Media and Democracy: The Emergence of Commercial Broadcasting in the United States, 1927-1935

Robert W. McChesney

The notion that U.S. media are inherently private, for-profit industries which rely upon advertising for a significant portion of their revenues dominates much of journalism and communication historiography.  It is almost as if the First Amendment was crafted as much to create a profitable sector for capitalist development as it was to protect and encourage a democratic polity (4).  With regard to the print media of newspapers and magazines, such observations are understandable, if not entirely accurate.  By the time the newspaper and magazine industries became mature oligopolies in the early twentieth century, the notion of a “free press” immune from public or governmental interference was sacrosanct in U.S. political culture.  Beginning in the Progressive Era, there was extensive criticism of the reactionary political trajectory of the commercialized and concentrated newspaper industry, but there was little sense that any change was possible (5). 

Such was not the case with radio broadcasting which emerged in dramatic fashion between 1920 and 1922.  If only due to the physical scarcity in the number of channels available, it was recognized by all comers that the federal government would have to determine who, among the plethora of contenders, would be permitted to broadcast and, conversely, who would not.  As Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, who was largely responsible for regulating the nascent industry in the 1920s, observed, radio provided “one of the few instances that I know of when the whole industry and country is praying for more regulation” (6). 

Despite the distinctly political basis of the formation of radio broadcasting in the United States, most scholarship on the topic has been decidedly deterministic, regarding the network-dominated, for-profit, advertising-supported system as the sole possible option for the United States.  To the mainstream school which regards commercial broadcasting favorably, the notion that some Americans may have attempted to establish an alternative system is uninteresting on its face, since the United States adopted the best possible system imaginable (7).  The ascendant critical school is no less deterministic, although it hardly regards the commercial broadcasting setup with enthusiasm.  Critical scholars have argued that commercial broadcasting was inevitable in the United States due to the domination of U.S. society by huge corporations and the ideology of corporate capitalism (8).  To critical scholars, the public was either apathetic, uninformed, or even mildly enthusiastic about the emergence of the status quo; there is little sense of organized or principled opposition. 

This article will present a picture of U.S. broadcasting history which runs counter to the above patterns.  I will argue that while it is true that there were powerful forces in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s which encouraged the development of commercial broadcasting, at the same time there developed a significant and sophisticated opposition to commercial broadcasting.  This opposition, which I term the “broadcast reform movement,” existed for less than a decade but played a central role in the debates over how best to structure U.S. broadcasting in the early 1930s.  Although crushed unmercifully by commercial broadcasters, these reformers generated an impressive critique of the limitations of an oligopolized, capitalistic media industry for the communication requirements  of  a democratic society, a critique which has aged very well.  Moreover, the reformers suggested a variety of reforms which were also opposed in principle to the establishment of a nationalized, state-run broadcasting monopoly.  Accordingly, the broadcast reformers have left an important tradition of U.S. media criticism that we may wish to draw from as we confront the stark political crises of the coming years (9). 

Broadcasting histories heretofore, mainstream and critical, have emphasized that the establishment of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company’s WEAF in 1922, with its formal commitment to time sales as its basis of support, was the first step in the inexorable march toward network-dominated, advertising-supported broadcasting.  Similarly, Secretary Hoover, with his strong belief in the private control of broadcasting and self-regulation by the industry as preferable to active government regulation, is seen as the “father” of U.S. broadcasting, as his vision largely anticipated the nature of the system that emerged.  Thus, when Congress passed the Radio Act of 1927 with little fundamental debate or opposition to the emerging order, the scholarship assumes that commercial broadcasting was formally cast in granite and the matter was settled for all time (10).  On all these points, the scholarship is either half-true or false. 

First, U.S. broadcasting in the 1920s was quite unlike the system that would be entrenched only a few years later.  Indeed, if one restricts analysis to the years before 1927, there was no organized opposition to commercial broadcasting as that system did not exist and no one anticipated that it ever would.  Approximately one-third of the early broadcasters were affiliated with non-profit organizations like universities, churches and civic organizations; their stated purposes were eleemosynary, not profit-related.  Approximately one-half of the stations were created by for-profit enterprises like newspapers and department stores, not to generate revenues in their own right but, rather, to shed favorable light on the owner’s primary enterprise (11).  Second, advertising was not taken seriously as a basis for supporting the industry throughout the early and middle 1920s.  Secretary Hoover, who was a staunch proponent of advertising per se, was opposed to having it play more than a marginal role in broadcasting.  The so-called advertising that did exist on the handful of stations like WEAF, was indirect.  Indeed, it was as mild if not milder in tone as the sponsorship announcements on Public Broadcasting System programs today.  In virtually all discussions on the future of broadcasting, listeners and industry representatives dismissed advertising as an acceptable basis for the industry.  As the  American Newspaper Publishers Association assured its members in 1927, “Fortunately, direct advertising by radio is well-nigh an impossibility (12)”. 

