When it comes to broadcasting, we will see that the same issues of inclusion and exclusion, of fact and fiction, of borders and identities, of empowered and silenced voices that play such a vital role in the making of history also form the significant forces in the development of radio and television. As we begin with an examination of the cultural milieu from which broadcasting arose, we will be looking at the currents of power swirling around radio’s imagination, invention, deployment, and use.

Situated in small-town rural America, appealing to the uneducated working classes, addressing them in ways not approved of by such elite institutions as the AMA but clearly speaking to their innermost fears and hopes, mobilizing ethnocentric racist appeals that created an “us” that was embattled, misunderstood, sick, and tired—Dr. Brinkley and his brethren on the border made connections via the miracle medium of radio that the larger society could not tolerate (Loviglio 1995). His story shows us where the borders of broadcasting culture are, and who gets to draw them.

A medium that knows no boundaries is bound and restrained by national laws and regulation; a medium that reaches the public directly and effectively creates an equally pressing desire to direct and control it; a medium that holds out democratic promise falls under the sway of racist demagogues. Broadcasting must, by law, operate within the public interest—but what if it’s goat glands the public really wants?

Not long after, the Mexican government, having finally reached a better frequency allocation agreement with the United States, closed down the station.

The station was able to reach most of the continental United States, at a favorable position on the dial right between popular stations WGN Chicago and WSB Atlanta. It developed into a showcase not only for the doctor’s flourishing medical practice, but for a host of other popular cultural forms either outlawed or marginalized by sanctioned U.S. broadcasting: fortune-telling, astrology, the radio equivalent of personals columns, direct selling to listeners, hillbilly (early country) and Mexican music, and fundamentalist preachers of uncertain denomination. Brinkley himself expanded into other medical concerns, including one recommendation with which he was years ahead of the AMA: “If you have high blood pressure, watch your diet. Eat no salt at all” (Fowler and Crawford 1987, 41).

As Brinkley observed, “Radio waves pay no attention to lines on a map” (Fowler and Crawford 1987, 23).

By all rights Brinkley should have won the 1930 governor’s race; his write-in votes gave him the victory, but his political opponents pressed a case that invalidated over 50,000 ballots that did not have his name written down exactly as “J. R. Brinkley” (as opposed to “Dr. Brinkley” or simply “Doctor”).

(after all, in the 1930s the AMA was still promoting tobacco use as safe and recommending that pregnant women drink alcohol)

When KFKB was given an upgrade to 5,000 watts while the Kansas City Star’s application to take its station to equal power was denied, the newspaper launched an exposé of Brinkley’s medical franchise. Their investigation was buttressed by the ongoing public accusations of medical quackery against Brinkley made by Dr. Morris Fishbein, head of the AMA, which was beginning its successful drive for the professionalization of the practice of medicine. Soon the FRC reversed its previously tolerant stance, and in late 1929 revoked Brinkley’s license, charging that he was in fact operating a point-to-point service for commercial purposes and not a proper broadcasting station in the public interest.

(which Brinkley reviled on air as the “Amateur Meatcutters’ Association”).

This was only one small part of the pitch made over radio station KFKB (for Kansas Folks Know Best, “The Sunshine Station in the Heart of the Nation”) by John Romulus Brinkley, “M.D., Ph.D., M.C., LL.D., D.P.H., Sc.D.; Lieutenant, U.S. Naval Reserves; member, National Geographic Society.” Though most of these degrees and distinctions had been achieved at less than distinguished institutions (such as the Bennett Eclectic Medical School in Chicago) or through outright purchase, Brinkley had by the early 1920s built up a considerable practice centered around his miracle cure for “male trouble”: the implantation of goat glands from special Toggenburg goats (known otherwise for their wool, but this was not what interested Brinkley) into the testicles of patients experiencing such symptoms as “No pep. A flat tire.” Brinkley’s hospital adjoined a flourishing stock farm so that, as historians Gene Fowler and Bill Crawford describe, “transplant recipients could stroll among the frisky bucks and take their choice” (Fowler and Crawford 1987, 17).

