Republic on the Wire: Cable Television, Pluralism, and the Politics of New Technologies, 1948-1984 9780813585321

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Republic on the Wire

Republic on the Wire Cable Television, Pluralism, and the Politics of New Technologies, 1948–­1984

J O H N M CM U R R I A

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW BRUNSWICK, NEW JERSEY, AND LONDON

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­P ublication Data Names: McMurria, John, 1963–­author. Title: Republic on the wire : cable television, pluralism, and the politics of new technologies, 1948–­1984 / John McMurria. Description: New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016015543| ISBN 9780813585307 (hardback) | ISBN 9780813585291 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780813585314 (e-­book (epub)) | ISBN 9780813585321 (e-­book (Web PDF)) Subjects: LCSH: Cable television—­United States—­History. | Broadcasting—­United States—­History. | Television broadcasting—­United States—­ History. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Media Studies. | TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING / Telecommunications. | HISTORY / United States / 20th Century. Classification: LCC HE8700.72.U6 M46 2017 | DDC 384.55/50973—­dc23 LC record available at https://​lccn​.loc​.gov/​2016015543 A British Cataloging-­in-­P ublication record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2017 by John McMurria All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. www.rutgersuniversitypress.org Manufactured in the United States of America

For my mother, Marion, Lytle, Miller, Lori, Fergus, and Doug and In loving memory of my father, my sister Ann, and my brother David

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: American Pluralism, Television Policy, and the Method of Equality 1

Broadcast Policy, Television Spectrum, and the Pluralist Logics of Inequality

2

1

34

Contesting (In)Equality at the Margins of Television Reception

62

3

Pay-­TV Orders

87

4

Local Origination, Public Access, and the Hierarchical Logics of Civic Culture

5

Blue Skies, Black Cultures

111 137

Epilogue: Neutrality, Connectivity, or Equality When Media Converge Notes

191

Select Bibliography

223

Index

237

170

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wrote this book within supportive communities of mentors, colleagues, co-­ workers, archivists, friends, and family. I am especially indebted to Toby Miller. Since taking his graduate course on cultural studies many years ago, he has inspired and supported me in my academic and life pursuits. His unwavering political commitments to thinking about the complexities of power and subjectivity continually remind me of the value of academic labor. While I was a graduate student, his invitation to join him and others on a collaborative writing project taught me how to write for publication and opened up academic opportunities. Since then he has continued to offer sage advice and warm friendship. In addition, I thank David Nasaw for teaching me the political significance of cultural history. Anna McCarthy taught me the value of conceptual clarity in rendering cultural history politically relevant for understanding the past and intervening in the present. Tom Streeter inspired me to think about how ideas mattered in understanding the history of media policy. And Rick Maxwell’s political economy perspective reminded me to never lose sight of the forest through the trees. I have benefited from supportive communities at three universities. As I first began to develop this project as a graduate student at New York University, the faculty in the Department of Cinema Studies guided my academic pursuits. A core group of fellow graduate students sustained me through the challenges and continued to encourage me as scholars and friends ever since: Ryan DeRosa, Nitin Govil, Shawn Shimpach, Gretchen Skogerson, and Michael Spear. While a faculty member at DePaul University I received support for my research from two Research Council Paid Leave Fellowships, a Competitive Faculty Research Grant, and a Faculty Research and Development Summer Research Grant. The camaraderie among Department of Communications faculty made my four years there a joy and the interdisciplinary engagements academically stimulating. I would like to thank Department Chair Barbara Speicher and Dean Jackie Taylor for mentoring my professional development.

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The University of California San Diego has supported my research through two Hellman Fellowships, an Academic Career Development Grant, and research and travel grants from the Academic Senate Committee on Research. The shared commitment to interdisciplinary critical approaches to communication among the Department of Communication’s faculty and graduate students has stretched and enriched my thinking about questions of culture, politics, and history. I thank Department Chairs Dan Hallin, David Serlin, and Val Hartouni for providing course releases and moderate committee work to give me time to complete the manuscript. I also thank Fernando Dominguez Rubio, Lilly Irani, and Christo Sims for hosting an informal discussion of my manuscript and for the faculty and graduate students in attendance who provided insightful feedback. The department graduate students, many of whom are now colleagues in the field, have helped me work through ideas central to this project, including Matt Dewey, Hannah Dick, Alex Dubee, Jahmese Fort, Reece Peck, and Pawan Singh. Working with the department’s professional and friendly staff has been a pleasure. In supporting my research pursuits I would like to thank Judy Wertin, Liz Floyd, Cindy Syacina, Gayle Aruta, and Renee Thomas in the Department of Communications, and Michelle Null in the Office of the Academic Senate. I am particularly grateful for the frequent early morning conversations with Angela Velazquez, who not only enlivened my days, but reminded me that the ivory tower is continuously a site of labor dispute. I am indebted to those who have generously given verbal and written feedback at various stages of my project. I thank Michael Curtin, Michele Hilmes, Mary Beltrán, and the attending graduate students for their valuable feedback during a talk in the Department of Communication Arts at University of Wisconsin, Madison. I thank Sarah Banet-­Weiser, Cynthia Chris, and Anthony Freitas for their sharp editorial guidance of my work on pay-­TV. I thank Nitin Govil for his sharp feedback on an early chapter and for his unconditional moral support since we were graduate students. I am grateful to Robert Horwitz for spending his Sundays reading several chapter drafts and offering his valuable comments regarding clarity of writing and argument. Henry Jenkins and Karen Tongson offered insightful comments and encouragement at an important stage in the publishing process. I also thank the anonymous reviewers at Rutgers University Press for their helpful suggestions about organization and flow of argument. A special thank you goes to Jennifer Holt for her sharp advice about broadening the book’s scope and intervention as I readied it for publication. The staff and archivists at a number of institutions have offered research guidance, expertise, and an enthusiasm for searching the past. Thank you to all those who helped me locate documents at the Dayton Public Library; the Chicago Municipal Reference Library; the Chicago History Museum; the City Archives’ Historical Records Program at the Los Angeles City Clerk’s Office; the

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National Archives in College Park, Maryland; the New York Public Library’s Performing Arts collection and Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; the Rand Corporation; the Wisconsin Historical Society; and the UCLA Arts Library. A special thanks to Lisa Wood at the Ohio Historical Society; to Norwood Kerr for his research assistance at the State of Alabama Department of Archives and History; to Tara Craig at the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library; to Christine Bruzzese at the New York City Department of Records and Information Services; to my researcher, Doris Kinney, who sifted through documents at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library with guidance from Kirsten Carter; to Shehla Khawaja, Lisa Backman, and Brian Kenny at The Cable Center; and Steve McShane at the Calumet Regional Archives, Anderson Library, Indiana University Northwest. Additional thanks goes to Brian Kenny and Steve McShane for locating and clearing photographs for publication. I would like to thank a number of advisors, colleagues, and friends who have supported my academic pursuits over the years including: Richard Allen, Luisela Alvaray, Jay Beck, Marshall Berman, William Boddy, Lisa Cartwright, Mari Castañeda, Steven Classen, Nick Couldry, Matt Fee, Des Freedman, Elfriede Fursich, Michael Gillespie, Elena Gorfinkel, Jonathan Gray, Roger Hallas, Brent Hartinger, Devorah Heitner, Liz Horn, Mark Jancovich, Michael Jensen, Jen Light, Ranjani Mazumdar, Vicki Mayer, John McGuire, Lisa Parks, Roopali Mukherjee, Allison McCracken, Denise McKenna, Heather McMillan, Laurie Ouellette, Auguta Palmer, Allison Perlman, Alisa Perren, Francis Fox Piven, Barbara Popovic, Alessandra Raengo, Jeanette Richards, Ken Rogers, Jessica Scarlata, Bob Sklar, Robert Stam, Louisa Stein, Chris Straayer, Dee Tudor, Silvio Waisbord, Barbara Wilinsky, Federico Windhausen, and George Yúdice. A special thanks to Kimberly Norton, Crystal Green, and Ann Massion for creating productive spaces for maintaining a healthy perspective on work and life. I thank the editorial and production team at Rutgers University Press for their cordiality and professionalism, including Lisa Boyajian, Marilyn Campbell, Evie Duvert, Carrie Hudak, and Victoria Verhowsky. I am especially grateful to my editor Leslie Mitchner for her enthusiasm, sharp editorial insights, and expediency in shepherding the book through the review and production process. I also thank my copy editor, Maria Siano, for her meticulous review and smart suggestions for sharpening the writing. Thanks to Nancy Gerth for her thorough and expert work on the book’s index. And a special thanks to the inspirational gay-­rights activist Dan Sherbo for his permission to use his elegant and politically searing artwork for the book’s cover. None of this would be possible without the loving support of my family. My mom, Bev, taught me to persevere through good times and bad and never give up. My dad, Al, modeled the value of empathy and humor in life. Their unconditional, loving support provided the foundation for all I have accomplished. My

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siblings, Ann, David, and Lori, and my sisters’ partners, Fergus and Doug, have always been there for me. I also want to thank my supportive father-­in-­law, Melford A. Wilson. My amazing kids, Lytle and Miller, remind me every day that the most important things in life do not happen at the office. And I can now happily respond to their incessant question: yes, Daddy is finally done with his book. Above all, I am most thankful for having my partner, Marion, in my life. As a gifted writer she has been my trusted editorial confidant throughout the writing process—­reading every word and offering her insights about readability, expressivity, and flow of argument. I have learned from her that love means knowing when to offer critical feedback and when to extend a supportive hug. She has taken on my share of the load of managing our home and kids over extended periods of time when I was deep into the writing, a debt that I am only beginning to repay. Thank you, my rock, my partner in parenting, my inspiration, my best friend, and the love of my life.

The select bibliography includes all cited sources except newspaper articles and unpublished archival documents.

Republic on the Wire

Introduction American Pluralism, Television Policy, and the Method of Equality

In 1955 the former soap opera scriptwriter and Cincinnati Post radio and television columnist Mary Wood asked her readers what they thought about a proposal to bring “pay-­as-­you-­see TV” to the area. From the over two thousand readers who responded, Wood concluded that “Greater Cincinnati viewers are overwhelmingly against” this method of distributing television that required viewers to pay between twenty-­five cents and two dollars for programs including, as the pay-­ TV proposal promised, “current motion pictures, dramatic and musical stage shows, educational and cultural programs, sporting events, operas, Broadway hits, programs to specialized groups only—­technical, medical programs, etc.—­not designed for general public consumption.” Wood submitted these survey findings, including a sampling of comments from her readers, to a 1956 U.S. Senate committee hearing on pay-­TV. Ida B. Erb, one of those readers, wrote that “many a time I read in your column that TV was the best thing since running water and how you wished everyone had a set.” Erb felt the same way, writing that TV “is a source of constant joy to me.” But she was concerned “about the poor (and there are thousands and thousands of us) who could not afford to pay” and concluded, “Let’s keep TV free and all of us help to make it better.”1 The prominent behavioral social scientist Paul Lazarsfeld, whose research contributed to, and epitomized, the more official discourse on questions of broadcasting and the public interest, had a different perspective about the cultural value of radio and television broadcasting and who was qualified to participate in making it better. In his analysis of a 1945 national survey “to ascertain where radio stands with the public,” Lazarsfeld believed that commercial broadcasters were “called upon to compromise between” two “forces.” One

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force was the advertisers who “want to promote programs which conform to the understanding and taste of the larger and less educated sectors of the population.” The other force included “the critic” who “wants a more sophisticated radio” for reasons including “that in his profession he has developed certain standards of taste which he is eager to see disseminated,” and persons in “the upper strata who merely want to have radio more to their own listening tastes.” Though Lazarsfeld interpreted the survey to reveal that “the large majority of the people in this country are pleased with radio as it is,” including the advertising, he argued that because a minority of college-­educated viewers and social scientists like himself remained less satisfied with radio, he concluded that “in cultural matters the experts who see a problem in its broader contexts should get a preferential hearing.” This privileging of the perspectives and tastes of the formally educated few over the less formally educated many did not conflict with American democracy’s “belief in the common man,” Lazarsfeld continued, because the “American tradition” of “checks and balances . . . was developed precisely to meet such conflicts.”2 This understanding that the tradition of American democracy required that experts keep the common man in check continued to influence Lazarsfeld’s assessment of television’s first decade of rapid expansion. At a Federal Communication Commission (FCC) hearing in 1959 he recommended that “a more realistic balance” in broadcast regulation should be “derived from empirical social research and common-­sense thinking about people in modern society.” This empirical research and common-­sense thinking “must somehow be built into the American system of television” to “make standards of judgment relatively objective,” such as creating “a standards committee composed of artists, psychologists, and research technicians” to guide FCC decision-­making. This empirical standard would keep in check such imbalances as those found in the daytime soap opera where “it was usually the men who created the problems and the women who found the solution,” because, as Lazarsfeld told the attending members of the commission, “most of us will agree that it is not a good idea in the long run to expose women to such a one-­sided picture of the family.” In his view, exposing women and the less educated to a more balanced television culture required that the empirical sciences move away from finding out what people liked to watch on television to finding out how “enforced exposure” to “more sophisticated” programs of “good taste” could stimulate a “desire for information and self-­improvement.”3 Lazarsfeld recognized, however, that investing government and a panel of experts with the authority to regulate commercial broadcasting created an American “dilemma” that must “reconcile the First Amendment with the fact that the communications industry is affected by public interests.”4 But for Ida B. Erb, the Cincinnati viewer cited earlier, the fact that television had a

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public interest purpose was not a dilemma that needed to be reconciled with the First Amendment. More profoundly, she wrote that the public interest was something that everyone should participate in defining, not just experts or those who can afford to pay for programming. This book considers this question of qualification to participate in defining the public interest in cable television from 1948, when community antennas and coaxial cables first extended the signal reach of broadcast television into remote areas, through 1984, when Congress passed the first federal cable television legislation. During these years when cable television developed concurrently with broadcast television, the material differences between the two forms of television transmission—­as a wired not wireless transmission technology, as a pay service rather than “free” over-­the-­air, and, since the late 1960s, as a communications conduit with greater capacity to deliver more channels and two-­way interactivity—­provoked contestations over the existing and potential value of television in American life, and over who was qualified to make such determinations. Confronting this more fundamental dispute about qualification to participate in determining the public interest in broadcast and cable television’s concurrent development requires asking different questions about television policy and history. Cable television histories have asked how policy and industry actions have either facilitated or inhibited what Patrick Parsons calls “the progressive evolution of the technology and industry” or what Megan Mullen poses as the “revolution or evolution” of “cable programming.”5 Instead of depicting cable history and policy as the fits and starts of a progressive evolution, I pose the following questions: How were the hierarchical judgments of Lazarsfeld about people’s unequal capacity to participate in defining the public interest—­ judgments that were prevalent among social scientists, federal administrators, lawmakers, and many television reformers—­rationalized as “democratic” within policymaking contexts? How were these perceptions legitimated with reference to taste and aesthetic judgment? How can we recuperate the significance of statements that claimed the equality of everyone to participate in questions of public interest, including Ida B. Erb’s, despite their marginalization in official decision-­making and in policy histories? This book’s central premise is that posing these questions about qualification to participate in defining the public interest requires situating cable television history and policy within the contexts of American pluralism, a widely circulating understanding of democracy in the United States from the 1940s through the early 1970s. Pluralism constituted a new theory of American democracy that began not with foundational principles about equality but with empirical methods to describe the political process. Drawing from social and behavioral science studies, pluralism posited that the political process largely

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comprised a competition for political power and influence among elected officials and interest group leaders representing religious, industry, labor, and civic organizations. Though most citizens were relatively inactive in the political process, according to pluralism, their group affiliations kept them in touch with the more active political leaders and in consensus with the legitimate governmental process. Within the contexts of the rise of communism and fascism, and within assumptions that the United States constituted the world’s most democratic society, American pluralism as a theory of democracy considered these relational dynamics between interest group leaders and their members to create both stability against threats to the American governmental system and adaptability to ever-­changing political interests.6 Revisionist histories have critiqued these depictions of the political process in the United States as open to a plurality of interests. In his study of the workers who took part in the most widespread strikes in U.S. history during the 1940s, George Lipsitz writes how the institutionalized relationships among political leaders, including union bosses, worked against the demands of workers and left them with little influence on working conditions. He writes how women and people of color were particularly marginalized within the interest group system where increasingly large corporations forged agreements with union leaders to create a governing consensus around commitments to corporate growth.7 Indeed, histories of historically marginalized groups often locate democratic politics outside of interest group relations because these disenfranchised groups have been marginalized in the formal governing process, as Robin Kelley has eloquently written regarding Black working-­class culture and politics.8 Extending these persuasive critiques, I consider how the behavioral science studies that informed pluralist understandings of democracy constituted hierarchical classifications of persons that rationalized the disenfranchisement of wage earners, women, and people of color in the formal and informal political process. As a theory that questioned understandings of democracy as the rule of the people as equals, pluralist social science classified personality characteristics, lifestyles, dispositions, and occupational status as significant indicators of qualification for political participation.