Finally, the Radio Act of 1927 was emergency legislation, passed to bring order to the airwaves after a Federal judge had ruled in 1926 that the Department of Commerce’s licensing of stations was unconstitutional, thus leading to a period of chaos in the ether, as many stations disrespected the existing frequency and power assignments.  The Radio Act established the Federal Radio Commission on a temporary basis to bring order to the airwaves.  The FRC was left on its own to accomplish this task; the Radio Act merely advised the FRC to favor those stations which best served the “public interest, convenience, or necessity,” although no one had a clear sense of how this term from public utilities law should be applied to the specifics of broadcasting.  As the Radio Act and the FRC were seen as temporary measures, radio legislation was considered at every session of Congress up until the passage of the Communications Act of 1934, which created the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), still the law of the land for radio and television. 

It was in the two years following the passage of the Radio Act that the modern network-dominated, advertising-supported broadcasting system came into existence.  To some extent the FRC merely crystallized trends in the industry, as non-profit stations found it increasingly difficult to remain on the air.  At the same time, the Radio Corporation of America purchased AT&T’s WEAF in 1926 and established the National Broadcasting Company.  The following year the Columbia Broadcasting System was founded.  These two national networks were clearly the dynamic element of U.S. broadcasting.  In addition, however, the FRC was comprised mostly of persons who either had been affiliated with commercial radio interests or who would go on to careers as executives with NBC or CBS.  The FRC’s general reallocation of the airwaves in 1928 was drawn up in virtual secrecy from Congress or the public and was crafted largely by engineers and attorneys who worked for commercial interests.  The reallocation of 1928 reassigned virtually every station to a new frequency and a new power level; it is the basis for AM broadcasting in the United States to this day. 

The reallocation established forty clear channels where only one high-power station would broadcast nationally.  The remaining 600 or so stations would share time and broadcast concurrently at lower power levels on the remaining fifty channels.  The networks were the big winners.  Thirty-seven of the forty clear channel stations went to network-affiliated stations.  By the early 1930s, NBC and CBS affiliated stations accounted for seventy percent of U.S. broadcasting when hours broadcast and power levels are factored in (13).  Advertising went from non-existence on a national basis in 1927 to the point where the networks accrued $72 million by 1934 (14).  The other side of the coin was reflected in the equally dramatic decline of the non-profit broadcasting sector, from well over one hundred stations in 1927 to less than one-third that total by the early 1930s.  Moreover, almost all of these stations operated with low power on shared frequencies.  By 1934 non-profit broadcasting accounted for only two percent of U.S. broadcast time (15).  For most Americans it effectively did not exist.  The FRC defended its practice of showing preference in granting licenses to commercial broadcasters unequivocally in its Third Annual Report (16).  Although many members of Congress announced opposition to these trends, concern with other matters, not the least of which was the economic situation, prevented Congress from considering the matter seriously until 1932. 

It was these displaced and harassed non-profit broadcasters who formed the bedrock of the broadcast reform movement.  The leading group was the National Committee on Education by Radio, which was an umbrella group of nine national education organizations created in 1930 to lead the fight to have Congress reserve channels for non-profit utilization.  The NCER was led by the National Education Association’s Joy Elmer Morgan, who had cut his teeth on the municipal ownership movement of the Progressive Era (17).  “Private monopoly in industry is bad enough; monopoly in the agencies which control the distribution of ideas is infinitely worse,” Morgan wrote Congress.  “It strikes at the very roots of free democratic government (18).” Morgan regarded the fight for the control of radio broadcasting as decisive for determining whether the United States would degenerate into “chaos” or move on to a “world-order of civilization” (19).  Other displaced broadcasters who organized on behalf of broadcast reform included the Chicago Federation of Labor, which  operated WCFL in Chicago, and the Paulist Fathers religious order, which operated  station WLWL in New York City (20). 

