andy Rooney, along with those of CBS news executives like Sig Mickelson and Les Midgley. The collection is obviously more targeted; no institution has CBS’s archive of corporate papers – rumor has it that the company pulped them all at some point: an incalculable loss to the field. The same appears to be true of ABC. A Companion to the History of American Broadcasting 13

Next to the holdings at Madison, Wisconsin, the other major repository for papers and audio‐visual material related to broadcasting in the United States is at the University of Maryland‐College Park. Under the umbrella of “Mass Media and Culture” collections, researchers will find the Library of American Broadcasting, which began as the Broadcast Pioneers Library – an effort by personnel affiliated with the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), the powerful lobbying organization for commercial broadcasters. When its archival holdings of broadcast industry materials could no longer be contained in the basement of the NAB’s Washington, DC headquarters, it was moved to splashy new facilities at the University of Maryland where it joined important collections on American non‐commercial, public broadcasting, specifically National Public Radio (NPR), the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the Pacifica Foundation, papers associated with the Washington, DC public radio station WAMU, and those of the PBS flagship TV station WNET. Unlike the University of Wisconsin‐ Madison, UT‐Austin, or UCLA, all universities with important broadcasting archives as well, the University of Maryland at College Park does not have a high‐powered PhD program geared toward educating scholars and academics in humanities‐oriented media studies. Maryland’s School of Journalism and Department of Communications are both geared more toward professional training or areas within their fields that do not emphasize history and the liberal arts. While the Merrill School of Journalism touts the Library of American Broadcasting as a resource for its graduate students, none of its PhD faculty (many of whom are former journalists) does historical work and its PhD students are typically working journalists. The implications for the archival holdings are significant in that there is no ongoing cohort of scholars, students, and faculty on‐site constantly mining the archive’s materials, building up a body of scholarship and on‐ going historical dialogue. If the manuscript and audio‐visual archives at Wisconsin and the film and TV archive at UCLA are as well used as they have been and have helped generate important scholarship, a significant reason may be their relationships with graduate programs that encourage students to explore archival research work. With the great archival richness available about television news, one might expect that histories of TV journalism would be a significant area of research endeavor for broadcast historians. However, despite the fact that Barnouw’s gathering of historians in the mid‐1970s appeared to consider news and documentary programming first on their list of materials future historians would want, this has not been the case. This kind of scholarship may have found more of a home in departments of journalism, a cognate field to media studies. Nevertheless, there are surprisingly few book‐length histories about TV news. Donovan and Scherer’s Unsilent Revolution (1992) remains the standard comprehensive chronicle, along with Craig M. Allen’s history of local news, News is People (2001). Charles L. Ponce de Leon’s That’s the Way It Is (2015) provides a promising recent survey history of network news. In the 1980s, there appeared to be the beginnings of a socio‐historical approach to television news with the works of Todd Gitlin (1980) and Daniel Hallin (1986) on 1960s TV news portrayals of, respectively, the student protest movement and the Vietnam War. Those early efforts did not, however, generate much of a further historiography of network news in that era, with a few exceptions (see, for instance, Pach 1994; Small 1994). The 1990s boom in television history did include Michael Curtin’s important book on early 1960s network news documentary, Redeeming the Wasteland (1995). My book on the civil rights movement and television (Bodroghkozy 2012) revisited the same era and tried to reconstruct how network news 14 Introduction

covered that crucial era of social change – made more methodologically difficult since the Vanderbilt Television News Archive was not in operation at this period. The value of the Vanderbilt Archive is on fine display in Bonnie J. Dow’s Watching Women’s Liberation, 1970 (2014). Her book provides an especially useful case study of how to do close textual analysis of television news’ verbal and visual discourses in historical context, showing how scholars can approach doing this kind of historical work. There are numerous other archives with collected papers of broadcasting personnel tucked away in unexpected places. The American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming began building up its twentieth‐century‐focused “Entertainment Industry Collections” beginning in the 1970s. From Jack Benny’s papers to collections of radio soap operas to Ozzie and Harriet Nelson’s papers, the archive is among the largest repositories of materials from writers, producers, actors, and other creative personnel involved in the radio and television industry in the United States. The out‐of‐the‐way location may be an impediment for some scholars, although the archive does provide research travel grants. The need to travel to far‐flung archives of both audio‐visual materials and collected papers can, of course, provide disincentives for graduate students and young scholars in deciding whether to pursue broadcast history as an area of specialization. Scholars who pursue advanced degrees in history as a discipline know that traveling to and immersing oneself in various archives is a part of the craft of being an historian. But history departments have not embraced media, or especially broadcasting, as an area of specialization in their graduate training. Media studies students who enter into a graduate program can easily see the added time and expense of dealing with archival material – and the unpredictability of what one might or might not find – and decide the inherent risks of pursuing historical research may not be worthwhile, especially if the student cannot merely walk across campus to an archival motherlode. Certainly, the academic job market for media studies scholars has never been overrun with postings for media, or specifically broadcast, historians despite the fact that many media studies academic units include courses on media and broadcast history among their curricular offerings. Undergraduate students tend to flock to courses on “new media” and what- ever the latest shiny objects in their media environment tend to be. Making the case for any kind of history – let along media or broadcast history – in the context of the neolib- eral university can be a challenge. Nevertheless, despite these built‐in barriers and the fact that the field – television studies in particular – has had a marked penchant for the contemporary, broadcasting history has flourished, and a key reason has been because of the growing infrastructure of archival resources, both those I have highlighted here and so many others.14 And then in 2016, US broadcast history got a particularly big and exciting boost when the Radio Preservation Task Force (RPTF) held its first national conference at the Library of Congress and at the University of Maryland, home of the above‐mentioned Special Collections in Mass Media and Culture. As the conference program guide proclaimed, “Radio just got more exciting.” Gathered together were over 300 radio and broadcast historians, archivists, and radio practitioners representing over 120 institutions with the goal of identifying, mapping, preserving, and sharing American radio history. In particular, the participants endeavored to seek out hidden or threatened collections connected with local, regional, educational, and non‐commercial radio. While much of the focus of radio and television history – and media studies more A Companion to the History of American Broadcasting 15 generally – has been on the network, national, and commercial realms, much of the impetus of the RPTF has been elsewhere because it is the local as well as the non‐ commercial areas of radio (and television) that have been understudied in large part because the archival materials to support such research have been hidden away if not destroyed.15 With faculty member volunteers around the country tasked with ferreting out local collections in university basements, back rooms of radio stations whose management may want to junk the old tapes to save space, the prospects for a new generation of scholarship on radio history seems promising as the RPTF seeks not only to identify these materials but to advocate for their preservation and ready access to researchers, teachers, and students. Doing archival research is not for the fainthearted: as with Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates, “you never know what you’re going to get.” But as the field of US broadcast history matures, the necessity for more “grubbing in the archive” is clear. If this overview of the history and availability of major repositories of paper and audio‐visual materials helps a new generation of media and non‐media scholars navigate the possibilities of research in American radio and television history, this volume will have achieved one of its main purposes.