Behavioral Science, Group Relations, and the Conceptual Foundations of American Pluralism In the early twentieth century, behavioral scientists began to question what they called the democratic “dogma” that all “men” were created equal in their capacity to participate in democratic rule.9 An influential proponent, theorist, and institution builder for this behavioral approach to American democracy was Charles Merriam who advocated for a “new politics” that could respond

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to rapid changes in modern society including industrialization, mass communication, human migration, and urbanization. Though he believed these changes, and the scientific revolution that made them possible, represented societal progress, he feared that they created new instabilities that could not be contained through the system of checks and balances of American constitutional democracy. The new politics, Merriam argued in 1925, required new methods that would “apply the categories of science to the vastly important forces of social and political control.” This included replacing classical liberalism’s natural law philosophy that began with a conception of man as equal in a state of nature and a conception of the state as limited to protecting man’s natural liberty. A “science of politics,” Merriam elaborated, conceived of human nature as a biological organism capable of adapting to environmental change and required an enhanced “purpose” for “government . . . in the organization of human intelligence, in appreciation, in scientific adjustments of individuals and groups through the agencies of education, eugenics, psychology, biology.”10 Merriam worked across disciplines in higher education, in government, and with private philanthropic foundations to institutionalize this new science of politics. This included founding the Chicago School of political science, co-­ founding the Social Science Research Council to coordinate and fund behavioral research, and serving as one of five members of Roosevelt’s New Deal planning board for its duration from 1933 to 1943.11 Of particular importance to the new science of politics were the methodological techniques of behavioral psychology, which, Merriam argued, made possible the “objective measurement” of “human traits and behavior . . . and the special conditions under which differentials in these traits are produced.” Once the attributes of these traits could be differentiated, and their sources, whether of “inheritance” or “environment,” could be understood, politics would no longer consist of the “rationalizations of groups in power or seeking power—­the special pleadings of races, religions, classes in behalf of their special situation,” but of the “modern intelligence” of social science. In this line of thinking, in particular need of guidance were the immigrant working-­class communities that had given power to urban “bosses,” a power that could be dismantled “through understanding of the habits, dispositions, wishes, and tendencies of the urban population, of how their traits are developed and how they are and may be modified, educated, trained, and fitted into institutions and organizations of government.”12 Regarding future immigration, the science of eugenics promised “to predetermine in considerable measure the types of person desired in the commonwealth of the future, negatively at first by forbidding certain unions,” a nativist rationale for the race and ethnic exclusions that were written into immigration statutes in the early 1920s.13 In the 1930s and 1940s Merriam believed that these scientific methods could guide “civic education”

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through encouraging citizens to accept these objective methods of thinking to understand the complex forces of a modern, industrialized society, and to adapt to “new situations requiring modifications of attitudes and behavior” in a “universal” process of “acculturation.”14 Merriam’s science of politics that sought to guide citizens to adapt their behavior to the rapidly changing conditions of industrial society, which included civic training to alleviate the habits and traits identified with non-­white and ethnic working-­class difference, were further institutionalized by his students. His most influential student, Harold Lasswell, is considered by many to be one of the most influential political scientists of the 1930s and 1940s. Lasswell drew from behavioral and Freudian psychology to study “personality” in politics and concluded that because irrational “primitive motives” in childhood motivate political action, the individual, in contrast to classical liberal conceptions of American democracy, “is a poor judge of his own interests.” Therefore, discussion among citizens does not promote democratic self-­rule but rather “often leads to modifications in social practice which complicate social problems.” Because “political movements derive their vitality from the displacement of private affects upon public objects,” imposing “fictitious values” into politics, Lasswell called for social science to guide a “politics of prevention” through relaying “the truth about the conditions of harmonious human relationships” to government administrators to “reduce the level of strain and maladaptation in society.” According to Lasswell, this “politics of prevention” entailed containing “political agitators” and taming the “political convictions” of those including the socialist who desired the attention of the “fickle masses,” the religious revivalist, the newspaper editor who “responded quickly to the appeals of the underdog and revealed injustices wherever he found them” earning “great popularity among minority racial and national groups,” the “litigious paranoid” attorney who championed the “causes of the poor,” and the “forceful, ambitious, and aggressive” woman who advocated for the “complete equality of the sexes.”15 These perceptions that the “masses,” including the poor, racial minorities, and women, were susceptible to destabilizing political persuasion were shared by Harvard political scientist Pendleton Herring. In his The Politics of Democracy, first published in 1940, he depicted the populist orators William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, and Father Charles Coughlin as “rabble-­rousers” who appealed to “the great mental lowlands of the nation” through offering them the “hocus-­ pocus” they demand. Yet within the period’s “growing industrialism and rapid change,” Herring found that such populist appeals were tempered by “politically effective power-­units” he called “interest groups.” According to Herring, such interest groups including “great industrial organizations, labor unions, professional associations, and the like . . . actually govern the lives of their members

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much more intimately than do many official regulatory agencies of control.” This governing process entailed group leaders initiating discussions with their members to facilitate compromise and moderation including, for example, “accepting labor as an emerging interest without disruptive effect.” In recognizing the political authority that group leaders held in facilitating “the roots of consent” over their group members, Herring acknowledged the existence of a “paradox of political inequality and democratic equality.” Yet because he was invested in identifying the hierarchical social relations that maintained political stability instead of questioning a political process that propagated democratic inequality, such a paradox was of little concern “so long as through our governmental machinery we can get for all citizens that minimum of substance and security which will keep them content with the imperfect world within which they find themselves.”16 Herring’s legitimating hierarchical social relations as endemic to political stability found further elaboration in David Truman’s highly influential book, The Governmental Process, which—­in at least fifteen printings from 1951 through the 1960s—­established pluralism as the prevailing theory of U.S. democracy. A student of Charles Merriam, Truman drew from Arthur Bentley’s group approach to the political process, first articulated in 1908, to argue that the governmental process in American democracy constituted an ongoing behavioral modifying process of hierarchical social relations within groups. The internal dynamics of group memberships, Truman wrote, “form and guide the attitudes and therefore the behavior of their participants,” with a significant role for the “techniques of leadership that spring from the connection between group cohesion and the conflicting attitudes and affiliations of members.” This behavior-­guiding process among group leaders and their members, particularly within the more “institutionalized groups” of the state (judiciary, legislature, executive), civil society (labor unions, business associations, churches), and the family, function to produce “conformity to the norms of the group” and an “equilibrium among the interactions of the participants.” When there is a “disturbance” to group equilibrium, “the group’s leaders will make an effort to restore the previous balance.”17 Truman’s examples reveal the accepted gender and class privilege that sustained group equilibrium. In “a typical American family,” he observed, “it will be accepted almost unconsciously and without discussion that the male parent will almost always make certain decisions” regarding money and the “mother will make many more decisions affecting the children.” In the case of labor unions, when “a sudden change in the relations (interactions) between management and workers in a factory, initiated by the former, may at first result in gossiping, griping, and picking on scapegoats,” it is the role of labor leaders

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to direct the rank-­and-­file responses toward more “‘constructive’ forms of interaction.” In such a “highly institutionalized” group such as organized labor, “in the course of maintaining cohesion and of perpetuating itself, the active minority can manipulate and exploit such aspects of formal organization” through regulating “the flow of ideas concerning the organization and its policies to members more or less prepared . . . to accept an authoritative view of both,” such as when the union leaders were able to contain rank-­and-­file reaction to the Taft-­Hartley Act of 1947 that prohibited, among other things, the worker-­led wildcat strikes and sympathy boycotts that proliferated the year before.18 Just as Truman rationalized the hierarchical relations within groups as an important mechanism for generating political stability and equilibrium, he also legitimated class, race, and gender barriers to participating in decision-­making within official institutions of the state. The access, influence, and effectiveness of an association on government policy, Truman explained, is greater when “the position of the group or its spokesman” is a member of a “high-­status group,” such as a business leader or bar association member, because “the large proportion of key officials” in legislative, executive, and judicial positions share these high-­status “class backgrounds” with “similar values, manners, and preconceptions.” For the “less privileged classes” who comprise most of the unorganized sectors of society and lack the high-­status manners and values, the “principal governmental leaders” from the three branches of government act as their “leaders” or “guardians,” though their consideration of the less privileged “is normally of a more unconscious character.” As Truman argued, following Bentley, inevitably “in all democracies,” as in “despotism,” the ruling class will at least minimally represent the “ruled class as well,” such as when the “Delta planters in Mississippi” advocated on behalf of their “Negroes.” The most threatening source of political instability, Truman warned, is the potential for the unorganized to form interest groups along class or racial lines, including the “appearance of groups representing Negroes, especially in the South,” because they lack the involvement of high-­status members who participate in other organized interest groups. These “caste and class interpretations of widespread unorganized interests” comprise a potentially “pathogenic politics” that deviates from what Truman referred to as America’s democratic “rules-­of-­the-­ game” or “general ideological consensus.” The mechanism for avoiding such pathogenic politics is for the established interest groups to recognize the interests of unorganized classes and races and incorporate them into the established interest group system. The interest group system, then, operates as a “balance wheel” to prevent instabilities that arise through race or “class interpretations of the ‘rules of the game.’” An important component of this balance wheel is the “educated elite” who comprise “an element of dynamic stability within the pluralist system.”19

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In elaborating the value of these educated leaders to the stability of American democracy, the highly influential political scientist Robert Dahl developed a theory he called “polyarchal democracy” to describe how educated leaders competed with one another for political influence—­a process he called “minorities rule.” In A Preface to Democratic Theory, first published in 1956, Dahl agreed with James Madison, paraphrasing that “democracy is an effort to bring off a compromise between the power of majorities and the power of minorities, between the political equality of all adult citizens on the one side, and the desire to limit their sovereignty on the other.” But Dahl disagreed that the constitutional separation of powers fully explained why this balance had been maintained in the United States because it “underestimates the importance of the inherent social checks and balances existing in every pluralistic society.” Drawing from social science research on the political process, Dahl elaborated the function of these social checks and balances:20 We now know that members of the ignorant and unpropertied masses which Madison and his colleagues so much feared are considerably less active politically than the educated and well-­to-­do. By their propensity for political passivity the poor and uneducated disfranchise themselves. Since they also have less access than the wealthy to the organizational, financial, and propaganda resources that weigh so heavily in campaigns, elections, legislative, and executive decisions, anything like equal control over government policy is triply barred to the members of Madison’s unpropertied masses. They are barred by their relatively greater inactivity, by their relatively limited access to resources, and by Madison’s nicely contrived system of constitutional checks.21

With the unpropertied masses in social check, the concern was no longer whether a majority will “act in a tyrannical way through democratic procedures to impose its will” on a minority. “The more relevant question,” Dahl posed, “is the extent to which various minorities in a society will frustrate the ambitions of one another with the passive acquiescence or indifference of a majority of adults or voters.” These active minorities typically have higher incomes, education, and status because, as Dhal wrote, “we know that political activity, at least in the United States, is positively associated to a significant extent with such variables as income, socioeconomic status, and education.”22 The stability of this system of social checks and balances rests on establishing a “consensus” around a set of “norms” for conducting elections for political office and for guiding political participation between elections. These norms include allowing citizens to choose any candidate, that the majority vote-­getter wins, and that voters respect the outcome of elections to allow elected officials to rule. Building consensus on these norms requires “total social training in all

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the norms” that occurs through the relational dynamics between the politically active and their members in “polyarchal organizations and perhaps on members of many hierarchical organizations as well.”23 To further examine how these “social checks and balances” operated in American society, Dahl conducted an empirical study of “democracy and power” in New Haven, Connecticut, that was first published in 1961. He wrote that his findings confirmed his minorities rule thesis that in “virtually all pluralistic systems and liberal societies” is a “small band of professionals within the political stratum” who are more likely to agree on “democratic norms” and the “rules of the game” than the broader population because they learned through formal education “what is expected in the way of words, beliefs, and behavior if they are to earn acceptance as Americans.” These educated professionals would “see to it that new citizens, young and old, have been properly trained in ‘American’ principles and beliefs” to promote the “voluntary political and cultural assimilation and speedy elimination of regional, ethnic, and cultural dissimilarities.”24 Dahl found that this assimilation process within the pluralistic system created pathways for the “ex-­plebes” in New Haven who rose “out of the working-­ class or lower middle-­ class families of immigrant origins” to enter into the political stratum. Their success, Dahl argued, depended on shedding their working-­class demeanors and ways of life for a middle-­class “disposition” because “political skills are in many respects middle-­class skills” requiring “a calling more akin to that of a white-­collar worker than that of a laborer.” Though none of the fifty leaders with “significant influence” in the governing process and very few of the “sub-­leaders” with influence had “blue-­collar occupations,” this was “explainable,” he argues, because blue-­collar workers could not engage in political activities during their working hours and because of their “low status and the whole style of life that tends to accompany it . . . from speech and dress to occupation and income.”25 Researchers have since revisited New Haven politics in this period and located new empirical evidence that questions Dahl’s research methodology.26 For the purposes of historicizing Dahl’s work as an influential study that contributed to and reflected understandings that the United States comprised a pluralist democracy, its significance is less in its methodological flaws than in accepting the normalization of middle-­class dispositions and ways of life as necessary qualifications for gaining entry into the political stratum. In choosing to describe the governing process comprised of middle-­class and upper middle-­class residents rather than, say, the economic structures that provided no work flexibility to participate in the political process for the 45 percent of New Haven residents who were “wage earners,” Dahl’s empirical study naturalized the cultural authority and privilege of the middle-­and upper-­class political stratum to guide the ethnic working classes in shedding their “cultural

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dissimilarities” as necessary pathways to political participating and acceptance as American citizens. In locating democracy as an empirical study of a governing process that had few women, people of color, or manual laborers participating, pluralist discourses subordinated attention to the political demands for social justice and equality among historically marginalized groups. In their 1963 study of democracy, Stanford University social scientists Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba exemplified this when they argued that understanding democracy required an “orientation to political structure and process” instead of an “orientation to the substance of political demands and outputs.” They claimed that “if elites are to be powerful and make authoritative decisions,” such as they do in the “more successful democracies” of the United States and the United Kingdom, “then the involvement, activity, and influence of the ordinary man must be limited.” The ordinary citizens’ participation is limited in successful democracies because of their low level of education and the “subcultures” of their “parochial” ways of life, making it “irrational to invest in political activity.” This goes for women, about whom the lengthy volume devotes scarcely a dozen pages, and relegates their civic cultural capacity to their role in family socialization. In making no reference to race at all, the study assumed a white normativity for the ideal civic culture.27 To summarize, these mid-­century social science studies that elaborated thinking about American democracy as a pluralist system rationalized the marginalization of women, people of color, and wage earners in the formal and informal governing process. They did so through differentiating participatory qualification along an index of status hierarchies of class, race, and gender privilege. In defining qualification as a style of speaking and way of life of those possessing higher educations and professional occupations, pluralism equated enfranchisement with advancement up the socioeconomic status ladder. For those of low status, their low level of participation helped to maintain the pluralist system’s stability. Breaking from the “dogmatic” principle that democracy entailed the equality of all the people to rule, pluralist democracy prioritized the process through which high-­status leaders built consensus around “democratic norms” including accepting the essential fairness of the American system of government, shedding cultural differences, and accepting that interest groups can and will accommodate everyone’s interests gradually over time. Though American pluralism and its behavioral science foundations prevailed in the early postwar decades it did not go unchallenged by contemporary critics. Sociologist C. Wright Mills published scathing critiques of what he called “romantic pluralism” and its “assumptions of a plurality of independent, relatively equal, and conflicting groups of the balancing society.” Mills believed that a “power elite” who held authoritative decision-­making power in

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large corporations, the higher echelons of the state, and the military shaped the political landscape. Interest group leaders were not equal to compete for power and influence but rather comprised a middle-­level stratum that worked to adapt to the power structures of the power elite. This middle level included “professional politicians,” “pressure groups,” the “new and old upper classes of town and city and region,” the “metropolitan socialite,” and the “professional entertainer.” Mills critiqued the behavioral sciences for their “undue attention to the middle levels of power” of interest group leaders which “obscures the structure of power as a whole.” “Commentators and analysists, in and out of the universities,” Mills elaborates, “focus upon the middle levels and their balances because they are closer to them, being mainly middle-­class themselves: because these levels provide the noisy content of ‘politics’ as an explicit and reported-­upon fact; because such views are in accord with the folklore of the formal model of how democracy works.”28 In addition to critiquing pluralism for not recognizing the power dynamics between the power elite and the middle level group leaders, politicians, and social scientists, Mills critiqued the pluralist assertion that the relational dynamics between group members and their leaders provided a modicum of feedback to keep group leaders accountable to their members. These members who inhabited the “bottom” of the social hierarchy lacked the capacity for independent, rational judgment because the “mass media, especially television, often encroach upon the small-­scale discussion, and destroy the chance for the reasonable and leisurely and human interchange of opinion.” Mass media enacts a “psychological illiteracy” on those who inhabit the bottom, Mills explains, that prevents them from trusting their “own experience . . . until it is confirmed by others or by the media.” Because the “men in the masses are gripped by personal troubles, but they are not aware of their true meaning and source,” they require the “liberally educated, continually to translate troubles into issues and issues into the terms of their human meaning for the individual,” a process, Mills concludes, that has been inhibited as education becomes more focused on job preparation and less on liberal education.29 Mills’s argument that the pluralist behavioral sciences focus on the middle level political stratum of interest group leaders obfuscated the growing power of corporate leaders and marginalized the perceptions of those who lacked professional middle-­class status correlates to the prevailing middle-­level focus of television policy. Regulated by a federal agency of appointed officials and expert staff who often saw their work as balancing the interests of competing industry groups and civic organizations, television policy was largely contained within the often shared perceptions of the middle-­class professionals who participated. However, Mills’s perception that the so-­called masses, who inhabited the bottom level of society, lacked the critical capacity to participate in making rational

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decisions about how to structure common life overlapped with pluralist perceptions. Both expressed concern about the effects of mass media on those who lacked formal higher educations. Mills believed that the masses at the bottom were ill-­equipped to make reasoned judgments about political affairs without the guidance of the liberally educated. Pluralists expressed concerns that mass media might interrupt the processes of interest group leaders assimilating their lower-­status members into the stable, pluralist order. Problematizing pluralism’s middle class normativity and contemporary critiques that positioned the masses as ill-­equipped to participate in making judgments about what constituted the public interest in television requires developing a critical analytic that is attentive to such hierarchical classifications of people and culture and to the moments when the subordinated disputed such classifications. Helpful here is French political theorist Jacques Rancière who conceptualizes democracy as a dispute over such hierarchical classificatory logics. Rancière began writing about democracy in the 1980s against a growing neoliberal consensus that accepted interest group politics and free-­market relations as the triumph of liberal democracy. He sought to recuperate the principle that democracy meant that all persons were equally qualified to participate in determining the conditions of common life and how to live together, irrespective of a person’s education, socioeconomic status, or ways of life. In doing so he developed a “method of equality” to identify the ways in which hierarchical classifications structure societal order and the moments of declassification when those subordinated in this order “verify” their equal capacity to participate in democratic rule.30

The Method of Equality and Democratic Politics Since the literature on television history and policy has not engaged with Rancière, who has received more attention in other disciplines, it is worth tracing the development of his thinking on equality and democracy. Rancière began writing about democracy after a decade of studying and writing about the archives of worker artisans in Paris during the period leading up to the July Revolution of 1830 through the Revolution of 1848. Rancière turned to these worker archives after questioning the scientific Marxism of his mentor, Louis Althusser, who argued that science and the class struggle comprised the revolutionary historical forces that would confront and displace the bourgeois ideologies that dominated the state and the institutions of education, politics, religion, media, communications, and the family. The event that crystalized Rancière’s break from Althusserian Marxism was the widespread protests in 1968 that included students questioning the authoritative legitimacy of educational institutions. When Althusser and the Communist Party condemned the student uprisings