In addition to displaced broadcasters, the reform movement enjoyed the participation of civic organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union, which in 1933 resolved that commercial broadcasting was systematically undermining free speech through censorship of radical and unpopular opinions and through the general preference for cheap entertainment over public affairs programming (21).  The ACLU’s stance reflected the position of virtually the entire U.S. intelligentsia during this period; Morgan was on the mark when he stated that it was impossible to find a single U.S. intellectual in favor of the status quo unless she or he was receiving either money or airtime from a commercial broadcaster (22).  In addition, many elements of the newspaper industry opposed commercial broadcasting, often out of fear of losing ad revenues and circulation to the broadcasters.  Nonetheless, the commercial broadcasters were able to defuse the threat to the status quo posed by the newspaper industry through a series of skillful and brilliant maneuvers.  Hence, newspaper coverage of the debate over broadcasting was favorable to the broadcasters by all accounts.  With the Biltmore Agreement of 1933, the newspaper  industry formally agreed to support the broadcasters on Capitol Hill against  the efforts of the reformers in return for having limits placed on radio newscasts (23). 

Among the various elements of the broadcast reform movement, four themes underscored virtually all of their criticism of the status quo (24).  First, the reformers argued that the airwaves were a public resource and that broadcasting was therefore a public utility.  By this reasoning, the reformers argued that turning the airwaves over to a handful of capitalist broadcasters so they could satisfy selfish goals was a scandalous misuse of public property.  Moreover, the entire process that led to this public policy had been conducted outside of public, even congressional, view.  Most of the reformers had supported the passage of the Radio Act of 1927; there was no sense that its passage brought with it the FRC’s reallocation of 1928.  Second, the reformers argued that the broadcasting system would invariably shade its programming to defend the status quo and that it would never give fair play to unpopular or radical opinions.  Third, the reformers criticized broadcast advertising unmercifully, particularly with regard to the lack of cultural and educational programming which the system seemed capable of generating.  Some of this criticism had a distinctly elitist tone which may have undermined the ability of the reformers to generate popular support for their cause.  Finally, the reformers rejected the notion that the government could regulate the existing system to act in a fundamentally superior manner; in their view the experience of the FRC revealed that such a notion was bankrupt. 

As such, this was distinctly radical criticism.  “Ownership of the facilities is the crux of the matter,” one reformer noted at an NCER conference (25).  All of the reformers’ proposals called for setting aside a percentage of the channels for the exclusive use of non-profit broadcasters.  At most, the reformers argued that the government should operate a series of stations in conjunction with both non-profit and commercial stations.  Most reformers were opposed in principle to the elimination of all commercial stations;  they simply wanted them to play a subordinate role in the overall system.  The Achilles’ heel for the reform movement was its inability to find a satisfactory source of funding for non-profit stations outside of taxation, particularly as philanthropic sources dried up during the Depression.  While federally subsidized non-profit broadcasting may have been politically viable in the late 1930s at the heyday of the “second” New Deal, it was a cropper in the economic dog days of the early 1930s.  This weak spot prevented the reform movement from ever coalescing around a single reform proposal and marshaling its forces to maximum effect in Washington, D.C. “Every son-of-a-gun and his brother has a definite idea about the way it should be handled,” bemoaned one reformer (26).  Indeed, with but a few exceptions, the reformers proved to be decidedly incompetent political organizers. 

This organizational weakness was only magnified in comparison to the radio lobby which had already emerged as one of the very most powerful lobbies in the United States.  In addition to the usual political influence that accompanies great wealth, the radio lobby had even greater leverage over publicity-conscious politicians due to its control of the airwaves.  The commercial broadcasters also spared no expense in the early 1930s in a public relations campaign to counteract the arguments of the reformers and establish the status quo as the only truly “democratic” and innately “American” method for organizing broadcasting (27).  The publicity provided by the broadcasters overwhelmed the efforts of the reformers, much to the reformers’ chagrin. 