You men, why are you holding back? You know you’re sick, you know your prostate’s infected and diseased.… Well, why do you hold back? Why do you twist and squirm around the old cocklebur … when I am offering you these low rates, this easy work, this lifetime-guarantee-of-service plan? Come at once to the Brinkley Hospital before it is everlastingly too late. (Fowler and Crawford 1987)

As historians Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob point out in their book, Telling the Truth About History, an important aspect of the developing discipline of history in the United States and Europe—what the authors call “scientific history”—was its concern with demonstrating and justifying the spread of Western knowledge and democratic nationalism. This nationalism is the defining focus of most history as we know it, as nationalism has been one of the prime motivating factors in the past events of the last two centuries. But, defining nation does not just mean fighting wars, instituting governments, and defending our borders against foreign encroachments; it also means shaping a notion of who we are and who we are not, of giving ourselves an identity as a nation apart from all others (Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob 1994).

Only in the United States was broadcasting permitted to be funded by private, commercial corporations through the sale of advertising time. Most other countries thought that was a crazy idea—just asking for social disorder and squandering a valuable national resource. But we did it our way.

It was also a result of the deep-rooted American reluctance to let the federal government make too many of our important decisions for us—and our equally strange willingness to let major corporations take on that role instead.

Other nations began in the 1960s to import American programs and today routinely watch news on CNN, reruns of Friends, the latest episode of CSI or Glee. They are learning much about our culture (much of it misleading); we are woefully ignorant of theirs. When’s the last time many of us saw a sitcom from Singapore, a soap opera from Mexico, a news report from Russia, a police drama from France? American television networks and producers tent to produce U.S. adaptations of foreign programs, under the assumption that Americans won't like the originals.

In contrast, unless you or your parents speak a language besides English, you have probably never experienced (except by flipping through them on cable) the large and growing world of media produced around the world and beamed into the US via satellite and distributed over the Internet or on DVD.

Even though some events can be proved to have happened, if they are not repeated in the right places, or worse, if they are overlooked or omitted by powerful histories, they can be silenced out of existence. Trouillot uses the example of the successful revolution in Haiti in the 1790s that brought former slaves to power and established an independent black-governed state. The story of Haiti’s revolution was downplayed or written out of accepted Western history by white American and European writers unable to face the contradiction between treasured democratic ideals and the kind of race-based thinking that allowed and justified enslavement.

The past is such an infinitely immense body of events that our consciousness could never encompass it all; the past is infinitely variable, depending on the perceptions of each discrete participant or observer. The past cannot be directly experienced, but only hinted at through what Jenkins calls traces of the past— documents, records, memories passed on through verbal or visual means, monuments, artifacts, or television shows. Some traces are more closely connected to the past than others (the courtroom transcript of a trial, say, rather than a news story or a docudrama about it); some we call reliable whereas others are flawed (but why?); all must go through a process of interpretation and validation to mean anything.

The English language uses the same word, history, to denote both “the past” (all those events that occurred sometime before the present moment) and “historiography” (writings about the past). They are not the same, and Keith Jenkins in Re-Thinking History suggests that we break apart the two terms to arrive at the equation given at the beginning of this section: History (our understanding of what happened in the past) consists inseparably of both the past and historiography (K. Jenkins 1991).

As sociologist Stephanie Coontz wryly puts it, “Contrary to popular opinion, Leave It to Beaver was not a documentary” (Coontz 1992, 29).

By featuring families such as these—and only families such as these, excluding working-class, non-white, and non-traditional families—such programs seemed to claim that this was how Americans just naturally were. (If not, something was wrong with them.)

These three trends were closely tied to the emergent business of the television broadcast networks, as they promoted TV set sales to suburban homeowners, aired shows sponsored by the manufacturers of home appliances and other consumer goods, and increasingly used market research to match up audiences, products, and appropriate programming.