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as a petit-­bourgeois movement, Rancière disagreed, believing that the protests constituted a significant staging of equality. To rethink assumptions about scientific Marxism and the class struggle Rancière spent years in the archives of nineteenth-­century workers.31 Within these archives Rancière did not find the working class expressing class solidarity and antagonism toward the ruling classes, as was the presumption of Marxist thinking. Instead he found workers challenging exploitation through demanding that their bourgeois masters respect them as equals. When the tailors, who sat for hours elbow-­to-­elbow sewing clothing for bourgeois clientele, called a strike in 1833, their demands included the right to smoke tobacco, time on the job to read newspapers, and the requirement that their masters take off their hats upon entering the shop floor. Other examples included workers contemplating the beauty of nature as they gazed out the window while struggling to get through the monotony of the workday and others who wrote poetry and contemplated philosophy in the evenings. Rancière found that in seeing themselves as equals to their bourgeois masters, these workers disputed the classifications that placed manual laborers as inferior intellectual beings who lacked the higher reasoning capacity to read, write, philosophize, critique, and aesthetically judge. These claims to equality as declassificatory moments also challenged the conception of workers by Saint-­Simonian socialist leaders who organized to build worker solidarity around the idea of the nobility of work and the Christian fellowship of man.32 Soon after writing about the significance of these moments of declassification in nineteenth-­century France, Rancière began writing about an emerging political climate in France in the late 1980s that constituted a consensus around a new classificatory order.33 In what others have called neoliberalism and what Rancière then called the “pluralist consensus,” Rancière critiqued the growing consensus around market liberalization that required “austerities and cutbacks” to release the “free and apolitical development of production and circulation” and grow the economy through a “new dynamism of enterprise pushing things before it.” For Rancière the consensus meant the “end of politics” where demands for equality had been subsumed within personalized choices in the marketplace and where democracy meant “supplying the disadvantaged with their minimum share of power and well-­being.”34 At the same time Rancière critiqued the discourse of democracy and equality that came from oppositional leaders who accepted “liberal democracy as an irreversible fact” and sought to “recollectivize” the people in a shared solidarity against “selfish individualism and class exploitation.” Following from his work that found nineteenth-­century workers claiming or verifying their equality through declassifications from bourgeois and socialist conceptions of societal order, the “essence of equality,” Rancière wrote, “is in fact not so much to

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unify” around an order of “interest-­adjusting” market forces or “the morality of equality in solidarity,” but “to declassify, to undo the supposed naturalness of orders.”35 As socialists and liberals looked back on ancient Greek democracy with “revolutionary and romantic nostalgias for a beautiful totality of citizenship,” Rancière turned to the Greek classics and found a paradoxical logic that both dispelled this nostalgia and offered a critique of contemporary discourses of democracy.36 In Plato and Aristotle’s writings Rancière identified two paradoxical logics. One logic claimed the superiority of some persons over others in their capacity to participate in democratic rule. As Plato put it in The Republic, justice meant that “each ought to perform one social function for which his nature best suits him.”37 Those whose nature qualified them to rule, Plato elaborated, included the wealthy, the virtuous, and the knowledgeable, while the laboring classes lacked these qualifications because of the manual nature of their work. These qualifications for rule, Rancière writes, were founded on the logos, or reasoned speech, which partitioned the speech of those who were considered to have the capacity to enunciate what is “just” from the speech of others considered to merely signal “pleasure or pain, consent or revolt.” Thus ancient Greek democracy found the non-­laboring classes to possess the reasoning capacity to rule on behalf of the entire community, while the laboring classes lacked these capacities and therefore had no part in ruling. This logic of inequality, which Rancière calls “the police,” a play upon the Greek word polis, is an “order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of the visible and the sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and another as noise.”38 Rancière calls this hierarchical ordering of persons and their forms of speech a “distribution of the sensible,” a distribution that endows some, by way of their occupation and location within the social order, with the capacity to make sense of society at large and how it works, and others who are merely equipped to go about their manual laboring lives.39 Such a distribution of the sensible is evident in American pluralism which legitimated, as Dahl expressed earlier, the political participation of “white-­ collar workers, businessmen, and professionals” and disqualified the political participation of the “unpropertied masses” by way of their “whole style of life . . . from speech and dress to occupation and income.” Alongside this logic of inequality, Rancière locates in Athenian democratic theory a logic of equality, because communities founded upon the qualifications of wealth, virtue, or knowledge for participating in ruling could not be said to be democracies but rather oligarchies, aristocracies, or epistemocracies. Athenian democracy, then, posited the demos, or the “people,” as, in Rancière

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words, “nothing more than the undifferentiated mass of those who have no positive qualification—­no wealth, no virtue—­but who are nonetheless acknowledged to enjoy the same freedom as those who do.”40 The demos, Rancière clarifies, “is not the population, the majority, the political body, or the lower classes. It is the surplus community made up of those who have no qualification to rule, which means at once everybody and anyone at all.”41 Rancière writes that democratic politics occurs at the meeting of these two paradoxical logics of inequality and equality when persons who are assigned subordinate roles in defining the “symbolic space of the community” experience the “wrong” of this hierarchical ordering and assert or “verify” their equal capacity to participate in democratic rule.42 Rancière calls this attention to the meeting of these paradoxical logics a method of equality. This method is both a critical analytic and a political intervention into conceptions of democracy that otherwise reduce it to a form of government or a way of life. Pluralism, for example, identifies democracy as a governmental system of checks and balances and a way of life that is constituted through hierarchical relations within and across groups to establish consensus and stability. Instead, the method of equality identifies the classificatory logics of inequality that inform pluralism and the moments when those subordinated in the hierarchical order dispute these logics of inequality. Because democratic politics constitutes this disagreement over the words and images that signify ways of speaking, doing, and representing, politics for Rancière is an aesthetic affair that calls into question hierarchical order. As Joseph Tanke put it, the aesthetics of politics “consists of forcing an opposing side to acknowledge not only demands for inclusion but also the speech of those making the demands” as equal subjects in defining the terms of common life.43 Lastly, such moments of verifying equality through disputing hierarchical order constitute a process of democratic subjective becoming, which Rancière calls “subjectivation,” that is constituted, not just reflected or expressed, at the moment of the experienced wrong of hierarchical order.44 In the example with which I began this introduction, what prompted Ida B. Erb to declare, “Let’s keep TV free and all of us help to make it better,” was the wrong that pay-­TV not only stratified access to television for those who could not afford to pay for television programs, but also disenfranchised those who could not pay from participating in making television better. She also disputed the “mass culture” discourse of pay-­TV proponents and social scientists, including Lazarsfeld, who prioritized the perspectives of professionals, experts, and the formally educated in determining the public interest. In defending the value of broadcast television, including the soap operas that Lazarsfeld and other social scientists so maligned, Erb disputed the hierarchical logics that informed the mass culture concerns among pluralists and other social commentators. In disputing her subordinated place in this hierarchical order, a place defined by

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her status as a woman, as low income, as non-­professional, and as domestic, Ida B. Erb enacted a moment of democratic politics that entailed, as Rancière describes, “a quarrel concerning the common, that is, concerning what place belongs or does not belong to it and who is able or unable to make enunciations and demonstrations about the common.”45 This book recuperates these moments of quarrel concerning who is qualified to make determinations about the common, or public interest, of television. Congressional testimony from individuals and spokespersons representing rural and low-­income residents, veterans, women, and people of color who were concerned about the stratification of access to television defended their leisure-­time entitlement to access “free” over-­the-­air television whether to relax, engage, critique, learn, laugh, or escape from the pressures or anxieties of living. Television was certainly not free given the significant purchase and maintenance costs of receivers and antennas, nor was it equally accessible for those in lower populated areas with fewer broadcast signals or in mountainous regions where signals were blocked. But for residents who had incorporated listening to broadcast radio and watching broadcast television into their daily lives for years, these over-­the-­air broadcasts had promoted a strong sense of entitlement to have equal access to television and a say in how it is regulated. These entitlement claims often disputed the aesthetic judgments of lawmakers, federal legislators, social scientists, and others who believed “mass culture” threatened democratic order. Against judgments that daytime television lacked public interest value, women’s groups defended their value in opposing pay-­TV. When the FCC acted to protect its commitments to “localism” through banning the “booster antennas” that brought television signals to rural areas, rural residents defended their right to access commercial network broadcast television as a leisure-­time entitlement in these locations that lacked access to other forms of recreation available in larger cities such as professional sports teams, motion pictures, symphony orchestras, and museums. Against official concerns about the superficial or overly violent commercial broadcast programs including quiz shows and crime genres, those defending TV as an entitlement spoke of the educational value of these genres. Recognizing these sentiments of entitlement to free over-­the-­air commercial broadcasting does not mean that those who opposed pay-­TV or who questioned localism rationales were uncritical of commercial broadcasting. Instead I consider them as disputes concerning who was qualified to make determinations about the public interest within prevailing pluralist perceptions about the importance of group leadership and the middle-­class, professional norms that established the terms and interpretive frameworks that informed official policymaking. Additionally, this means questioning the logics of inequality that circulated within the FCC’s push to set aside spectrum for non-­commercial

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educational television stations and congressional support for public broadcasting. Following scholars who have critiqued the elitist sentiments that informed educational television, I elaborate the significance of pluralist hierarchical judgments to the FCC’s television allocations plan, which precipitated the expansion of cable television.46 I give particular attention to the sustained critique of commercial and non-­ commercial broadcasting among African Americans who sought to own cable television systems following the race rebellions in the late 1960s. Civil rights activists and Black investors turned to cable ownership as a means to gain control over Black representation and to develop a significant infrastructure for urban economic development. In doing so they disputed the pluralist diagnoses of congressional and scholarly commissions that believed the “civil disorders” in Black ghettos were the result of community alienation, and that the solution was to enhance intra-­community communications among urban residents and with the mostly white establishment. Such integrationist perspectives elided the economic inequalities and ongoing racial prejudice that fueled the race rebellions and that marked the failure of civil rights legislation to address these inequalities. Civil rights activists and Black cable ownership groups sought ownership in majority Black neighborhoods to ensure that jobs would go to local residents and that subscription revenues would get channeled back into the local economy and fund Black perspectives on television. Some advocates for Black cable ownership even envisioned cable subscribers as partial owners of the cable system. However, this movement for Black ownership would prove nearly impossible as cable deregulations facilitated the growth of large multisystem cable operators, which held much of the financial capital for investing in cable installations and therefore held the leverage to dictate ownership arrangements that marginalized Black investors and residents. The question of why the FCC deregulated cable in the 1970s, thus facilitating the growth of large multisystem operators that inhibited Black cable ownership, is an important one. In his study of media policy in the U.S. and the U.K. Des Freedman argues that the reason for deregulation is that neoliberal norms have displaced pluralist norms for guiding media policy. Though pluralism and neoliberalism share a commitment to facilitating market competition, Freedman explains, “pluralism is the language often adopted by policymakers who speak of the importance of the expression of multiple voices, opinions and outlets in the interests of social stability and consensus.” Alternatively, “[n]eo-­liberalism is a discourse that describes attempts by political and economic actors to roll back barriers to profitability and to inscribe market dynamics in all areas of media activity.” Therefore questions of diversity in neoliberalism are reduced to “simply celebrating choice and recognizing demographic differences” rather than promoting “diverse and antagonistic sources” for all citizens to engage.

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Freedman recognizes the critiques of pluralism in the 1950s and 1960s that found high-­class elites and corporations to set the terms of debate in interest group politics which often failed to address certain issues or take political action on issues important to marginalized populations.47 Though Freedman traces an important shift toward neoliberal rationales in policymaking since the 1970s, in supporting pluralist norms as a means to challenge neoliberal policies he misses the hierarchical logics of pluralism that I have elaborated earlier. Pluralism’s normative commitment to “social stability and consensus” was predicated on assumptions that group processes included middle-­class group leaders mollifying the demands of disenfranchised people and assimilating them into the prevailing middle-­class, white, male norms that defined the consensus rules of the game. In considering pluralism as an “ideal type” for analytical purposes, Freedman obfuscates the historical contexts of pluralism in the behavioral sciences, and how these science studies contributed to classifying people’s capacity to participate in defining questions of public interest.48 The method of equality directs attention away from identifying democratic politics as policies that adhere to normative principles and instead, directs attention toward identifying how these normative principles are themselves sites for propagating and contesting hierarchical order. In doing so we find not just an overlap between pluralist and neoliberal norms regarding the significance of market competition, but how neoliberal rhetoric has come from pluralist concerns that mass television culture, race rebellion, and civic apathy have disrupted pluralist hierarchical relations, consensus, and stability. For example, pay-­TV advocates concerned about the fading status of cultural and political leaders in “mass” television culture, including former New Deal liberals associated with Americans for Democratic Action, spoke of viewer payments as realizing perfect classical economic supply-­and-­ demand dynamics, and even equated viewer payments to democratic ballots. Proponents of interactive broadband cable who believed that cable television could help integrate African Americans into the pluralist order supported deregulations to further advance cable technologies in the open marketplace. The leading supporters for setting aside channels for public, educational, and leased access disagreed with Black civil rights advocates who prioritized cable ownership. Instead, these cable access advocates expressed concern that mass television culture created civic apathy and that public access to cable television could reinvigorate civic participation in urban areas. Cable access leaders partnered with multisystem cable operators who referenced their public access facilities to promote ownership deregulation. Cultural studies approaches to media policy have been more critical of pluralist and other public service rationales for television policy. Indeed, cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall, with his incisive analysis and biting wit, had this

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to say about pluralism in 1982 as the cultural studies movement set out to find new theories and methodologies for understanding culture as a contested site of politics: the democratic enfranchisement of all citizens within political society, and the economic enfranchisement of all consumers within the free-­ enterprise economy, would rapidly be paralleled by the cultural absorption of all groups into the culture of the centre. Pluralism rested on these three mutually reinforcing supports. In its purest form, pluralism assured that no structural barriers or limits of class would obstruct this process of cultural absorption: for, as we all ‘knew’, America was no longer a class society. Nothing prevented the long day’s journey of the American masses to the centre. This must have been very good news to blacks, Hispanics, Chicanos, American Injuns, New York Italians, Boston Irish, Mexican wetbacks, California Japanese, blue-­collar workers, hard-­hats, Bowery bums, Southern poor-­whites and other recalcitrant elements still simmering in the American melting pot. What is more (a comforting thought in the depths of the Cold War) all other societies were well on their way along the ‘modernizing’ continuum. Pluralism thus became, not just a way of defining American particularism, but the model of society as such, written into social science.49

To challenge pluralism’s teleology of enfranchisement through cultural absorption Hall elaborated a developing “critical paradigm” that drew from the work of Marxist cultural theorists of ideology to conceptualize culture, language, and discourse as sites of struggle over meaning and power. According to this work the historically disenfranchised were not awaiting absorption into pluralist order but contesting the class, gender, and racial disenfranchisements of that order. In countering pluralist assumptions about the cultural absorption of the marginalized into the cultural and political center, Hall identified the emerging critical paradigm as conceptualizing the “return of the repressed” to the stage of contestation over culture and politics.50 I consider the method of equality as a developing contribution to locating a return of the repressed to the stage of politics as emerging critical paradigms have tended to focus on the structural limitations to political agency and the prevailing neoliberal rationales that are said to guide citizen conduct. I have found these critical paradigms to be useful for understanding the historical forces that have contributed to constituting circulating logics of inequality and place in dialogue with them the method of equality as a means to recoup the power of democracy as a staging of equality.