The political battle regarding broadcast policy had two phases on Capitol Hill.  The first phase, during the final two years of the Hoover administration, represented the high water mark for popular discontent with broadcasting, at least by any subsequent standard.  Prior to the middle 1930s, commercial broadcasting was anything but sacrosanct in U.S. political culture.  By all accounts the public was dissatisfied with the amount and nature of advertising on the radio and pressured Congress to enact reforms of the status quo. One reformer estimated that fully seventy-five percent of the members of Congress would support broadcast reform legislation, a point the industry did not dispute in its internal communications (28).  The broadcasters, on the other hand, were opposed to any consideration of radio legislation for the time being, as they were quite satisfied with the manner the FRC was regulating the airwaves.  Nonetheless, reform legislation failed to get through Congress, for two reasons.  First, the economic depression dominated all legislative agendas during this period.  Second, although the reform cause had support among rank and file members of Congress, the relevant committee chairmen were closely allied with the broadcasters.  Thus no reform legislation was even able to get to the floor for a vote during this period. 

The second phase covered the period from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inauguration in 1933 to the passage of the Communications Act into law in June 1934.  By 1933 the shakeout following the reallocation of 1928 and 1929 was complete, and the commercial broadcasters determined that it was time to press for permanent legislation, both to stabilize the industry and so that broadcasting would not remain a political football on Capitol Hill (29).  The broadcast reformers had many allies in the Roosevelt administration, including FDR’s close friend Ambassador to Mexico Josephus Daniels, many of whom even favored out-and-out nationalization over the status quo.  Nevertheless, Roosevelt decided not to take a public position on the matter, while his aides worked behind the scenes to promote the legislative agenda of the commercial broadcasters.  FDR was in no mood to take on an uphill fight against the powerful communications industry, particularly when he enjoyed less than perfect relations with the nation’s largely Republican newspaper industry.  As even Daniels advised him, he had more important battles to fight (30). 

The commercial broadcasters hoped to rush permanent legislation establishing a new FCC to replace the FRC through Congress with a minimum of debate and then have the new FCC take up the question of whether there should be any changes in the broadcasting setup.  The Roosevelt administration and relevant congressional leaders adopted this stance as well, leading most to believe that passage of a pro-status quo bill was all but a certainty (31).  In March and April,  however, an ad hoc campaign thrown together by the Paulist Fathers and organized labor led to the introduction of the Wagner-Hatfield amendment in the Senate, which would have turned over twenty-five percent of all channels to non-profit broadcasters.  The amendment received an outpouring of support despite minimal press coverage; by late April the trade publication Variety reported that it stood “better than a 50-50 chance of being adopted” (32).  The radio lobby attacked the Wagner-Hatfield amendment with a vengeance.  It was defeated on the Senate floor on May 15 by a vote of 42-23, mostly because a clause had been added to the communications bill calling for the new FCC to study the viability of the Wagner-Hatfield proposal and report back to Congress the following year.  The Communications Act, with this clause, passed the Senate on a voice vote and was signed into law in June.  The FCC hearings on the Wagner-Hatfield concept, which took place that autumn, were a pro forma affair which predictably recommended that no such reform was necessary. 

With the passage of the Communications Act of 1934, Congress effectively removed itself from the discussion of fundamental broadcast policy issues for the balance of the century.  The new FCC, as well, learned quickly that it was generally left alone by Congress to the extent that it did not antagonize the powerful broadcasting lobby.  The broadcast reform movement quietly unraveled and disappeared, soon to be forgotten.  In the late 1930s, with no opposition to its existence, the commercial broadcasters located their industry next to the newspaper industry as an icon of American freedom and culture.  The nature of “our American system of broadcasting,” RCA president David Sarnoff told a nationwide radio audience in 1938, was “already implicit in the American system, ready and waiting for broadcasting when it came” (33).  The implications of this logic were not always left unspoken.  “He who attacks the fundamentals of the American system” of broadcasting, CBS president William S. Paley told an audience of educators in 1937, “attacks democracy itself” (34).  Only a few years earlier such a statement would have been met with derision. 

By the Second World War commercial broadcasting was completely enshrined as a natural and benevolent institution, not only immune to fundamental criticism, but elevated to the point that such criticism was unthinkable (35).  By 1945 Paul Lazarsfeld would conclude his classic study of broadcasting by observing that most Americans seemed to approve of the private and commercial basis of the industry.  “People have little information on the subject,” he noted.  “They have obviously given it little thought” (36). 

To conclude, the private, for-profit basis of the U.S. broadcasting system did not emerge as the result of consensus but, rather, as a result of conflict in which there were clear winners and losers.  This point notwithstanding, it was a hollow debate, to the extent that the commercial broadcasters successfully kept the public and even Congress mostly oblivious to their right to establish fundamental broadcast policy.  And insofar as the Communications Act of 1934 not only laid the basis for radio but for television and much more, this lack of debate can be seen as a weak spot in U.S.  democracy. 

