Bob McChesney, in his recent book Telecommunications, Mass
Media and Democracy, details the debate between 1928 and 1935
for control of radio in the US. How did that battle play out?
That’s a very interesting topic, and he’s done an important
service by bringing it out. It’s very pertinent today, because we’re
involved in a very similar battle over this so-called “information
superhighway.”
In the 1920s, the first major means of mass communication since
the printing press came along—radio. It’s obvious that radio is a
bounded resource, because there’s only a fixed bandwidth. There
was no question in anyone’s mind that the government was going to
have to regulate it. The question was, What form would this
government regulation take?
Government could opt for public radio, with popular
participation. This approach would be as democratic as the society
is. Public radio in the Soviet Union would have been totalitarian, but
in, say, Canada or England, it would be partially democratic (insofar
as those societies are democratic).
That debate was pursued all over the world—at least in the
wealthier societies, which had the luxury of choice. Almost every
country (maybe every one—I can’t think of an exception) chose
public radio, while the US chose private radio. It wasn’t 100%; you
were allowed to have small radio stations—say, a college radio
station—that can reach a few blocks. But virtually all radio in the US
was handed over to private power.
As McChesney points out, there was a considerable struggle
about that. There were church groups and some labor unions and
other public interest groups that felt that the US should go the way
the rest of the world was going. But this is very much a business-run
society, and they lost out.
Rather strikingly, business also won an ideological victory,
claiming that handing radio over to private power constituted
democracy, because it gave people choices in the marketplace.
That’s a very weird concept of democracy, since your power
depends on the number of dollars you have, and your choices are
limited to selecting among options that are highly structured by the
real concentrations of power. But this was nevertheless widely