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Critical Cultural Policy Studies and the Method of Equality I consider the method of equality to contribute to a productive engagement with four overlapping critical frameworks that have informed the field of critical cultural policy studies. The first comprises Marxist approaches to political economy that critique capitalist modes of media production, circulation, and consumption. The second draws from Pierre Bourdieu to conceptualize cultural taste as a socioeconomic structure that legitimates social inequalities. The third develops Michel Foucault’s work to conceptualize policy as a discursive practice and a governing technology for guiding citizen conduct. And the last, and most undeveloped in media policy studies, are the approaches of Critical Race Theory. Each of these approaches offers a critical analytic that questions classical liberal and neoliberal assumptions about the nature of market competition and the objectivity and neutrality of legal and administrative procedures. Placing them in dialogue with the method of equality prompts questions about their critical analytic value for exposing classificatory logics of inequality and about their problematic assumptions that inscribe hierarchical classifications. This dialogue too emphasizes questions about democracy and its power as a principle of equality, and the ways in which these critical approaches might contribute to expanding and developing the method of equality. Robert McChesney has been the most prominent exponent of critical political economy in the United States. The consistent theme across his prolific writings is that democracy is not possible within the existing “monopoly capitalist” system comprised of “massive corporations, commercial propaganda, political corruption, obscene inequality, poverty, stagnation, militarism, and endless greed.” There is a passion and moral outrage in McChesney’s writings that, while often sweeping in its capitalist invectives, has drawn attention to issues of corporate power and inequality. As an activist scholar he co-­founded the media reform organization Free Press to promote policies that challenge corporate power, even if this requires forming alliances with sympathetic liberals who do not share his Marxist critique of capitalism. Yet it is within his Marxist analysis, and in particular, his acceptance of certain Marxist ontologies, that he situates the working classes as lacking the critical capacity to question capitalist modes of exploitation because capitalist media has an effect on persons that limits their ability to challenge it. Following Marxist cultural analysis from the 1950s through the 1970s, McChesney argues that capitalist media creates a “cultural apparatus” that “cements the workers to the dominant order.” Providing evidence for this were Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy who in their 1966 book Monopoly Capital found that “television and other mass media contributes to a crippling of the individual’s mental and emotional capabilities.”51

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The conceptual basis for this lack of critical capacity comes from the Marxist concept of “contradiction.” As Des Freedman has elaborated, internal to the forces of capitalism are a range of contradictions emanating from the destructive forces of competition that require increasing mechanisms to exploit labor for profit and result in periods of crisis and instability. These contradictions get played out in the consciousness of workers. Following the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, Freedman writes that “there was a battle going on in the minds of ordinary people between what he called ‘common sense,’ ideas generally distilled from the capitalist class, and ‘good sense,’ the formation of a more progressive set of ideas developed in the course of struggling against the class.” Studying media power, Freedman concludes, requires consideration of ownership, policy, technology, and “crucially, the contradictory consciousness of the audience on which the media depend.”52 Here ordinary people possess the critical capacity to contribute to questions of the public interest only to the extent that they attain good sense through class struggle, a sense possessed by the Marxist political economist. Other policy scholars have been critical of the Marxist concept of contradiction. Thomas Streeter did not believe that the contradictions he found in broadcast policy were “surface manifestations of fundamental contradictions festering away in the soul of the system, harbingers of its impending collapse,” as classical Marxism had it. Instead he turned to Michel Foucault’s understanding of contradictions as, in Foucault’s words, “neither appearances to be overcome, nor secret principles to be uncovered [but] objects to be described themselves.” This “discourse theory” seeks to understand how ideas and practices are constituted and take form in relation to each other and how they are put to use in particular domains. The discourse of significance for Streeter was the “intellectual habits characteristic of the professional and managerial classes that did most of the decision making” in broadcast policy. This thinking exhibited corporate liberal habits of thought that sought to reconcile classical liberal beliefs about the neutrality of liberal government to protect the freedom of autonomous individuals with the task of managing social relations within the contexts of twentieth-­century industrial capitalism. In an economy comprised of large corporations, a mass labor force, and an increasingly national consumer economy, liberal order required, Streeter writes, the “impersonal, objective, irrefutable clarity of scientific method and reasoning” and the neutrality of administrative experts to “balance” the competing “interests” of big business, labor, and the public at large.53 Streeter argues that such corporate liberal thinking about the objectivity of law and administrative expertise constituted a “hierarchical distribution of power, with a core dominated by an alliance of corporate and government elites, orbited by less powerful—­but not powerless—­peripheries: an economic

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periphery of smaller enterprises and a political periphery of electoral politics.”54 Though the FCC would hear from peripheral stakeholders such as independent television programmers, educators, and reform-­minded interest groups, the FCC ultimately continued to favor the national network-­centered system of corporate commercial broadcasting and the system of nationally circulated commercial cable networks that would follow. The result of corporate liberal thinking, he concludes, is that these peripheral stakeholders, and members of the public at large, were never granted the authority to participate in determining “what kind of property relations” should exist in television. Streeter identifies the FCC’s decision to set aside spectrum for non-­commercial broadcasting in the 1940s as a rare example when an alternative to corporate liberal thinking established alternative property relations in broadcasting.55 Streeter’s influential corporate liberal framework is useful for locating the significant patterns of thinking that influenced policy decision-­makers. It is valuable too for emphasizing property relations as a sphere of sociality that affects us all, suggesting the rules of property should be open to democratic deliberation—­a point that is all the more relevant as the neoliberal habits of thinking in current media debates increasingly place questions of property beyond the domain of the commons. And yet, if we extend the analysis of policymakers’ patterns of thinking to include pluralism’s hierarchical ordering of persons by way of their socioeconomic status and ways of life, we must account for the ways in which this ordering occurred through hierarchical aesthetic valuations of persons and their viewing practices. In other words, corporate liberalism’s legitimation of expertise and managerial professionalism entailed a delegitimation of the cultural judgment of those who did not possess these qualifications. Critical cultural policy scholarship frequently has considered aesthetic valuation through the work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Though Rancière is highly critical of Bourdieu’s approach, I find both value and limitations to Bourdieu’s framework.56 Drawing from Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment to study the sociology of taste in 1960s France, Bourdieu theorized that distinctions of aesthetic judgment and taste differentiate between legitimate forms of high culture and illegitimate forms of low culture. Though high culture and legitimate taste comprise forms of aesthetic judgment that are cultivated within the familial, educational, and social networks of the privileged classes, these judgments, because they are embodied and do not circulate as independent from a person’s individual dispositions, are widely misrecognized as innate judgments. The legitimacy of the “pure aesthetic,” and the class that exercises it, claims an aesthetic practice that recognizes the stylistic and formal properties of things through a refined judgment that is distanced from the practical daily necessities of life. Conversely, Bourdieu argues that the working classes

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who lack a formal education exhibit a “popular aesthetic” judgment that values the immediate and sensual bodily necessities of working-­class life such as sustenance in eating, comfort and relaxation in leisure, and belly laughs and thrill in recreation.57 Tony Bennett, following Rancière, has questioned Bourdieu’s framework for beginning with the pure aesthetic and functionally positioning the working-­ class popular aesthetic as the antithesis of the pure aesthetic, thus failing to account for the complexities and variations in working-­ class judgments.58 Indeed, Rancière found in nineteenth-­century workers a refusal to accept hierarchical aesthetic valuations that positioned them as inferior to their bourgeois masters. Within the contexts of early television policy, low-­ income viewers defended the aesthetic value of soap operas and crime shows, and their equal capacity to make aesthetic judgments. In doing so they disputed social scientists and policymakers who assumed that those who regularly watched these popular genres lacked the capacity for critical distance. However, recognizing the problems with associating the popular aesthetic of necessity with the working classes does not mean there is no analytic value in identifying how pure aesthetic judgments among the privileged classes contributed to their legitimating class, gender, and racial hierarchies. Laurie Ouellette’s work on the development of public television in the United States makes such use of Bourdieu to argue that the mostly white male professionals who designed public television as an alternative to what they described as the “vast wasteland” of commercial television assumed that they possessed the superior aesthetic judgment to determine what aesthetic values should guide public and educational programming.59 Here Bourdieu is useful for problematizing Marxist political economy approaches that miss these legitimating cultural hierarchies in their categorical support for non-­commercial and public funded media. In chapter 1 I elaborate how such aesthetic valuations among supporters of allocating television frequencies for educational television contributed to their disregard of spectrum engineers’ warnings about using ultra-­high frequencies for television—­a decision that not only inhibited the development of educational stations but also precipitated the development of cable television. Other critical approaches to media policy which complicate assumptions that non-­commercial media necessarily constitute or facilitate media democracy have developed Foucault’s concept of governmentality. Here attention is given to how discourses of citizenship and the public interest call upon persons to recognize themselves as members of a public or self-­governing community and to recognize, as Toby Miller put it, their “moral obligations” to manage their own conduct in the interests of stability, security, and socioeconomic order.60 Regarding the contexts of 1950s television, Anna McCarthy has convincingly argued that corporate and labor leaders, philanthropists, and intellectuals

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sponsored television programs that circulated a Cold War discourse of citizen­ ship that broke from a more populist, redistributive ethos of the Popular Front and Roosevelt’s New Deal policies. Within an anti-­ communist discourse of American freedom, addressing social inequalities was no longer a matter of redistributing wealth but of supporting the decisions of interest group leaders to find consensus and make “balanced” decisions. These sponsored programs instructed viewers to perceive corporations as good citizens and to conduct themselves as freedom-­loving individuals rather than groups that have been historically subjected to class, race, and gender inequalities.61 Ouellette traces similar governing discourses in the development of public television.62 Readers will recognize these governing rationales in what I have identified as the common sense of pluralist assumptions about the stabilizing function of hierarchical relations between high-­status professionals and the masses. And the significance of the behavioral sciences to constituting and legitimating pluralist thinking correlates to a Foucauldian framework that understands modern epistemologies as establishing the criteria and norms of humanness through which governing technologies circulate. Yet the governmentality framework has been less productive in conceptualizing the contexts or conditions within which practices of democratic politics occur. One reason for this is that the scope of Foucault’s philosophical and substantive critique of modern epistemologies as technologies of power, and the pervasiveness with which power is constituted through discourses and practices in everyday life, has left little conceptual space for understanding human subjectivity that is constituted through other forms of knowledge and self-­understanding or that elide or dispute governmental technologies.63 Put another way, Foucault’s conception of subjectivity posits that the subject of knowledge is necessarily also subjected to knowledge as power. Instead of collapsing the knowing subject and the subjected subject of knowledge, Rancière’s conception of “subjectivation,” as Chambers elaborates, makes visible a “gap” between Foucault’s knowing and subjected subject. Subjectivation refers to the moment when persons assigned to a subordinate place in the hierarchical order experience the wrong of this order and claim an equality to define the symbolic space of the community and participate in defining the rules of common life. It is at this moment of the wrong of hierarchical order that “renders visible the gap between one’s identity within the police order (within the distribution of roles, places, and status) and a certain claim of subjectivity through the action of politics.”64 Here the governing technologies of knowledge as power are disputed through the experienced wrong of hierarchical order, an experience that constitutes democratic subjectivities in the very actions of dispute. For example, following the race rebellions in the late 1960s civil rights leaders confronted the dominant pluralist responses that framed these “disturbances”

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as signs of ghetto alienation and a need to integrate Black leaders into mainstream political and economic institutions. But civil rights leaders including Kenneth Clark and Ralph Ellison argued that it was the imbedded racial hierarchies within these institutions that prompted the rebellions. Similarly, civil rights activists challenged pluralist programs that sought to use cable television to facilitate communications between city agencies and Black urban residents. Civil rights activists viewed these solutions as maintaining racial subordination in government and business and instead organized to own cable systems as major infrastructures for Black economic development. In these contexts, pluralist racial hierarchy constituted the wrong that prompted Black rebellion and actions that claimed an equality to define the commons of politics and economics. While Rancière’s conception of politics opens up space within critical theory to recognize hierarchical disputes as contexts for the formation of democratic subjectivities, Critical Race Theory (CRT) extends questions of democracy and equality to confront the legal structures that obfuscate and subordinate Black experiences of racial discrimination. The CRT movement began within the contexts of civil rights struggles in the 1960s through the foundational texts of Derrick Bell, including his influential Race, Racism, and American Law first published in 1973, and continued through seminal works including Cheryl Harris’s 1993 essay “Whiteness as Property.”65 In contextualizing race as an everyday occurrence that exists within and across all of society’s institutions of government, law enforcement, education, and commerce, CRT exposes the ways in which the assumed neutrality of U.S. constitutional law, equal protections, and liberal property rights have sustained white racial privilege. To confront these structural impediments to equality, CRT promotes storytelling in law and policy to insert the experiences of historically disenfranchised groups as a method for confronting institutionalized structures of racial exclusion.66 CRT extends Rancière’s method of equality through accounting for a broader range of everyday struggles against hierarchical structures that may not constitute forms of democratic politics under Rancière’s framework, but that are significant for organizing collective actions for confronting racial discrimination and economic disenfranchisement. In chapters 3 and 4 I devote much attention to the strategies and tactics of civil rights activists and Black organizations to promote Black ownership of cable systems. This attention to the strategies and tactics of the Black cable ownership movement articulates to other critical-­oriented policy work that has focused on advocacy groups as a method for studying issues of media, power, and democracy. A notable example of an advocacy group approach is Allison Perlman’s study of how the National Association of Women used the strategy of filing petitions to deny broadcasters the renewal of their licenses as a means to confront

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sexist practices in television and to promote the organization’s wider struggle for gender equality.67 The method of equality can complement CRT and advocacy group approaches through further asking how hierarchical classifications get activated within advocacy groups and how they articulate to historically changing invocations of democracy, including the pluralist and neoliberal forms that have dominated policy in recent decades. In giving attention to the discourses of hierarchical classification and the moments when those subordinated in the hierarchy dispute hierarchical order, the method of equality engages with new ways of thinking about history and with the relevance of contestations over the emergence of cable television.

The Method of Equality and Television/Media History Thomas Streeter has persuasively argued that the history of commercial broadcast policymaking in the U.S. has been organized and circumscribed within an “interpretive community” of federal regulators, agency staff experts, lawmakers, consulting firms, lobbyists, and policy institutes that inhabit the corridors of power and influence in Washington, DC. This interpretive community shares a belief in “the autonomy and neutrality of expertise” and that entry into the policymaking community requires expert credentials and a commitment to negotiating practical solutions. Though advocacy groups and citizens are sometimes included in deliberations and debate ensues such that unanimity on all issues is rare, the policymaking interpretive community gives little weight to the non-­ credentialed. Decisions rarely stray from the belief that “classical liberal principles can be squared with government intervention by way of expertise.”68 Because the decision-­making power in television policy is invested in the interpretive community Streeter identifies, I devote considerable attention to the cultural politics of these decision-­makers and credentialed experts. As I mentioned earlier, my focus expands upon Streeter’s corporate liberal framework to identify the pluralist habits of thought that have constituted a hierarchical ordering of people’s capacity to participate in defining questions of public interest. This includes close attention to the aesthetic valuation of television culture and of people by way of their socioeconomic location in the pluralist order. But giving attention to the moments within policy arenas when the subordinated contested pluralist hierarchical order recovers forms of speech and democratic subjectivity that destabilize the more sweeping generalizations about continuities in corporate liberal or pluralist habits of thought. Rancière calls these moments “heretical” histories because they are not only often left out of historical narratives but they also enact a dissensual democratic politics that disputes the consensual order.69 Television histories have elided the history

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of the Black cable ownership movement. But its inclusion cannot just be additive to the historical record. In disputing pluralist reasoning that Black inner-­ city poverty resulted from alienation from the white governing establishment, African Americans united investors, civil rights activists, accomplished actors, professional athletes, and residents in speech and actions that defied alienation. Against policy authorities who assumed Black ownership was impractical or unrealistic as cable operations progressively expanded their operations into multi-­system corporate entities, African Americans claimed a right and entitlement to participate in defining the commons of economic relations. Other heretical histories include: rural residents who disputed the FCC’s values and rationales for prioritizing localism in its spectrum allocations; independent retailers who challenged policymakers’ common sense support for nationalizing the economy; and the working classes and women who disputed the logics of mass culture that informed policymakers’ aesthetic judgments. Just as these heretical histories have been largely absent in policy histories, they too have remained missing and unintelligible in television histories couched within generalized narratives of evolution, revolution, and progressive liberation. A common storyline of these progressive narratives is a periodization that marks a transition from an era of broadcast network television characterized by limited channels and lowest common denominator programming for a passive mass audience to a “post-­broadcast” or “post-­network” television era comprised of multiple channels delivering more diversified programming choices to more actively engaged niche audiences. These narratives often attribute the passive viewing habits of the mass audience in the network era as inhibiting the revolutionary potential of cable television. As Megan Mullen narrates, cable television in the 1980s and 1990s marked an “evolution” rather than a “revolution” in this transition because cable networks mostly aired reruns of commercial broadcast network programs or motion pictures that continued to cater to audiences that tended to “gravitate toward what is familiar” and thus “used their television dials to ‘vote’ in support of traditional broadcast fare—­whether received over the air or by cable.” The more progressive and revolutionary plans for cable envisioned by social scientists, engineers, cultural critics, and non-­profit foundations in the late 1960s, according to this narrative, did not materialize because these planners were “blissfully neglectful of the fact that the passive viewing habits engendered by commercial broadcast television had been in place for decades by the time satellite cable entered the scene.”70 Amanda Lotz agrees that the transition to a post-­network era was “gradual” because “viewers grew accustomed to arbitrary norms of practice” of network-­era television, which “seemed ‘natural’ and altering them seemed unimaginable.” She argues that the post-­broadcast “revolution” occurred when “adjustments in the television industry . . . enabled

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critics, industry workers, and entrepreneurs to envision radically different possibilities for television.”71 Such assumptions that a habitually passive mass audience stood in the way of television progress replicates rather than interrogates similar “mass culture” assumptions at mid-­century. The mass culture discourse was predicated on hierarchical aesthetic valuations of people and commercial broadcast programming that correlated aesthetic judgment and critical capacity with socioeconomic status. These hierarchical valuations informed proponents of pay-­TV who looked to uplift television culture and social scientists who advocated deregulating cable to realize its revolutionary interactive capacities. In replicating these mass culture assumptions, the post-­network progressive narratives miss the moments when low-­income residents, women’s groups, veterans, seniors, and people of color disputed hierarchical aesthetic valuations and opposed pay-­TV deregulations that would stratify access to television. In contrasting the network-­era of passive mass audiences with a post-­network era of active niche audiences, these progressive narratives also underrepresent the range of programming available in the network era. Lynn Spigel suggests in her study of modern art’s influence on network-­era television that viewers then were likely as taste driven in their selection of programs as are post-­network viewers.72 The contexts of these disputes over aesthetic valuation and stratification tend to be overlooked in television industry histories that center policy as a process where the FCC and Congress mediate the interests of key industry stakeholders. In their history of the American television industry, Michael Curtin and Jane Shattuc are careful to place industry developments within socioeconomic and political contexts. Yet the narrative remains focused on the industry’s “key players” and the role of television policy to mediate the “interests” of these major economic stakeholders. The major transformation in the television industry came, these authors narrate, when regulators lifted restrictions on cable television in the 1970s, allowing new industry competitors from Hollywood, independent UHF stations, and the publishing industry to create “alternatives” to the broadcast “network oligopoly.” To exemplify the diversifying potential of these new competitive market mechanisms the authors follow Chris Anderson’s theory of the “long tail” to depict the progressively diversifying classical economic forces of supply and demand that exist in a multichannel economy of branded cable networks. The “short head” of “traditional big media corporations and their blockbusters in television, music, film and books,” the authors write, “is slowly dying out into the boundless [long-­tail] abundance of niche products in the digital age that will attract somebody, somewhere, at some time.”73 These depictions of the arrival of a long-­tail economy of abundance and consumer choice as a progressive change from a past era of mass broadcast