These families lived for the most part in a substantial suburban single-family home, with a yard and trees and neighborhood schools that the kids could walk to. Their kitchens contained the most modern appliances; they dressed well, owned at least one car, and entertained regularly. They ate meals together, served by Mom (unless there was a maid, usually depicted as an African American woman, as in Beulah or Make Room for Daddy). Not only were all the families affluent and mysteriously non-ethnic, so was everyone else in their neighborhood and social circle.

(you could have a family of all sons but never all daughters).

Conservative leaders in the early nineties like Newt Gingrich, Pat Robertson, and Governor Kirk Fordice of Mississippi invoked a 1950s vision of the “safe streets, strong families, and prosperous communities of yesteryear,” and others recalled the era as a time in which “things were better” and “the country was moving in the right direction” (Rosenbaum 1994). “Strong families” meant heterosexual, nuclear units with a dad who worked, a mom who stayed home and looked after the house, and good clean kids who respected their parents. “Things were better” because the government stayed out of people’s private lives, and families were self-sufficient and right-thinking.

For instance, one popular way of explaining the domestic sitcoms of the 1950s and 1960s is that they simply reflected the reality of people’s lives during that conservative, family-oriented, rather dull period of history. As postwar baby boom families purchased TV sets for their new suburban living rooms, naturally they wanted to see people just like them on TV.

Are we ever influenced in our thinking without our conscious knowledge, persuaded of the fact of something without being totally aware of it? Yes, or advertising wouldn’t be as effective as it is!

Yet, we the audience are not powerless in this media megalith. Every day we pick and choose among a variety of programs, messages, and meanings available to us. We understand media texts depending on our own knowledge, values, and experiences. We accept the truth of some messages and reject others. Of course, the power to make meaning out of texts is not necessarily equal: Analogous to the author/reader situation, the producer of a text makes the initial plays while the audience has a harder time being heard.

believe that the best way to understand how broadcast media work in our society is to look at them as conduits for social and cultural power. This includes the power to create understandings about the world and the people who live in it, the power to direct our attention toward some things and away from others, the power to influence how we see ourselves and our potential in life, the power to ensure that certain kinds of things get said over and over, while others remain silent, on the margins, without a voice.

I don’t pretend that our role is equal; as the author, I have obviously set the ground rules and laid out the field of play. And I won’t deny—as you may not either—that who I am as a person plays an important role in the choices I have made: As a white, middle-class, midwestern American woman born in the mid-1950s, my interpretation of events comes along with not only a set of overt theoretical beliefs, which I can and will highlight and discuss, but with a set of assumptions and biases of which I am not always aware.

However, it is not the selection and privileging process that is at fault here—no book can be written, no story told without it—but rather the denial that such a process exists, and most of all the corresponding erasure of the role of you, the reader. Are you just a passive recipient of the “true facts” about the history being told? Does history happen without you, or do you play a role in deciding what history is?

Then television would have a billion histories—as many histories as there are viewers to experience it. Where could we possibly begin such a history? How could we draw lines around it sufficient to contain it within the covers of a single book?

You may have picked up this book because it is part of a course on the history of broadcasting, or because you are interested in reading an overview of radio and television’s impact on twentieth-century culture, or because you have an interest, personal or professional, in the media and like to keep up with books in this field.

as one thing is gained, another might very well be lost

The novel is also a meditation on the changes that twentieth-century culture and “progress” are making on traditional ways of life, how a shift in one direction can cut off another, and how each “improvement” comes along with possibilities for ruin.

Henry Wilcox here stands for the inequities and blind spots of a whole way of life in early twentieth-century England, a time during which change took place so rapidly that people’s values, beliefs, and perceptions could barely keep up.

the process of making connections—between actions and their outcomes, between rich and poor, between the past and the present—creates all manner of problems for the characters.

It’s about the intersecting lives of three families in Edwardian England—the romantic, liberal Schlegels; the wealthy, conservative Wilcoxes; and the poor, struggling Basts—who meet by chance and who, through a series of accidents and misunderstandings, find their lives forever altered.