The contestants in the early 1930s had differing  notions of democracy and the role of the media in such a political system.  To the reformers, turning broadcasting over to a few enormous corporations for the pursuit of profit had ignominious implications for the ability of society effectively to be self-governing.  At the very least, the reformers argued that it was incumbent upon a democratic society to actively study, discuss, and debate the various options on how best to organize its broadcast media, regardless of the outcome of the debate.  To the industry, the market was quintes-sentially democratic, and no debate was necessary to justify its extension into most any  conceivable  realm  of social life.  Moreover, merely debating the suitability of the market was even undemocratic by this reasoning, to the extent that it might lead society to adopt non-market structures, which were presupposed as anti-democratic (37). 

Finally, subsequent trends in the media industries suggest that many of the concerns of the broadcast reformers have not gone away but, rather, may be more pressing than at any other time in U.S. history.  If this is the case, an understanding of this chapter in U.S. communication history may be all the more necessary.  A rich, American tradition of critical media analysis can aid us as we make our way further into the corporate-dominated, advertising-saturated, information-and-communication-based, world economic order of the 1990s and beyond. 

1. For two recent discussions of this topic, see William Greider, Who Will Tell the People: The Betrayal of American Democracy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992);  W. Lance Bennett, The Governing Crisis: Media, Money and Marketing in American Elections (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.
2. For the classic work on this topic, see Ben H. Bagdikina, The Media Monopoly, third edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990);  for a particularly radical treatment of the subject, see Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon, 1988).
3. I take up the matter of why fundamental media issues are verboten in U.S. political culture in the following: Robert W. McChesney, “Off Limits: An Inquiry into the Lack of Debate Over the Ownership, Structure and Control of the Mass media in U.S. Political Life,” Communication 13 (1992): 1-19.
4. For two recent arguments that would seem to suggest this interpretation, see David Kelley and Roger Donway, “Liberalism and Free Speech,” in Democracy and the Mass Media, ed. Judith Lichtenberg, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 66- 101;  Lucas A. Powe, Jr., The Fourth Estate and the Constitution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
5. For some classic work along these lines, see Silas Bent, Strange Bedfellows (New York: Horace Liveright, 1928);  George Seldes, Lords of the Press (New York: Juliann Messner, 1938);  George Seldes, Freedom of the Press (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1935).
6. Quote cited in James L. Baughman, Television’s Guardians: The FCC and the Politics of Programming, 1958-1967 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), 5.
7. See, for example, Sydney Head, Broadcasting in America (Boston: Hough-ton-Mifflin, 1956). 
8. See, for example, Mary S. Mander, “The Public Debate About Broadcasting in the Twenties: An Interpretive History,” Journal of Broadcasting 25 (Spring 1984): 167-185.
9. The balance of this article will be lightly referenced, and will use mostly accessible secondary sources. Readers interested in more detail are urged to look at Robert W. McChesney, The Battle for the Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928-1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming, 1993 or 1994). I have written two shorter versions of the basic argument. See Robert W. McChesney, “Conflict, Not Consensus: The Debate Over Broadcast Communication Policy, 1930-1935,” in New Perspectives in U.S. Communications History, ed. William S. Solomon and Robert W. McChesney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming 1993). Both of the above are working titles subject to change. The other overview of this research is Robert W. McChesney, “The Battle for the U.S. Airwaves, 1928-1935,” Journal of Communication 40 (Autumn 1990): 29-57. Readers interested in more information are welcome to call me at (608) 263-4365.
10. See, for example, Susan Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899-1922 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 317;  James Schwoch, The American Radio Industry and Its Latin American Activities, 1900-1939 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 76;  Michele Hilmes, Hollywood and Broadcasting: From Radio to Cable (Erbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 49. 
11. See S. E. Frost, Education’s Own Stations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1937).