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culture risks obfuscating the ways in which our contemporary television culture has accentuated rather than relieved the circulation of hierarchical aesthetic judgments that had informed the mass culture critique and pluralism in earlier decades. Newman and Levine have drawn from Bourdieu to argue that “cultural elites” in our contemporary digital, multichannel television culture, from journalists and television critics to TV creators and media scholars, have “intensified” the legitimating discourses of class and gender privilege that characterized the mass culture critique during television’s network era. These elite commentators claim the aesthetic superiority of the expensive dramas on premium cable and Internet subscription platforms for their cinematic production values, complex story arcs, and critically engaged and often upscale male viewers. These cultural commentators distinguish these high-­value programs and their audiences from the low-­class and often female-­depicted passive audiences of reality TV, games shows, soap operas, and daytime talk.74 Newman and Levine’s analysis helps to question the progressive narratives and classical economic reductionisms of the long-­tail economy and to shift attention to the ways in which aesthetic hierarchies are constituted through the niche cultures of contemporary television and digital media. Though attentive to these legitimating discourses of class and gender privilege, Newman and Levine leave silent the perspectives of those who were subordinated in these legitimating discourses. In focusing only on the legitimating discourse of the cultural elite, this analysis risks assuming that the working classes, women, or anyone else subordinated in these legitimating hierarchies, including people of color, do not have something relevant to say about television culture. This absence exemplifies the limitations of Bourdieu’s framework, including his functionalist reading of the popular aesthetic as the antithesis of the pure aesthetic. Instead, the method of equality is attentive to aesthetic valuation as a context where declassificatory stagings of equality dispute classificatory logics of inequality, and in so doing, recuperates these otherwise erased moments of democratic politics in history. Another area of television scholarship that questions long-­tail depictions of television’s market evolution has given attention to the business practices of branded cable television networks. These studies question supply and demand logics and locate the ways in which these networks constitute and solicit ways of knowing and doing that cannot be reduced to classical economic forces of supply and demand. For Sarah Bennet-­Weiser, the children’s cable channel Nickelodeon is best understood as a space for constituting cultural citizenship that fuses consumerism and citizenship. Nickelodeon promotes citizen empowerment through a “cool” and “diverse” space for kids that parents “just don’t get” while also soliciting children as a target market for promoting the consumption of programs and advertised commodities.75 The Food Network, Toby Miller

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argues, promotes neoliberal cosmopolitanism and conspicuous consumption through a multicultural display of food cultures at the expense of programming that makes visible the labor, environmental, and health politics of food.76 Also questioning long-­tail narratives is Katynka Martinez’s study of HBO Latino, which exposes the “fallacy of equating consumer choice” with meeting diverse viewer interests. She details the ways in which the network’s “multiplex patchwork of television programs” fails to engage with the complexities and realities of bicultural experience.77 The complexities and diversities of African American experience too have been marginalized in the contexts of branded cable networks, as Beretta Smith-­Shomade elaborates, given that the cable network Black Entertainment Television existed for twenty-­eight years as the only channel on cable devoted to Black experience.78 Further, the business practices of these branded cable networks have become increasingly international, meaning that programming strategies are less driven by appealing to increasingly segmented niche audiences than they are in developing genres, including documentary spectaculars, action adventure dramas, and children’s programs that are marketable across the most profitable television markets globally.79 While these studies of branded cable networks complicate progressive narratives of television history, they tend to give credence to widely held perceptions that cable television became culturally significant after the mid-­1970s when cable deregulations and satellite technologies facilitated the national and international circulation of branded cable networks. Instead, I suggest that the history of cable television prior to the mid-­1970s has particular significance for thinking about the cultural politics of television in our contemporary period as media converge through the Internet. Internet-­based subscription services including Netflix do not organize and promote programming through thebased matically branded networks but through creating personalized taste-­ algorithms to guide viewer selections. There is much talk about how this “distribution revolution” is offering individuals more personalized choices and easier access to a greater diversity of programming.80 Yet we find similar revelations about increasing choice and diversity in cable television’s early period of development prior to the mid-­1970s. Then as now, the talk about personalized choice tends to support neoliberal logics about market competition and consumer choice. Then as now, the talk of the value of these choices tends to skew toward cultural sensibilities that legitimate aesthetic hierarchies. Proponents of pay-­TV in the 1950s expressed disdain for soap opera and television westerns while embracing classical music and international cinema. Now, the talk of a new “golden age” of television includes critical acclaim for programming on pay-­services including HBO’s Game of Thrones and Netflix’s House of Cards and a flippant disregard for reality television.81 Beliefs in the early 1970s that cable access television could reinvigorate democratic participation

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in media are recast today in talk about the democratic promise of social media to break down the division between production and consumption.82 The method of equality places attention on the ways in which talk about the revolutionary potential of new distribution technologies to diversify, uplift, and democratize cultural production are entangled in classificatory logics of inequality, whether through discourses of postwar pluralism, or more recently, neoliberalism. This method too recuperates moments when these revolutionary or evolutionary discourses dismiss concern about the stratification of access to culture through subscription services, and when disenfranchised people dispute stratification through equality claims. Further, as the discourse of a television revolution places attention on a new golden age of television, the historical struggles for Black cable ownership shifts attention toward addressing the vastly unequal ownership opportunities in new media technologies for historically disenfranchised groups. The following chapters are attendant to pluralist classificatory logics of inequality and their dispute in broadcast and cable television concurrent development to promote thinking differently about what constitutes democratic politics in our television past and present. Chapter 1 identifies the cultural values that guided the FCC’s rationales of localism and competition that informed its 1952 spectrum allocation plan for television, a plan that slowed the expansion of television in small cities, rural areas, and mountainous regions. Chapter 2 considers the significance of this plan in precipitating the development of cable television in the 1950s. Residents in rural areas and small cities disputed the FCC’s local community ideals through claiming a leisure-­time entitlement to access multiple signals from regional and network affiliated stations. Chapter 3 situates the early history of pay-­TV in the 1950s and 1960s within the discourse of “mass culture” that referenced a twofold concern about the effects of the mass media on “high” culture and the effects of “low” mass culture on the majority of Americans who did not have formal higher educations. For proponents of pay-­TV, including liberal pluralists, anti-­communist liberals, and classical liberal economists, requiring viewers to pay for individual programs would create classical economic forces of supply and demand that would restore high-­cultural alternatives. Opposition to pay-­TV from low-­income and rural residents, film and TV industry workers, and city mayors disputed these mass culture and classical economic rationales. These cultural concerns that commercial broadcast television had dulled the civic energies of ordinary Americans were evident in the late 1960s when municipal leaders, media activists, and federal administrators promoted using the increasing channel capacity of coaxial cable to set aside cable television channels for educational, government, and public access. Chapter 4 situates these calls for cable access within the discourses of civic culture that informed social scientists, the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty, and

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a countercultural participatory idealism to address citizen “alienation” and urban poverty. Civil rights activists challenged these civic diagnoses and identified racism and economic marginalization as sources for inner-­city poverty, not a lack of civic mindedness. Chapter 5 considers related disputes within the contexts of beliefs that interactive broadband cable television could provide a communications solution to racial discrimination and “civil disorder” in urban areas through promoting and administrating social services and facilitating intra-­ community communication to alleviate alienation. Black activists challenged these pluralist visions and created organizations to facilitate Black ownership of cable systems. These cable ownership advocates challenged the Nixon’s administration’s “black capitalism” model for urban development through promoting a vision that channeled race rebellion into Black control over the means of production and media representation. The significance of these disputes over qualification to participate in defining the economic relations of cable television is captured in the double meaning of “wire” in the book’s title. On the one hand, the wire refers to the materiality of cable as a new large-­scale communications infrastructure that lined city streets and whose property status was indeterminate prior to 1984, fitting neatly under neither of the FCC’s broadcast nor common carrier property categories for communications technologies. The policy contexts for determining cable television’s property status, and the disputes over who was qualified to participate in defining property relations, had the American Republic itself on the wire, or tightrope, balancing pluralist concerns about maintaining stability and order against the faint winds or moments of democratic politics when the subordinated disputed hierarchical order. The book ends not with an elaboration of the first federal cable legislation in 1984, as a reading of the book title might suggest, but with reference to a celebration on a weekend in October 1973 in Gary, Indiana, of the first operating Black-­owned cable television system. I find this celebration to stage a heightened moment of democratic politics in cable television history when people of color disputed mass culture panics and pluralist rationales for integrating people of color into white-­controlled political structures. Residents of Gary, Indiana, and invited guests celebrated a range of Black cultures that destabilized high and low classifications of aesthetic legitimacy. And they celebrated their participation in cable ownership and in defining the economic relations of television in Gary. But as national cable policies lifted multisystem ownership restrictions that would make sustaining Black cable ownership in future decades nearly impossible, the celebration is a fleeting one that portends the ongoing struggles for people of color to secure economic opportunities in our current digital media sectors. The Epilogue addresses these current struggles and suggests how the method of equality can redefine questions of democracy in our digital age.

1 Broadcast Policy, Television Spectrum, and the Pluralist Logics of Inequality

Beginning in 1948, radio station operator L. E. Parsons in Astoria, Oregon, television set retailer Bob Tarlton in Lansford, Pennsylvania, and antenna manufacturer Milton Jerrold Shapp erected antennas on tall buildings or mountaintops in locations on the fringe of television reception to capture television signals from distant cities. From these antennas they strung coaxial cables to television appliances stores, town bars, and individual homes. Historians have narrated these cable television beginnings as a “technical evolution” of wired communications led by the “pioneering efforts” of “entrepreneurs” including Parsons, Tarlton, Shapp, and others.1 What this narrative does not include is a serious consideration of the cultural politics of the Federal Communications Commission’s television spectrum allocations policies, which inhibited the reach of broadcast television signals to areas distant from large cities. Thus, the allocations policy created the conditions for the need for alternative means for receiving television signals, including through community antenna television, as these early cable TV systems were then called. The FCC did not intend to limit television’s expansion across the United States. Indeed, when the FCC stopped granting television station licenses in 1948 to work out a plan for allocating spectrum frequencies for television, which it completed in 1952, the commission sought a “substantially more efficient use of the available spectrum” than had the FCC in the 1930s, which prioritized high-­powered stations that could transmit signals for hundreds of miles. The FCC’s 1952 spectrum allocations plan for television limited the signal reach of television stations to ensure that “as many communities as possible” could “have the opportunity of enjoying the advantages that derive from having local outlets that will be responsive to local needs,” and to optimize the number of

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communities that could have multiple stations to create what the FCC called a “nationwide, competitive service.”2 To realize these twin goals of local service and competition the FCC added eighty-­two new channels in the Ultra High Frequency (UHF) portion of the spectrum to the existing thirteen Very High Frequency (VHF) channels that the FCC had previously allocated for television. The commission did so despite warnings from engineers that UHF signals could not bend around hills and into valleys as well as VHF signals could. Also, UHF transmission towers and television sets equipped with UHF receivers would cost significantly more than for VHF broadcasting. Further, the commission chose to license UHF and VHF in the same local areas, despite the economic advantage that this would give to VHF stations. Although the commission recognized that the smaller markets, most of which received UHF assignments, would have difficulty economically sustaining a local station, the 1952 plan concluded that “it is not unreasonable to assume that enterprising individuals will come forward in such [smaller] communities who will find the means of financing a television operation.”3 Such confidence led FCC Chair Wayne Coy to predict in 1951 that there would be 1,500 television stations within five years.4 What Coy failed to predict, however, was that television set manufacturers would be slow to include the more costly UHF tuners on their VHF-­ready TV sets, that the networks and their national advertising sponsors would prioritize VHF stations in larger markets, and that, as FCC staff engineers warned, UHF stations would experience significant technical difficulties with signal propagation. In the seven years after the FCC began licensing television stations under its new allocations plan, VHF stations grew to 441 while only 79 UHF stations were in operation.5 Additionally, the allocations plan included 200 channels reserved for non-­commercial educational stations, most of which were placed in the UHF spectrum. By 1956, only 19 of the 200 educational assignments were put to use.6 With hindsight in 1958, FCC Commissioner Frieda Hennock, a strong supporter initially of the allocations plan, said the plan “was the worst thing that came out of that Commission.”7 Policy histories have been more generous than Hennock, representing the FCC’s television allocation plan as a good faith effort to negotiate the political landscape to realize their goal to maximize local service and nationwide competition.8 Others have focused on the political power of VHF television set manufacturer RCA and its NBC network, which lobbied to ensure that television would develop in the VHF spectrum and not be shifted entirely to the UHF spectrum.9 But these accounts leave unexamined the cultural politics that informed the FCC’s unwavering commitment to the goals of maximizing local service and nationwide competition through VHF and UHF allocations despite warnings

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about the economic and technological problems of this plan. Indeed, the FCC maintained its commitment to these twin goals of localism and competition for the next two decades in mediating conflicts between UHF station operators, who struggled to finance stations in smaller markets, and cable operators, who imported signals from big city stations from hundreds of miles away, a practice the FCC saw as impeding UHF station growth and thus compromising its twin goals. Instead of accepting localism and competition as self-­evident normative goals for broadcast policy, I consider the sociocultural contexts that gave meaning to these goals among the federal administrators, lawmakers, and other officials who held decision-­making authority.10 This requires close attention to the cultural perceptions of policymakers regarding commercial broadcast culture including what forms of broadcast culture they believed competition would promote and what types of programs local stations should air. In evaluating commercial broadcast culture, federal administrators, lawmakers, social scientists, and cultural critics most frequently referenced the civic responsibility of local stations to carry non-­commercial “sustaining” programs. Of most value to policy officials were symphonic music performances, which included renowned conductors and music experts guiding viewers in classical music appreciation, and national public affairs discussion programs organized around political and educational professionals leading civic discussion. Conversely, policy officials expressed disdain for popular commercial network broadcasting including daytime soap operas, quiz shows, and nighttime crime dramas, believing that these genres manipulated a “mass” audience through emotional and sensational appeals. Informing these judgments were perceptions that most women, the working classes, and, indeed, the majority of the U.S. population who had no more than a high school education were in need of civic guidance in cultural and political affairs. Such perceptions among policy officials regarding the relational dynamic between cultural, political, and educational leaders and the so-­called masses epitomize American pluralism, which reflected, and informed, thinking about democracy in the United States at mid-­century. As I elaborated in the Introduction, pluralism as a theory of American democracy has antecedents in the early twentieth century when influential behavioral scientists including Charles Merriam and his student Harold Lasswell questioned the basis of democracy as the equality of the people. Instead, they developed a science of politics that measured human traits to identify those most conducive to democracy during the modernizing era and looked to the social sciences to guide citizen conduct.11 In the 1940s and 1950s, Pendleton Herring, David Truman, and Robert Dahl argued that American democracy’s stability in a world threatened by totalitarianism resulted from individuals belonging to interest groups and, most significantly,



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the political guidance of high status group leaders who possessed the higher educations, professional skills, and middle-­class demeanors considered necessary to mollify the destabilizing demands of their low-­status members and to compete with other group leaders for influence in the political process.12 Pluralism was thus identified as a hierarchical order where the high-­status elites in business, government, unions, and other groups guided the conduct of the majority of Americans who were wage earners, people of color, and women. Pluralists believed these groups lacked the occupational status, style of speaking, and way of life of the high-­status group leaders. David Truman called these hierarchical relations within the interest group system a “balance wheel” that maintained stability in the American governmental system.13 Federal regulators frequently used the term “balance w ­ heel” to identify their public interest mission, and in particular, the FCC’s requirement that radio stations air “sustaining” programs as public services to balance schedules otherwise filled with advertising-­sponsored programs. I consider the ways in which this pluralist balance-­wheel way of thinking about democracy in the United States was both reflected in, and informed by, the cultural perceptions of policy officials in the principle policy initiatives of the 1940s and early 1950s, including the FCC’s network monopoly inquiries, its report on The Public Service Responsibilities of Broadcasters in 1946 (widely known as the Blue Book), the Commission on Freedom of the Press and its documents on broadcasting, and the FCC’s television spectrum allocations decisions. Recent scholarship has identified these policy initiatives as a progressive moment in broadcast history that championed “social democracy” and a “public service mission” for broadcasting to curtail the “crass commercialism” of advertising-­sponsored broadcasting. Victor Picard’s book-­length study argues that these progressive reformers, including activist groups, progressive policymakers, and citizens, promoted anti-­trust actions and public service obligations that included non-­commercial public service programming. Throughout the book Picard makes a categorical distinction between “profit-­oriented” commercial broadcasting and public service-­oriented programming where the latter “benefits all of society” against “corporate libertarian” policies that protect the first amendment rights and property rights of commercial broadcasters. He recognizes that this distinction was not so clear-cut for critics of these public service obligations, who critiqued them for their paternalist and elitist assumptions that commercial broadcast culture catered to the low tastes of a mass audience. Nonetheless, he believes these elitist claims were a “red herring” because, in the example of the Blue Book, its “content analysis made abundantly clear, public affairs shows, cultural programming appealing to ‘minority tastes,’ non-­advertising-­supported fare, local coverage—­all were disappearing from the public airwaves.”14

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But such categorical distinctions between commercial and non-­commercial programming and reliance on broad content analysis does not engage with the nuances of aesthetic valuation that informed pluralist assumptions that hierarchical relational dynamics between interest group leaders and their members stabilized American democracy at mid-­century. Attention to aesthetic valuation includes close attention to the statements made about commercial and public service programming and about the people who preferred one form over another. An aesthetic analysis of the forms of public service “sustaining programs” that policymakers valued most and the commercial genres they despised reveals a more complicated cultural politics that exposes assumptions about class, gender, and race privilege. Relevant also is a consideration of the forms of political engagement in commercial programming that policymakers claimed had little public interest value. The point here is not to legitimate the commercial system of broadcasting or to deny the value of non-­commercial alternatives. My argument is that democratic politics resides in contests over who is qualified to make decisions in the public interest, and that these played out in complicated ways that defy categorical distinctions between commercial and non-­commercial programming or between national and local programming.