This anthology brings together a group of the most significant academics in the field of broadcast media studies – from the most senior to the most promising junior scholars – to reflect on the state of the field: what we know, how we know it, areas and questions that have been neglected, and where the field may – or should – be going in the future, with promising paths of inquiry and potential roadblocks. This volume does not attempt to provide a comprehensive survey of the history of US broadcasting, but rather considers the historiography of the field and spotlights some of the most exciting and innovative work going on within it. Some of the chapters in this volume explore topics that have received a fair amount of attention in the scholarly literature, such as broadcast regulation, the soap opera, African Americans in broadcasting, fandom – although perhaps not from within an historical framework. Other chapters explore subjects that have not received the attention due them: Latino broadcasting, technical histories of television, or the radio sitcom, for instance. This volume also pushes against a long‐standing impulse in the field to see radio as merely the precursor to television and ignore the medium once the networks abandon it for television, or to treat radio as a discrete medium separate from television. Contributions to this anthology both acknowledge that the history of radio continues following the so‐called “Golden Age” of network radio and that radio and television can be discussed together thematically: many of the chapters in Part II, “American Broadcasting in Historical Focus” examine the history and historiography of both broadcasting forms in their topic‐focused examinations.

Overview of the Volume

Part I, “American Broadcasting in Historical Overview,” is chronological and features key, senior scholars writing on eras within the history of US broadcasting for which they already have national/international reputations. But rather than merely outline the history of the period or re‐present their own scholarly contributions, the chapters in 16 Introduction

this section provide reflections on the historiographical literature about the particular era: successes, limitations, challenges, and future directions for scholarly explorations. The chapters probe what we know about the period, how and why we know it, what we do not know adequately, and why. They also suggest future directions for broadcast history scholarship. Susan J. Douglas returns to subject matter she initially examined in her canonical book Inventing American Broadcasting (discussed in Shawn VanCour’s chapter in Part III) to further explore the earliest days of wireless and radio. Of particular note is Douglas’ discussion of the archive: the challenges of finding archival collections, working with the documents in them, and creating one’s own archive. Michele Hilmes takes the chronology through American radio’s heyday with the rise of network broadcasting, a subject she originally mined in Radio Voices, her path‐breaking social and cultural history of US radio as a nation‐making medium. Michael Kackman explores the development of US television, from early technological experiments in the 1930s, through the formative years of live local and network production, to the rise of telefilm production that would eventually form the foundation of the classic network era. Rather than merely a step along the way toward an inevitable network system, Kackman shows that US television before the 1960s was, rather, a distinct period of experimentation and conflict that has often been elided in the historiography of the medium. Victoria E. Johnson examines the heyday of that system by exploring how the histories of NBC, CBS, and ABC have been written and the importance of taking account of networks as “brands” in the period from the 1960s to the 1980s. Bambi Haggins and Julia Himberg trace the impact of the “multi‐channel transition” period of the 1980s and 1990s and the undoing of the three‐network oligopoly. They use a case study of the FOX network and its impact to explore how scholars have understood a period during which some of the basic rules of television were altered while other functions of programming remained the same. Radio, of course, did not disappear in the television era. But as Alex Russo notes, scholarship on radio has produced a kind of donut hole: lots of research on the period before the 1950s and lots of contemporary research on podcasting and digital distribution, but not a great deal of historical work on post‐network radio. He notes the challenges in pursuing the history of radio in an era of local ownership and ever‐ changing format specialization, noting that much of the scholarship on radio in the post‐network era has been done from outside media studies without a particular concern for radio as a medium. Nevertheless, with the new impetus of the Library of Congress and the Radio Preservation Task Force, Russo suggests a bright future for historicizing radio’s post‐1950’s past. Amanda Lotz, who has done groundbreaking work on the transformations American television has undergone in the digital era, explores the post‐network era (the here and now), in her contribution. She explores how we can use the tools of historiography to understand contemporary television and she usefully discusses the challenges of using trade press publications in researching the medium in the twenty‐first century. Part II, “American Broadcasting in Historical Focus,” is more thematic and cuts across periods, and in numerous cases scholars in this section examine both radio and television in their chapters in keeping with the volume’s goal of encouraging a joint consideration of these two media of broadcasting and their connected histories. Chapters in this section examine the historiography and scholarship about the subjects