12. “Report of the Committee on Radio,” American Newspaper Publishers Association Bulletin, No. 5374, May 5, 1927, 285.
13. See Thomas Porter Robinson, Radio Networks and the Federal Government (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943);  “The Menace of the Radio Monopoly,” Education by Radio, March 26, 1931, 27;  “The Power Trust and the Public Schools,” Education by Radio, December 10, 1931, 150.
14. Herman S. Hettinger, “Some Fundamental Aspects of Radio Broadcasting,” Harvard Business Review 13 (1935): 14-28;  “Chain Income From Time Sales,” Variety,  January 8, 1935, 40.
15. Congressional Record 78 (May 15, 1934): 8830-8834;  “Superpower,” Education by Radio, May 7, 1931, 50.
16. Federal Radio Commission, Third Annual Report of the Federal Radio Commission to the Congress of the United States (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1929), 31-36.
17. See Joy Elmer Morgan and E. D. Bullock, Selected Articles on Municipal Ownership (Minneapolis: Wilson, 1911).
18. Joy Elmer Morgan, “An Open Letter to the Members of Congress,” January 20, 1933, Payne Fund Inc. Papers, Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio, Container 39, Folder 750. (Hereafter cited as PFI Mss.)
19. See Joy Elmer Morgan, “Education’s Rights  on the Air,” in Radio and Education: Proceedings of the First Assembly of the National Advisory Council on Radio in Education, 1931, ed. Levering Tyson, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 120-136.
20. For discussions of each of these groups, see Robert W. McChesney, “Labor and the Marketplace of Ideas: WCFL and the Battle for Labor Radio Broadcasting, 1928-1934,” Journalism Monographs, August 1992;  Robert W. McChesney, “Crusade Against Mammon: Father Harney, WLWL and the Debate Over Radio in the 1930s,” Journalism History 14 (Winter 1987): 118-130.
21. For a discussion of the ACLU, see Robert W. McChesney, “Constant Retreat: The American Civil Liberties Union and the Debate Over the Meaning of Free Speech for Radio Broadcasting in the 1930s,” in Free Speech Yearbook, Volume 26, ed. Stephen A. Smith, (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), 40-59.
22. Joy Elmer Morgan, “The New American Plan for Radio,” in A Debate Handbook on Radio Control and Operation, ed. Bower Aly and Gerald T. Shively (Columbia, Mo.: Staples Publishing Company, 1933), 82.
23. For a discussion of press-radio relations, see Robert W. McChesney, “Press-Radio Relations and the Emergence  of  Network,  Commercial Broadcasting in the United States, 1930-1935,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 11 (1991): 41-57.
24. For a more detailed (and referenced) discussion of this critique, see Robert W. McChesney, “An Almost Incredible Absurdity for a Democracy,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 15 (Winter 1991): 89-114.
25. Gross Alexander, “Supplemental Statement,” in Radio as a Cultural Agency in a Democracy, ed. Tracy F. Tyler (Washington, D.C.: National Committee on Education by Radio, 1934), 119.
26. S. H. Evans to W. V. Woehlke, February 15, 1932, PFI Mss, Container 60, Folder 1165.
27. For two classic statements along these lines, see National Association of Broadcasters, Broadcasting in the United States (Washington, D.C.: National Association of Broadcasters, 1933);  National Broadcasting Company, Broadcasting, Volumes I-IV (New York: National Broadcasting Company, 1935).
28. Edward N. Nockels, “Labor’s Rights on the Air,” Federation News, February 7, 1931, 2;  “Labor Resolution Presented,” Broadcasters’ News Bulletin, January 12, 1931;  “Labor Bill Headed for Congress,” Broadcasters’ News Bulletin, February 21, 1931.
29. Sol Taishoff, “‘War Plans’ Laid to Protect Broadcasting,” Broadcasting, 1 March 1933, 5. 
30. For a more detailed discussion of FDR and radio, see Robert W. McChes-ney, “Franklin Roosevelt, His Administration, and the Communications Act of 1934,” American Journalism, 5 (1988): 204- 230.
31. Philip T. Rosen, The Modern Stentors: Radio Broadcasting and the Federal Government (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980), 177.
32. “Air Enemies Unite Forces,” Variety, May 8, 1934, 37, 45.
33. Cited in “In Their Own Behalf,” Education by Radio, June-July 1938, 21.
34. William S. Paley, “The Viewpoint of the Radio Industry,” in Educational Broadcasting 1937, ed. C. S. Marsh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1937), 6.
35. See Erik Barnouw, The Sponsor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 40-42.
36. Paul F. Lazarsfeld, The People Look at Radio (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1946), 89.
37. For examples of this peculiar hostility to  wide-ranging  public  debate as being antithetical to (capitalist) democracy, see Kelley and Donway, “Liberalism and Free Speech,” 95-96;  Powe, Fourth Estate, 281-282.

Robert W. McChesney is Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.