“Sustaining” Pluralist Relations as the “Balance-­Wheel Function” of Broadcast Policy A defining issue for broadcast policy in the late 1930s and early 1940s concerned the increasing power of the broadcast networks over affiliated stations. In 1933 the NBC network inaugurated an “option time” policy, which gave the networks the right to demand the use of station affiliates’ broadcast hours with twenty-­ eight days’ notice. In 1936 NBC extended its affiliate contracts from one to five years. When the emergent network Mutual Broadcasting System began soliciting stations for network affiliation in 1934, the NBC and CBS networks tightened their territorial exclusivity rules, which restricted their affiliated stations from airing programming from other networks.15 By 1937 both houses of Congress threatened to hold hearings on FCC practices including investigating political favoritism between agency staff and the networks in station licensing. President Franklin D. Roosevelt intervened by appointing a temporary chair to make staff personnel changes and initiate an inquiry into the monopoly practices of “chain broadcasting,” as networking was called. Roosevelt later appointed Lawrence Fly as FCC chair, an ardent New Deal supporter and former general counsel for the Tennessee Valley Authority.16 Following extensive hearings on network monopoly practices, the FCC released its Report on Chain Broadcasting in May 1941 calling for immediate rules curbing the power of networks over their affiliated stations. Networks were



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no longer to restrict affiliates from airing programs from another network, to dictate scheduling on local stations, to set contracts longer than a year, and to penalize stations for rejecting network programs or setting rates for non-­ network programs. Corporate organizations were not to own more than one broadcast network, nor were they to own more than one broadcast station in a single market. Though the FCC wrote these rules to provide local stations with more flexibility and authority over programming decisions, the report emphasized that the most likely and beneficial outcome of this flexibility would be that local stations would air more network “sustaining” programs. As the five commissioners who supported the new rules believed, these non-­commercial programs that the FCC recognized as providing balance to otherwise advertising-­sponsored programming were important to local broadcasters for building goodwill with their listeners. The new rules, the FCC argued, “undoubtedly will encourage the networks to supply sustaining programs whose good quality will induce stations to carry their commercial programs.”17 Even the two commissioners who opposed the new rules prioritized sustaining programs as central to meeting public interest standards, because they believed the rules would provide less incentive for stations to air them. In their dissenting opinion, these commissioners argued that the restrictions to network business practices would lead to “an unwholesome conglomeration of opportunistic ‘time brokers’ catering to an aggregation of local monopolies in various towns and cities” to an extent that “the incentive would be removed for the origination of such sustaining features as the European war broadcasts, the American Farm and Home Hour, the Town Meeting of the Air, Toscanini, etc.” For the dissenting commissioners, the increased authority of local stations was less important than maintaining the “good programming” with “superior talent” that came from the “efficiency” of national network distribution.18 Neither group of commissioners was correct in their predictions. Despite their warnings, the predictions about unwholesome time brokers did not materialize after the chain broadcasting rules were implemented. And while the majority of commissioners assumed that network sustaining programs promoted station affiliations and goodwill with listeners, their assumptions were not corroborated in a 1946 FCC study that found that many commercial stations chose to carry locally sponsored commercial programs in place of network sustaining programs.19 The significance of considering the rationales of proponents and opponents of the chain broadcasting rules is not just that they both failed to predict the outcome of the new rules. More important here is to consider the cultural perceptions that created a consensus among FCC commissioners, lawmakers, social scientists, and cultural critics regarding the public interest value of sustaining

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programs, and their shared cultural disdain for popular commercial genres. For FCC Chair Fly, the sustaining programs that aired mostly on Sundays were so significant that he told a like-­minded Senate committee that “the programs that are on the air from around noon on Sunday through Sunday evening alone justify the existence of the American system of broadcasting.”20 The two most prevalent genres of sustaining programs during these hours, and the ones most cited in policymaking forums, were symphonic music and public affairs discussion programs. The symphonic music that aired as sustaining programs was predominantly renowned conductors leading the nation’s elite symphonic orchestras in concerts featuring a canon of nineteenth-­century European composers.21 These performances were not to entertain but to cultivate classical music appreciation. Presiding over Senate hearings concerning the FCC’s chain broadcasting rules in 1941, Interstate Commerce Committee Chair Burton Wheeler, in reference to the sustaining value of NBC Orchestra conductor Arturo Toscanini and other symphonic programs, said that “some people assert that jazz and soap operas are what the great majority of the people want. . . . But it seems to me that radio has a higher duty than to appeal to the poorer and cheaper things of life. It should try to raise the standards by an attempt to educate people to the higher and better things.”22 This reverence for canonical composers and cultivated listening has precedents in the decades before and after the turn of the twentieth century when wealthy Gilded Age benefactors financed professional orchestras in major cities to perform the “masterworks” of “great composers” before audiences seeking “aesthetic and spiritual elevation rather than mere entertainment.”23 Unlike more widespread musical performances that mixed classical music segments from opera arias, piano concertos, and symphonic works with popular dance music for interactive cross-­class audiences, the “sacrilization” of classical music, as Lawrence Levine calls it, demanded performances from professional symphonic orchestras of acknowledged masterpieces in their structural entirety before quietly “refined,” “cultivated,” and higher class audiences.24 For Progressive reformers in the urban settlement movement, however, classical music was not just a means to distinguish the high from the low but a means to promote refined and disciplined listening among working-­class immigrants. A broader music appreciation movement that promoted the uplifting capacities of classical music grew in the 1920s in response to the perceived threat that African American–­originated jazz incited the baser instincts of the dance-­ crazed masses.25 These sentiments that the working classes required musical cultivation were expressed by New York Symphony conductor Walter Damrosch, who, by the late 1920s, was the most prominent evangelist of music appreciation through promoting the canonical nineteenth-­ century European repertoire.26 In 1928



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Damrosch joined NBC to create the National Orchestra for regular broadcast performances and hosted the NBC Music Appreciation Hour to train school kids and those he referred to as “common people” in the art of listening. Damrosch believed that “home life” was “seriously threatened” by the “great majority” who believed that playing “sentimental trash” on their home pianos, including the “The Old Oaken Bucket” and “Sweet Adeline,” “meant good music.”27 Though this cultivation of proper listening over participating in music making might seem to counter a democratization of music, many critics considered the art of listening as a democratic endeavor. Music critic Lawrence Gilman, author of Music and the Cultivated Man in 1929 and Toscanini and Great Music in 1938, wrote that Toscanini’s weekly concerts on NBC represented “a new extension and significance to our ideas concerning the democratization of musical culture.”28 The networks would draw from such democratic rhetoric to fortify their public service record. A 1938 NBC publicity brochure proclaimed that “the Maine fisherman, the Texas rancher, the Montana miner, the Louisiana cotton-­picker, farmers, villagers and townsmen living far removed from music centers can and do enjoy as much symphonic music as the most ardent music patrons can hear in the concert halls of New York, Berlin, Vienna, Paris, London, or Rome.”29 The democratization of classical music during a time when totalitarianism spread in Europe meant not simply making it available to whomever might be interested, but to ensure that the music preferred by the patrons of classical music properly penetrated the thinking of the masses. The prominent music critic Olin Downes argued in 1941 that despite the German and Austrian origins of many of the canonical composers, “there was no really democratic diffusion of its essence” in Germany. If the United States was to avoid fascism’s fate, the continued dissemination of classical music was essential so that “we must not only listen to Beethoven, but have him in our thoughts.”30 Agreeing with this reasoning were the middle-­class progressive reformers affiliated with the Women’s National Radio Committee who gave awards to radio programs that promoted democracy during wartime including symphonic music broadcasts. The committee’s founder said “that the obligation of America to conserve and to foster the presentation of fine music is very great. If we can do it before the blitz strikes us, we shall have helped to build the kind of morale that enabled England to stand stoutly under the rain of terror from the skies.”31 These perceptions that cultivating classical music appreciation was a democratic and public interest endeavor were evident when the Rockefeller Foundation sponsored a study through Columbia University’s Office of Radio Research that sought to find out whether radio instilled an interest in “serious music” in those who otherwise did not listen to it. From eight hundred phone interviews conducted in winter 1939–­1940 of those who listened to a radio broadcast

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of classical music in New York City, the study distinguished between the three types of listeners and their practices of listening. The “understanding listener,” according to the study, “‘lives’ the music, realizes spontaneously all its relations, is able to recognize and judge reasonably well about the performance and the work, even though he may not be essentially conscious of musical terminology.” The “radio-­initiated” listeners did not truly “understand” the music but instead listened in a “romantic or emotional” way to “dream and forget” the pressures of their everyday lives, or with a “more sensual nature” for “excitement,” or simply as an “entertaining pastime.” Lastly, “the mass of uneducated listeners” lacked “a certain seriousness of purpose in one’s leisure pursuits” and therefore did not listen to “good music” at all. Assuming that the significance of classical music on radio was to cultivate the serious pursuit of the more cerebral leisure-­ time listening practices of the “understanding listener,” the study concluded that “all is not well” because classical music on radio was only successful in “building up of a pseudo-­interest in music” among radio-­initiated listeners who were unlikely to exhibit a serious interest through attending classical music performances or playing classical musical instruments. In accepting that serious listening was superior to listening for entertainment, these social scientists and foundation benefactors elevated and legitimated the aesthetic valuation of those whose occupation and background cultivated serious listening over the devalued aesthetic tastes of the uneducated masses.32 In addition to valuing symphonic music as a cultivated experience in music appreciation, broadcast policymakers frequently mentioned public affairs discussion programs as highly valued sustaining programs. As with their classical musical counterparts, these discussion programs sought the guidance of credentialed experts to cultivate particular ways of listening and engaging among radio’s listeners that intersected with a broader discussion forum and adult education movement. The most frequently referenced discussion program was America’s Town Meeting of the Air, which first aired on NBC’s Blue network in 1935 in partnership with the League for Political Education (LPE). The discussion forum invoked the idealized New England town hall in opening with a costumed town crier ringing a bell and announcing “town meetin’” before an audience of 1,500 in the LPE’s Town Hall building in midtown Manhattan, New York City. This introduction was followed by ten-­minute position statements from four experts with opposing views and twenty minutes of short questions from the attending audience. In the year that the Department of Education announced its Federal Forum Project to promote discussion forums across the country, LPE’s Associate Director George Denny presented the idea to NBC, which had been fielding ideas to broadcast a discussion forum. With a background in theater and a proponent of “showmanship” in educational broadcasting, Denny injected a theatrical style with the opening crier and his lively role as moderator, and a



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sense of dramatic suspense in casting panelists with opposing viewpoints and situating the auditorium audience as potentially unnerving the panelists with unpredictable questions and heckling.33 Denny’s theatrical techniques for building an audience of radio listeners was put to use in fulfilling the broader civic mission of these discussion forums to train citizens, and in particular, the less formally educated who were thought to be susceptible to propaganda or dogged in their views, to be more open-­minded through guidance in prescribed forms of democratic deliberation. In the introduction to their 1938 book praising America’s Town Meeting of the Air, Harry and Bonaro Overstreet asked, “Are the totalitarians right? Is it impossible for a highly complicated, industrialized, citified civilization to conduct its affairs by those modes of common discussion and mutual understanding that were successful in a village society?” Concerned that “except in a few highly civilized spots, America manages to do without free discussion,” the Overstreets sought to promote discussion through their active participation in the adult education movement, and praised America’s Town Meeting of the Air for “training the minds of Americans in the art of social, political, and economic thinking—­public discussion.” But public discussion required “good manners,” with a goal to promote “cultural unity” to combat the “live-­and-­let-­live hodgepodge of mutually exclusive cultural groups” fueled by rapid immigration.34 This threat of cultural difference was a driving theme in the Carnegie Corporation’s American Association for Adult Education (AAAE), to which Harry Overstreet had served as president and from which the LPE had received funding for a new Town Hall building.35 This threat was evident when the more conservative and upscale members of the LPE clashed with the newcomers that America’s Town Meeting of the Air brought to the Town Hall auditorium. In 1935 one LPE member referred to the newcomers as “such a mob of booing, baaing, hissing creatures I never saw—­most of them east side Jews.”36 Though these “spectator hecklers” proved valuable in publicizing the dramatic value and unpredictability of the program, cultural critics including Charles Siepmann, whose significant impact on FCC policies will be explored later, wrote that the program, “by playing up emotionalism and exploiting mob psychology, defeats the very aim of the round table technique.” It was this mob psychology that also concerned Denny who feared a “dangerous epidemic of authoritarianism.”37 Concerned that the experts and host could not prevent the audience from getting out of control, Denny lamented that “the tragedy is that we cannot turn our problems around so simply. Each of us is bound by all of his yesterdays.”38 Similar sensibilities that understood discussion to require trained guidance informed the CBS network’s signature public affairs discussion program, The People’s Platform, which aired from 1938 through 1952. The show’s creator, Lyman Bryson, a leading figure in the adult education movement and former president

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of AAAE, invited four guests, including a prominent person, an expert in a field, a woman, and, in Bryson’s words, a “representative of the American public” who “had to be somebody from the street” such as “a cab driver or a shoe clerk or a small bookkeeper,” to dine together in the CBS studio for unrehearsed and “never unfriendly” discussion.39 For Bryson adult education required the guidance of trained teachers to help all adults with or without formal educations to develop a “mature mind.” Of particular concern was the “intellectual proletariat” whose “minds have been sharpened by struggle and who have industriously followed their accidental opportunities.” Though the “practical experience” of the intellectual proletariat “may sometimes help him to tell a true prophet from a false one,” Bryson concluded that “more often it does not.”40 Guided by such convictions, Bryson invited the “man on the street” to the dinner conversations, not so much to include the perspectives of those from different class backgrounds but more to stage the adult education expert’s guidance of the less formally educated to put aside their class experience in service of developing a more “mature” orientation to deliberating the issues of the day.41 Social science researchers and their foundation sponsors shared this goal of training citizens from lower socioeconomic positions to accept the guidance of experts. In 1939, one of the social objectives of the Rockefeller Foundation was “to increase tolerance toward experts and expert knowledge in social affairs.”42 Rockefeller funded the work of the Office of Radio Research, including a study of the potential for radio to increase “serious” listening among those who are unlikely to be serious readers. Under the direction of Paul Lazarsfeld, the study identified serious listening as “more detached” from “a felt personal need to supplement one’s own knowledge or skill.” The study identified the public affairs discussion programs as exemplary forms of serious programs that required a detached mode of listening, unlike news programs “because today’s news interest is so general that earnest endeavor cannot be attributed to anyone simply because he keeps track of current events.”43 This value distinction between news and discussion programs is revealing of social science researchers’ distrust in radio listeners’ capacity to grasp the significance of current events and deliberate and discuss them outside of the contexts of expert guidance.44 The Lazarsfeld study placed listening on a hierarchical scale where listeners with the “ability and inclination . . . to pay attention to serious subject matter” were deemed to possess a “high cultural level” and those who did not a “low cultural level,” which largely correlated to length of formal education. The study found the largest disparity in program preferences between high and low level cultural groups to be classical music and the discussion programs.45 In a letter to Lyman Bryson, Lazarsfeld confided his frustration in “the sheer stubborn resistance of persons of low socio-­economic rating to listening to serious discussions of public problems over the air.”46 The study found “strange”



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that respondents in the lower cultural groups identified soap operas and quiz shows as sources for information and learning. To further explore this, the study included interviews with eight listeners of Professor Quiz and found most liked the program for its diversified general knowledge that could be applied to daily life and invoked in everyday conversation. These respondents rooted for “the average man” contestant against the “college people” and felt empowered to answer many of the questions themselves, often alleviating status anxiety about their level of formal education. Lazarsfeld concluded that these findings might help broadcasters and educators expand their audiences for educational programming, but ultimately remained anchored in pluralist perceptions about the maintenance of social relations among leaders and the people: “It is unlikely that any considerable cultural achievement has ever sprung spontaneously out of people’s ‘needs.’ Progress is the result of efforts originated by small, advanced groups and gradually accepted by the population.”47 These sensibilities that the small advanced groups, who had a cerebral understanding of classical music and the maturity for reasoned discussion of public affairs, best understood the public interest in television were shared by the FCC and its hired staff who released a report titled The Public Service Responsibilities of Broadcasters in 1946—­a report known as the Blue Book, after the color of its cover. When Roosevelt appointed Paul Porter, the Democratic National Committee publicity director and former legal counsel to CBS, to replace Fly as FCC chair, Porter expressed concern that stations were replacing network sustaining programs with commercially sponsored programs. In 1945 Porter chose the intermission of a CBS symphonic program to encourage listeners to speak out.48 This choice of venues revealed that he shared the cultural sensibilities that equated classical music understanding with a privileged capacity to set the public interest standards of broadcasting. A year later, in Hollywood Quarterly, a new journal started by left-­leaning academics at UCLA, Porter encouraged the journal’s readers, whom he considered “an articulate and cultivated group” whose devotion to classical music broadcasts made them “citizens of demonstrated discrimination,” to let their local station or network know “how much you like this great music” as well as to let them know about the programs “you don’t like.”49 In scrutinizing license renewals Porter instructed his staff to document station programming practices and gave only temporary licenses to stations whose performance did not meet the promises that were stated in their licensing applications. To study the extent of the problem, Porter asked FCC Commissioner Clifford Durr to conduct a study and produce a report that identified the extent of these differences and elaborated the public service responsibilities of broadcasters. Durr, who had been a career federal administrator when Roosevelt appointed him to the FCC in 1944, expressed similar cultural sensibilities

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to Porter. In a speech to the New York Federation of Women’s Clubs in October 1944, Durr remarked that “soap operas” and “the hysterical urgency of the commercial plug” were “merely part of the price we pay for the news, discussion of public issues, and some of the excellent musical and variety programs which radio brings us.” As an example of how radio has “made a great contribution toward lifting the cultural and educational level of the American people,” Durr cited radio’s classical music broadcasts: “while majority tastes in music may still be a source of despair to the symphony lover, many people, thanks to radio, have heard good music for the first time and have learned to enjoy it.” For Durr the public interest required widely disseminating the genius of great men: “The richness of our heritage from any past generation has depended not solely upon the genius of the men of that generation but upon their success in crashing through the barriers between them and widespread public access to the fruits of their thinking.”50 In a discussion on the “social responsibility of radio” at the annual conference of educational broadcasters in 1947 Durr reiterated that safeguarding the “public interest” required the higher judgment of professional administrators and elected officials. In justifying that broadcast licensees should be accountable to the FCC and not directly to the people, Durr stated that “I doubt if the public we talk about always can act effectively” because “the public is pretty busy with its own affairs” such as “tending to babies, working in factories, and doing other things.”51 Without the need to consult the people and with a conviction that the higher judgment of the FCC and its staff were best equipped to define the public interest, Durr enlisted FCC staff economist Dallas Smythe to compile statistics on broadcast station programming logs and asked science writer Edward Brecher and Charles Siepmann, a Harvard lecturer and former British Broadcasting Corporation staffer, to write the report, which took only a month.52 The report found an excess of commercials, particularly spot announcements, in a number of cases numbering over one thousand per week. It also found that sustaining programs were aired mostly on weekends with few sustaining programs from 6 to 11 p.m. on weekdays. Many stations rejected network sustaining programs: for example, only 39 of 136 CBS affiliates carried its great books program Invitation to Learning. The failure of these stations to air sustaining programs, the report elaborated, upset the “balance-­wheel function of the sustaining program” to offer alternatives to the “news and entertainment” programs favored by advertising sponsors.53 To illustrate the imbalance of commercial programming and its lack of public interest value, the report singled out as most egregious the prevalence of soap operas during daytime hours. While the prevalence of soap operas undoubtedly limited the genre diversity of daytime programming, policymakers’ cultural distain for soap operas and their regular listeners revealed the



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class and gender privilege that informed official assessments of public interest obligations. The Blue Book’s principal author, Charles Siepmann, elaborated his cultural perceptions of soap operas in his book Radio’s Second Chance, released that same year. He argued that because soap opera characters represent for the “morbid coterie of listeners” a “living projection of the listener’s own thwarted dreams, frustrations, and personal anxieties,” the product pitches using “the same soothing and intimate tones used in the enactment of the drama” have the “authority, almost, of Almighty God.” This susceptibility to “sales suggestion,” he wrote, is a result of the soap opera audience’s “low IQ and many other attributes which, from the standpoint of vigorous democratic health, mark it as a social liability.” For Siepmann these so-­perceived overly emotional and unintelligent women were ill-­equipped to participate in democratic society. Rather, radio must air more sustaining “programs for significant ‘cultural’ minorities” because “they may be the majority of an enlightened tomorrow; lovers of music and of literature, listeners curious about science and its discoveries.”54 Siepmann’s disdain for soap operas and their listeners was widely shared by federal administrators, lawmakers, and social scientists. In 1943 FCC Chair Fly told a Senate Committee: we have never held a hearing when the soap operas ­haven’t come in for a little trimming. And I might say that I’ve never made any secret of the fact that I thought that they do, monopolizing the long hours through the long days on the two big networks—­I think it is one of the cheaper and worst forms of public service they could put on; and I h ­ aven’t made any secret of my feeling on that subject through the years, and some of you have not made any secret of your feeling on it.55

Senate Committee Chair Burton Wheeler was especially verbal about his distaste for soap operas and their listeners, stating that “certainly they are popular with certain classes of the people, and you can say that is in the interest of democracy, but I don’t believe it is.” Fly agreed and elaborated that the networks should not feed “that instinct” for “this sort of trash just because there was an appetite for that highly emotional, cheap form of drooling and moving from one great emotional crisis to the other.”56 Such depictions of soap operas as feeding emotional instincts exemplifies what Sara Ahmed has identified as a gendered discourse that associates emotions with women “who are represented as ‘closer’ to nature, ruled by appetite, and less able to transcend the body through thought, will and judgment.”57 As insinuated in Wheeler’s comments, the low status of soap operas was associated with the lower class who were thought most susceptible to their emotional manipulations. This was the case with spokeswomen for women’s clubs. Comprised of mostly middle-­ class and affluent white women, these

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women’s clubs expressed a disdain for soap operas, organizing an “I’m Not Listening Campaign” in 1939 to replace the “cheap love dramas” filled with “gutter morals” with educational homemaking programs, symphonic music, and book review shows. In her study of soap operas, Jennifer Wang found that women’s groups argued that there were more college-­educated women listening in daytime, and that the less articulate lower-­class women were less rational in their program choices and vulnerable to advertisers enticing them with immoral programming.58 Fly shared this low regard for the reasoning capacity and judgment of lower-­class women in answering a senator’s question about “who is going to be the judge of what the American people, as a free people, ought to be able to hear.” Fly responded, “those who are in a position to raise their voice publicly, including you, sir” and “semipublic organizations, and associations.”59 These depictions of soap opera fans as irrational and susceptible to advertiser manipulation did not reflect the actions of soap opera fans who, as Kathy Newman has traced, were savvy about how network sponsorships worked and organized letter-­writing campaigns to keep the shows on the air, promote particular character developments, and advocate for timeslots that better fit their household work schedules. Newman writes that women listeners developed a sense of social power in their shared enjoyment of the soaps and aspired to become professional writers like women soap creators such as Jane Crusinberry and Erna Phillips.60 Though belittled by critics as melodramatic depictions of family squabbles, Jason Loviglio’s study of radio soap operas found that “the resolutions of intimate crises were almost always linked to a collective solution to a public dilemma.” Plots included collective efforts to improve tenement housing conditions, retain and attract manufacturing jobs, support immigrants, and champion free clinics and legal aid for the poor. Class conflicts were explored from working-­class perspectives or, more commonly, from middle-­class perspectives sympathetic to the working class. Women protagonists felt out of place in marriages to men of higher class status, supported or worked in businesses that served working-­ class customers, lived with modest means, and vilified the vulgar socialites.61 Though plot resolutions often upheld traditional middle-­ class gender roles, Michele Hilmes argues that indeterminate plot structures provided a cultural space for women to question these norms even as commercial sponsors and networks restricted particular controversial issues including references to labor strikes, illegitimate births, or racial conflict.62 The sheer volume of soap operas certainly monopolized daytime programming. Women’s organizations were quick to point this out in mounting effective campaigns to get the attention of federal administrators and lawmakers. But the women’s groups and the professional class of male regulators who expressed their problem with soap operas as dangerously appealing to the instincts of



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working-­class listeners with overly emotional appeals, rather than, say, recognizing that commercial censorship restricted reference to controversial issues, revealed the forms of class and gender privilege that informed official deliberations over public interest standards. This class and gender privilege was further evident when the Blue Book faulted Philadelphia station WCAU and Baltimore station WBAL for replacing network sustaining programs with locally originated programming. The report highlighted “a special case of failure” when WCAU aired the New York Philharmonic, sponsored by U.S. Rubber, but replaced the sustaining five-­minute introductory comments by music critic Olin Downes with local news sponsored by the Philadelphia-­based Yellow Cab Company. Also, the report faulted WCAU for replacing the Salt Lake Tabernacle Choir and the great books program Invitation to Learning with a local children’s talent show, and replacing a historical drama and The People’s Platform with swing and dance music from the locally based and nationally known band leader Eliot Lawrence. WBAL replaced University of Chicago Round Table Discussion with recorded music and the practical-­advice local commercial talk shows Listen, Motorist and Stay Out of Court, and replaced a sustaining drama about Indians of the North with the locally sponsored and produced show Women of the Week. Here the FCC subordinated locally originated grown big-­ band celebrities, programs that celebrated amateur talent, home-­ local women, practical knowledge, and local news to the sustaining programs that solicited classical music appreciation, expert-­guided political discussion, and historical drama. Though the Blue Book nominally endorsed the value of “local live programs,” it divorced this concern from the importance of local advertising to the economic strength of local stations by not distinguishing between local and national advertising when enumerating the excessive advertising on local stations. It was the local department store in Baltimore that produced Women of the Week, a local automated food service company in Philadelphia that produced the children’s show, and a Philadelphia-­based ship builder that sponsored the local band leader. This is not to suggest that these local programs represented a response to local community interests free from the promotional priorities of their local sponsors. Rather, it is to suggest that the report’s central concern about station’s replacing national sustaining programs with commercial programming and its methodology of listing these replacements was far removed from engaging with the material contexts of locally originated programming and the dynamics of local communities and cultures. This disconnectedness from local contexts was further evident when the Blue Book made no reference to how racial prejudice on WBAL and WCAU, stations located in cities with large Black populations, might fail to meet local public interest obligations. Though the Blue Book showed great concern that

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national sustaining programs were seldom aired in primetime on WBAL, it showed no concern that the few programs featuring African Americans were relegated to fringe timeslots when aired at all.63 Rather, the Blue Book explicitly stated that an important function of the sustaining program was to appeal to the “significant minority tastes and interests” of those who appreciate classical music and expert-­led educational and political discussion programs, to offer time for non-­profit organizations, and to promote “experimental” programs by more “distinguished writers” and playwrights. The Blue Book concluded that while the FCC should require stations to keep better program logs and encourage stations to carry sustaining programs during primetime evening hours, the report prioritized the voices of experts and organizational leaders. These included the “independent radio critic” who, much like the “dramatic critic and the literary critic,” can “bring to bear an objective judgment on questions of good taste and of artistic merit,” and the “radio listener councils” whose high-­status members could represent “the wishes of the vast but not generally articulate radio audience.”64 The recommendations of the Commission on Freedom of the Press reinforced these prescriptions that “objective” radio critics and the leaders of listener councils should have priority in setting and evaluating public interest standards over the less articulate radio audience. The commission was funded by the publisher Time, Inc. and chaired by University of Chicago chancellor Robert Hutchins. The twelve-­member board included a former secretary of state, the chair of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and ten university professors in the social sciences and humanities including Harold Lasswell and Charles Merriam. Of central importance for the commission was to prescribe the “responsibilities of the owners and managers of the press to their consciences and the common good for the formation of public opinion.”65 The commission recommended that the FCC ensure that radio and television reach “every village in the land” to provide “local news and discussion of public issues,” to promote “honest, expert criticism” to improve program “quality,” to air public affairs programming at prime listening times, to support frequency allocations for “non-­commercial” programs “under the sponsorship of educational institutions, foundations, and state and local governments,” to limit advertiser’s input into programming, and to prohibit dual station ownership in any single community.66 The importance of local news and public affairs programming was elaborated in the commission’s report on broadcasting. Written by the commission’s assistant director Llewellyn White, this report stressed the urgency that in the age of the atomic bomb there must be “a total effort to preserve and to develop the capacity for reasoned judgment and action which has marked man apart from the lower animals and which now is his surest and perhaps his only



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defense against self-­destruction.” With pluralist sensibilities, White framed this effort as a need to use broadcasting to maintain and extend the relations among leaders and the general public. Because “many persons have had little or no constructive parental guidance, little or no inspiring church influence, little or no direct contact with the other leaders in the community,” White wrote, “media of mass communication can and do reach citizens who can be reached in no other way.” Yet with this potential reach comes a potential power to destabilize existing hierarchal relations such that “the most heroic efforts of parents, teachers, preachers, and other community leaders may avail little if the media of mass communication shirk their peculiar responsibilities.”67 Leery of investing power in the government to determine what constituted quality programming while perceiving the average citizen as lacking the capacity for good judgment, White appealed to the consciences of community leaders including broadcasters, educators, credentialed critics and listening councils. Because “the average radio listener is no more able to evaluate the news which is hurled at him from every direction than is the average newspaper headline-­ scanner,” more news needs to be “organized and processed . . . by radiomen” and “related to the significance-­evaluations of qualified experts.” Furthermore, White claimed that “90 per cent” of commentators “lacked minimal qualifications for such work,” and as such more commentators should have “either a sound college education or its equivalent in experience as a highly trained writer-­observer of, or practitioner in, the specialized fields of political science, economics, government, etc.” White also supported educational broadcasting to be funded by “a few powerful, wealthy institutions of the order of Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Chicago, Duke, and Stanford” and that the broadcasters “keep the volume of educational broadcasts slightly above what the masses want” so that they “may contribute to a systematic rise in the general cultural level without defeating the educational goal by driving the audience away.”68 This leadership was to “broaden the public taste” that had otherwise gravitated to commercial genres that White clearly disdained. Regarding soap operas, White snidely commented that while some psychologists believed that “American women really are ‘helped’ by vicarious excursions into divorce, adultery, and incurable disease,” these psychologists “might find better employment looking into what may be happening to the human race.” Other genres that did not fulfill the commission’s task of “presenting and clarifying . . . the goals and values of the society” were “children’s shows in which unpleasant brats go unpunished by doltish parents” or crime shows “in which the one mistake in an otherwise perfect crime is explained with such painstaking care as to encourage the most cautious nascent delinquent to try it with the improvements.” Regarding the “recent craze” of “audience-­participation shows,” White commented that “the questions and answers must under no circumstances add to

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the sum total of useful knowledge, they must be asked and answered in a setting reminiscent of the old-­time vaudeville stage on amateurs’ night, and the whole proceeding must be managed in such a way as to screen out the more intelligent citizens with their silly inhibitions about vulgar exhibitionism.” The class and gender composition of the less intelligent studio audience participants was evident when White dismissed the audience as “those who troop weekly into studios in the hope of being rewarded with a pair of Nylons (and a lusty cheer from the studio audience if they’re from Brooklyn) for their ability to identify a few strains of ‘popular’ music.”69 White’s visceral disdain for soap operas, children’s shows, crime shows, participation shows—­ and for the “masses” who listened to and audience-­ them including women and the “vulgar” working classes who lacked a higher education—­exposed the logics of inequality that informed the commission’s thinking about press freedom in broadcasting. Such hierarchical aesthetic judgments about culture and people by way of their tastes and socioeconomic status, and recommendations that educated professions must raise the cultural level of the uneducated masses, articulated to pluralist understandings that hierarchical social relations created a balance ­wheel in the American democratic process. Similar aesthetic judgments informed the FCC’s four-­year freeze on granting broadcast television licenses and its 1952 spectrum allocations plan.

Allocating Pluralist Values for Television When the FCC suspended granting broadcast television licenses in 1948 after authorizing licenses for 108 stations in 63 of the nation’s largest cities, the commissioners did not intend a long suspension. The deliberations dragged on as the FCC faced questions about color television technologies, the technical feasibility of expanding television into the UHF portion of the spectrum, and allocating television frequencies for non-­ commercial educational television stations.70 In 1952 the commission finally implemented its spectrum allocation plan that comprised an “engineered Table of Assignments” to promote more local broadcast programming and multiple stations in larger markets to create national network competition.71 FCC Chair Wayne Coy and Commissioner Frieda Hennock were particularly influential during these deliberations and each shared the cultural perceptions that broadcast television needed to rise above the cultural level of broadcast radio. Each supported the assignment table that allocated spectrum to stations in the VHF and UHF portions of the spectrum despite warnings from engineers about the technical and economic problems of such plan. Consideration of Coy’s and Hennock’s aesthetic judgments that pertained to their commitments to local service, educational television, and national competition reflects hierarchical pluralist rationales.



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In December 1947 President Harry S. Truman appointed Wayne Coy as chair of the FCC. With his New Deal agency experience as former regional director of the Works Progress Administration and assistant budget director to Roosevelt, Coy was selected to provide strong leadership to define the direction of the commission.72 In the early months of his chairmanship, Coy gave a number of speeches and wrote editorials in newspapers elaborating his perspectives on broadcast regulation and his vision for television. In a speech at a meeting of the National Association of Broadcasters Coy spoke of how well he thought the 1945 plan for allocating frequencies for the new technology of FM radio had gone. The FM allocation plan, like the one Coy would support for TV frequency allocations, created an assignment table for allocating licenses to stations of uniform signal strength for a “more orderly growth for the aural broadcasting of the future” than was the case with “the ‘topsy-­like’ growth of AM broadcasting in this country.” He stated that this allocations strategy “eliminates the present competitive inequality that exists between AM stations” of unequal signal strength and “paves the way for competition between stations on the basis of quality programming, initiative, enterprise, [and] imagination in serving the public interest.”73 In March 1948 Coy released a statement to the Musical Courier in New York City that made clear that by “quality” he meant the expansion of classical music programming on the high fidelity FM radio stations. He wrote that “no one has a greater stake in the rapid development of FM broadcasting than the music lover and the music profession” because the “rational, more uniform system of allocating channels over the nation” will “force” FM stations “to rely on competition in programming to attract listeners.” This “will go far to arouse a wider appreciation of music and will create new demands for the service of the music teacher.”74 Coy further elaborated his understanding of quality programming, and its importance to American democracy, in a June 1948 commencement address to the graduates of the Cincinnati College of Music: “Broadcasting—­both sound broadcasting and television—­has given the modern world almost incalculable opportunities for bringing into every home the works of the greatest composers of all time, and the performances of the most gifted artists of the day,” the “presentation of the finest plays in dramatic literature,” and the opportunity for “listeners in the most remote and lonely corners of the land to hear the top-­ ranking leaders in every field of endeavor.” For Coy it was this dissemination of culture from “top-­ranking leaders” that constitutes broadcasting’s “power to arouse the citizens to a keener awareness of their responsibilities as citizens of a democracy.” Equating high musical taste with a propensity for model civic leadership, Coy said that “the role of music in American broadcasting makes it highly important for the parents and the schools to give every child the widest possible opportunity to cultivate his natural love of music, to know and to

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understand good music, to become an intelligent and discriminating listener.” This “proper training will create a demand for more of the better type of music that radio has to offer, thereby offsetting the present widespread acceptance of the plethora of boogie-­woogie, jazz and jive.” Unlike the widespread listeners who enjoyed these African American–­originated musical genres, Coy told his audience that they “have an outstanding role to play in elevating the musical taste of the nation” that “can stimulate the movement for better radio not only as professional musicians and as teachers, but as civic leaders.”75 The class and racial privilege that informed Coy’s pluralist conception of democracy as including civic leaders elevating the taste of the nation also included gender privilege. In his praise of the work of the Cleveland Radio Council for advocating for more classical music on radio, he advised the mostly middle-­class women members to “seek the advice of the specialists in the various fields in your community so that your judgment will be based upon facts and expert opinion” rather than “your own personal likes and dislikes.”76 This promotion of reasoned, expert-­directed decision-­making that infused Coy’s discussions of the public interest was a common theme in his public statements on broadcasting, including his advocacy for color television. Prior to his arrival at the FCC, the commission had determined that the competing color television systems developed by RCA and CBS were not ready for commercialization, and authorized RCA’s black-­ and-­ white standard for television. Soon after the FCC announced a freeze on granting new television licenses the FCC held hearings to reconsider establishing standards for color television with RCA and CBS launching new campaigns to win approval for their competing systems. Despite indications from the Radio Manufacturers Association that the color technologies were not ready, and the problem that CBS’s system was not compatible with existing black-­and-­white television sets, the FCC endorsed the CBS system and put pressure on manufacturers to begin building compatible color television sets. With such resistance from manufacturers, questions from the print media about the wisdom of the FCC’s decision, and, as was made evident later, a lack of initiative from CBS to launch a color system, enthusiasm for color television came most forcefully from the FCC.77 According to one commissioner, the FCC had no indication that the public wanted color TV.78 Nonetheless, in an April 1951 speech to the National Newspaper Promotion Association, Coy, a self-­described “color enthusiast,” applauded newspaper professionals for their interest in the new technology of television, stating that “this new attitude of genteel, rational, unimpassioned interest in new inventions did not always hold true. People in the old days didn’t have our sense of detachment and emotional discipline.” Without reference to specific types of programming, Coy said “the Commission has discovered that color opens up whole new fields for



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effective broadcasting,” describing the possibilities in the formal aesthetic language of adding “both apparent definition and realism,” and “a sense of depth and texture.”79 In supporting color television as a genteel and unimpassioned assessment of color television’s formal aesthetic qualities, Coy seemed detached from the forms of pleasure that popular television programs elicited. This was evident in Coy’s participation on CBS’s first commercially sponsored color telecast on June  25, 1951, that aired through thirty or so color television receivers set up in five cities. During the broadcast Coy pronounced that color gives “you the world beyond just as it is with nothing subtracted, nothing suppressed, nothing distorted, nothing degraded, nothing changed. They give you the actuality. They give you the living truth.”80 But these high-­minded promotional words that equated image fidelity to truth proximity seemed oddly estranged from the rest of the hour-­long telecast that was hosted by Patty Painter, CBS’s “Miss Color Television” model for color-­TV promotional advertisements, who was renowned for ceremoniously taking a bite out of a red apple in each of her appearances.81 The telecast also showcased popular CBS personalities including variety show host Ed Sullivan and talk show hosts Faye Emerson and Arthur Godfrey. Coy’s presence on television with Godfrey was especially discomfiting given that a year earlier Coy singled out the talk-­show host for representing a “trend toward bad taste” in television. Coy elaborated his perspective on Godfrey and the state of television culture in March 1950: “The world has moved from the horse and buggy days to the electronic age, but this type of comedian is still peddling livery stable humor” resulting in “off-­color television—­tainted television.” Also in his remarks he revealed his distaste for popular detective and crime shows, which he called “Merchants of Death and Hawkers of Horror,” and equated his own cultural sensibilities as universal: “Of course we do not require any complaint to learn about the trend toward bad taste, particularly by some of these comedians and MC’s” because “anyone who has eyes or ears can learn for himself what is going on.”82 Federal administrators and lawmakers shared Coy’s distaste for crime shows and his assumption that such aesthetic perceptions were beyond reproach.83 But these dismissive perceptions among lawmakers who admitted they rarely watched crime shows revealed elitist sensibilities that were themselves targets in crime shows. In her study of pulp magazines and working-­class readers in the 1930s and 1940s, Erin Smith found that the tough-­taking, hard-­boiled hero-­ detectives who asserted their autonomy against corrupt authority resonated with workers anxious about the deskilling of increasingly monotonous and emasculating factory work. Within the pages of the more than fifty detective magazines that circulated by the late 1930s, the private eye protagonists worked

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with modest means, shunned book learning in favor of practical knowledge, and made the “literate classes . . . look silly for their petty concerns and effete ways.”84 According to Elena Razlagova, popular true-­crime radio programs such as Gang Busters “absorbed the populist politics” of pulp magazines and appealed to working-­class men. Though these dramatizations exclaimed at the beginning and end that crime never pays, as did true-­crime pulp magazines, bandits were sympathetically depicted “as former farmers or laborers driven to crime by unjust laws.” True-­crime radio depicted “gangs,” Razlagova continues, “as informal family units governed by a strict code of honor and personal obligation in opposition to state authority.”85 Though Coy and other policy officials admonished crime fiction as sensationalist, for working-­class men crime fiction provided an outlet for negotiating hierarchical structures of class power at a time when industrial working conditions were increasingly regimented and labor-­ management pacts left workers with less authority over workplace conditions.86 Another context that revealed the FCC’s hierarchical aesthetic sensibilities in making television spectrum allocations decisions was its support for allocating 10 percent of the television spectrum for non-­commercial, educational use. Leading this effort was FCC Commissioner Frieda Hennock. When Truman appointed Hennock to the FCC in 1948 she was the only woman partner of a prestigious law firm in New York City and a successful fundraiser for the Democratic Party. Though her appointment faced a challenge from the Republican-­ controlled Congress, her distinguished position as a corporate attorney at a politically conservative law firm won her confirmation. According to her close associates, Hennock was eager to identify an issue that could become her defining political cause, which she soon identified as non-­commercial educational television.87 In her public statements supporting educational television Hennock revealed similar cultural sensibilities to her colleagues Coy and Durr in prioritizing the views of educated officials and leaders over others in defining the public interest in broadcasting. When Hennock attended the Institute for Education by Radio conference in 1949, she expressed an animosity toward commercial broadcasters who expressed the need to consider viewer interests and tastes when developing educational programming. During a panel on the future of television for “American life,” CBS Director of Research Oscar Katz disagreed with “many intellectual and cultural leaders” who felt “that their tastes should be directly reflected in larger and larger proportions of the content of the mass media.” Rather, “intellectual and cultural leaders should take into account the present tastes and preferences of the mass audience” through incorporating “showmanship” into programming strategies. Katz urged the conference attendees to “direct our interest and the interest of our students to the whole of



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television” through aiding “our students and our townspeople in their participation in this new extension of their environment.” In her remarks at the closing dinner, Hennock dismissed advice that educators should learn showmanship: “to you educators I say, don’t change, stick to education, be educated!”88 However, station managers of land-­ grant college radio stations in the Midwest disagreed with Hennock’s remarks that educators and their tastes should guide educational television instead of incorporating the modes of engagement of commercial broadcasts that have interested wider audiences. Since the 1920s these educational stations developed a variety of extension programs for local and regional listeners and held annual conferences that brought commercial and educational broadcasters together to share programming strategies. Exemplifying the vision and practice of veteran educational broadcast programming was Richard Hull, who had produced farm-­related programming for a number of college extension programs in the 1930s before running Iowa State’s educational broadcasting station in 1941.89 In 1947 the FCC awarded Iowa State College with a license for television broadcasting. With the licensing freeze in 1948, WOI-­TV began airing in 1950 as the only television station in the state of Iowa. In response to the statewide interests in a range of television programs, Hull, with the permission of the college regents, designed a service that included three hours per day of station-­originated programming and twelve hours of programming selected from the four existing national commercial television networks, with a goal of expanding the volume of local programming. With experience as the nation’s first educational institution to launch a television station, Hull sponsored a workshop on educational television at Iowa State College in August 1952 where he elaborated his philosophy. As a longtime member and leader of the National Association of Educational Broad­casters (NAEB), Hull recounted how in the early days of educational radio, the “big schools, like Yale and Columbia,” were not interested in radio, and that it took many years for most educators “to accept the idea that radio required different psychological teaching approaches than did formal classroom education, and some of the educators thought it was no good.” In reference to the several dozen educational radio stations that remained on the air since the early 1930s, he credits their survival to “the fact that most of the stations are found on land grant college campuses, where there is a tradition of service to the whole public of the state.”90 Hull said educators must not consider educational television as “another sub-­department” of their college, but as “our major display and contact with the public . . . composed of many people, many tastes, and many needs.” Hull conceived of educational television from the perspective of the local station manager who “has to be an editor, a stimulator, a pusher, an analyzer, and

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a sociologist of an amateur sort, to understand what his local community needs are.” This required guarding “against applying stereotyped labels and then discarding or favoring programs that appeal to different sets of tastes.”91 Hennock opposed this vision. At the FCC’s educational TV hearings in 1950, when Hull supported spectrum allocations for “non-­profit” stations that could air commercially sponsored as well as unsponsored programming, Hennock strongly disagreed, as did the Office of Education and the NEA, which wanted educational reservations to be strictly non-­commercial and restricted to educational institutions.92 In response to witnesses who believed educational broadcasters could learn from commercial broadcasters how to engage viewers in educational programming, Hennock replied, “How are you ever going to be a purely educational station if you keep worrying about the number of people you have listening to you.”93 Her cultural sensibilities were more aligned with a new vision for educational broadcasting that came from east coast Ivy League universities that had little history with educational radio but wanted to influence educational broadcasting for the television age. The event that defined this new vision occurred in the summer of 1949 when Wilbur Schramm of the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois sponsored a two-­week seminar on educational broadcasting with financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation.94 Unlike the annual meetings among the mostly land-­grant colleges affiliated with the NAEB that involved sharing programming ideas among experienced educational and commercial broadcasters, the Allerton House seminar, named after the off-­campus retreat location where it took place, invited some twenty experienced educational station managers to converse with university professors who had higher-­ minded ideals for educational broadcasting.95 A second seminar was held in the summer of 1950 to train the educational broadcasting directors, producers, and technical personnel to incorporate the perspectives of elite educators. Summarizing the focus of the first seminar, Robert Hudson, who had worked for the Carnegie Foundation’s grant projects in adult education and produced educational programming for university and commercial broadcasters, recounted that the “seminar spent much time trying to think through and resolve satisfactorily the ‘mass vs. class’ issue.” After insinuating that the commercial mass audience was of lower class status, the seminar focused its mission on serving “those publics which are not otherwise being serviced,” even if this audience is “small.” To do so, the seminar established a plan to create a central service for sharing programming and, more long-­term, to create “an financed program-­ producing center.” Hudson educational network and well-­ chaired the second seminar, setting a goal of “lifting program people, for a fortnight, out of their day-­by-­day routine of broadcasting for the purpose of helping them in testing and resetting their sights, the obvious and most promising



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method was to bring them into contact with fine minds, each of which was a specialist in a field educationally and socially important” in the manner of “a master–­student relationship.”96 To provide a sense of what the sessions were like, Hudson offered the example of Professor Walter R. Agard speaking about how to bring great literature to radio. Agard spoke of literary work as an art that is best represented in its entirety to “evoke in the listener a sense of growth and achievement,” which might include a series on “the great literature of history” or a chronological study of authors “such as ‘The Development of Ibsen as a Dramatist.’”97 In his history of educational television, John Powell recounts that the longtime NAEB members were resistant to these Ivy League visions from those with little experience in educational broadcasting. For the experienced NAEB broadcasters, Powell recounts, the “University of Chicago, ‘the Harvard of the Middle West,’ was an alien breed from the land grant universities whose radio stations performed a variety of extension services for the farmers, housewives, workers, and business­men across their states.”98 Reflecting the cultural sensibilities of the Allerton House seminar organizers, Hennock promoted educational television’s potential to “bring the world’s classics into the living room.” With the professional direction of theatrical luminaries such as “Margaret Webster or Lawrence Olivier,” and “under the guidance of a brilliant Shakespearian scholar such as the late Professor Kittredge of Harvard,” Shakespeare, Hennock professed, “can become as vibrant as any contemporary dramatist and compete for listener attention with any murder mystery or Western.”99 She expressed disdain for commercial radio and television and campaigned for an educational alternative to counteract commercial broadcasting’s harmful effects. At the 1951 Institute for Education by Radio conference Hennock argued that “it would be a double tragedy if TV were to go the way that too much of commercial radio has gone—­developing patterns and formulas that remain untouched by passing years and changing times and tastes—­ keeping many of its listeners in a never-­never-­land of soap operas, disc jockeys and give-­aways.” “Our experience with television—­short though it may be,” she continued, “should have convinced us of the harm that can result from unwise and unintelligent programming—­perhaps even the eventful degradation of our national tastes and standards.”100 Hennock did not believe that commercial broadcasters were hoisting unintelligent programming on an otherwise intelligent audience. Instead, as she elaborated at the 1950 Institute for Education by Radio conference, commercial broadcasters “turn to the lowest common denominator approach, because that is the intellectual level of the public mind and that is the reason for the mediocre product you get on the air.” For Hennock, a more democratic society required the leadership of educators in television to counter mediocrity and

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“attain a cultural level in keeping with the heritage of our great democracy.”101 She referenced Harry Overstreet’s contemporary best-­seller The Mature Mind in legitimating this hierarchical rationale for educational television. Overstreet argued that adults are psychologically immature and must “maturely appraise themselves” through “asking experts to come and open up to them the new knowledge about the human mind and character that has been brought to us: psychologists, psychiatrists, physicians, anthropologists, sociologists.”102 With little elaboration, Overstreet labeled “radio actors,” “singers,” “comedians,” “commenters,” “quiz masters,” and “advice givers” as “mediocre.”103

Hennock’s understanding that the “public mind” did not possess the required maturity to participate in democratic governance without the guidance of formally educated experts and professionals characterized much thinking among broadcast policymakers in the 1940s and early 1950s. Recognizing that behavioral scientists were defining such hierarchical relations as integral characteristics of American democracy draws attention to the logics of inequality that informed the pluralist discourse on democracy during this period. The historical relevance of exposing this hierarchical way of thinking about democracy is not to legitimate commercial structures of broadcast television as democratic or to suggest that alternative funding structures or non-­commercial channel designations were inevitably elitist. It is not to assume that the working classes did not enjoy classical music or public affairs discussions, or that soap operas were not driven by profit motives. Instead, it is to ask how qualification to make aesthetic judgments about what constituted a democratic broadcast culture was asserted and contested. It is to consider discourses about democracy and the public interest, about normative values including competition and localism, and about forms of commercial and non-­commercial broadcast culture within a critical analytic of equality. This method of equality asks how perceptions about unequal qualification to participate in democratic governance were intertwined with hierarchical aesthetic judgments about culture and about persons by way of their socioeconomic location in the pluralist social order. Situating the beginnings of cable television within these discourses about aesthetic judgment that informed the FCC’s television spectrum allocations plan foregrounds questions of equality in considering the development of new communications technologies. Policymakers’ perspectives about technological issues including spectrum wavelengths, color TV, and broadcast transmitters and receivers cannot be separated from their disdain for soap operas, crime shows, and the masses who watched them, or from their judgments that professional qualification held sway in determining questions of public interest. While the FCC sought an allocations plan that would uplift broadcast television



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culture, the plan’s failure to bring television to many areas distant from large cities incited disputes of the FCC’s aesthetic judgments from those who sought alternative methods for gaining access to broadcast television, including through cable television. The next chapter considers how the aesthetic judgments of residents in rural areas and small cities complicate the FCC’s commitment to, and understanding of, its regulatory principles of localism and competition.

2 Contesting (In)Equality at the Margins of Television Reception

At the U.S. Senate Communications Subcommittee on Commerce hearing held at the City-­County Building in Casper, Wyoming, on December 15, 1959, Edward Craney, owner of several broadcast television stations in Montana, testified that the Helena cable television system was jeopardizing the financial viability of his Helena station, the only existing station serving the state’s capital.1 The Helena cable operator was importing signals from three network-­affiliated stations in Spokane, Washington, some 250 miles away, using a series of microwave towers. As these microwave systems increasingly dotted the expansive terrain of western states to relay television signals from big cities to small towns across the region, Craney, who represented dozens of broadcasters, warned the subcommittee that “small-­town local broadcasting may be lost with all that local broadcasting means in terms of service as a voice and outlet of the community.” And because cable television wired only the homes in the more densely populated areas of these small towns, and charged monthly fees for the service, Craney argued that cable television “is not a broadcast system for all, it is a service for a limited few, gratuitously located, and with money.”2 In questioning Bruce Hamilton, manager of the Helena cable television system, at a different hearing held in Helena, Senate Subcommittee Chair John Pastore was sympathetic to the Federal Communications Commission’s commitment to expand local broadcast service to as many communities as possible: “Let’s assume you want someone to speak for a charity drive, or the United Fund appeal, or someone wants to deliver a message for polio, and you want to hear your neighbor talk about it, or a local person running for the school committee. What are you going to do if everything is just cabled in from the big cities in different parts of the country. . . . It can’t be all entertainment.” Hamilton

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IMAGE 1.  Increasingly in the late 1950s cable television operators used

microwave towers such as this one to capture television signals from stations that were located hundreds of miles away. Notice that one microwave dish was positioned to capture the incoming signal and another to send it to the next microwave tower. Source: Searle Collection, Antennas and Towers Folder, The Barco Library, Denver, Colorado.

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IMAGE 2.  Notice that this cable television tower, circa 1960, included

rectangular antennas to capture signals from area television stations and microwave dishes at the bottom to capture television signals from great distances. Such towers relayed area and distant television signals to homes and businesses using coaxial cables. Source: Searle Collection, Antennas and Towers Folder, The Barco Library, Denver, Colorado.

replied that his cable subscribers were less interested in television originating from Helena than they were with having access to multiple network-­affiliated stations: “Our people feel that the ultimate right rests with the people to choose whether the broadcast service is more desirable to them or the CATV service.”3 Such disputes between broadcasters who spoke of the value of television as an outlet for local community expression and cable operators who defended their subscribers’ “right” to pay for imported signals from distant network-­ affiliated stations preoccupied the attention of Congress and the FCC throughout



C ontesting ( I n ) E q uality 6 5

the 1950s. When the FCC implemented its television spectrum allocations plan in 1952, FCC Chair Wayne Coy predicted that by 1956 1,500 stations would be in operation. But the engineers and economists who had warned the FCC about the technological and economic problems of assigning stations in the VHF and UHF portions of the spectrum proved prescient.4 By 1956 only 504 commercial stations and 31 educational stations were operating in just 325 of the over 1,300 communities that received reserved frequencies.5 By 1960 only 79 UHF stations were operating, a decrease from a peak of 127 stations in 1954.6 Multiple committees within both houses of Congress held over a dozen hearings to confront the slow expansion of television, particularly in areas outside of major metropolitan areas.7 To accommodate residents in these more remote areas, the Senate Communications Subcommittee on Commerce took the unprecedented step of holding hearings in Casper, Helena, Idaho Falls, Salt Lake City, and Denver.8 These congressional hearings offer significant historical records for considering the material realities of television’s uneven expansion and the contestations over the social and cultural value of television in these areas on the margins of television reception. As the exchanges above reveal, cable television incited conflicting perspectives about whether regulations should protect local stations as outlets for community expression or allow cable television to import signals from multiple network-­affiliated stations. Was television to give voice to local charities and civic leaders or give residents access to network entertainment? Was television a public medium to be distributed widely and equitably or a consumer product to be sold to individual consumers? What the hearings reveal is that answers to these questions are contingent and varied across geographic locations and among residents who have uneven access to participate in defining the social, cultural, and economic relations of television. I approach these questions through giving attention to the dynamics of equality and inequality in four contexts. In the first, I consider the meaning of “community” as it circulated among federal administrators, lawmakers, and, most prevalently, television broadcasters. As Senator Pastore iterated, community connoted a geographically bounded space where charity organizations and civic leaders spoke to, and heard from, residents about matters of common concern. I situate these often generic and idealized articulations of a community that circulated widely at mid-­century within anthropological studies of small and medium-­sized cities. Though anthropologists and sociologists set out to study the totality of social relations in these cities to reflect life in a typical American community, their choice of cities and concluding remarks marginalized working-­class, ethnic, minority, and Black perspectives. These studies catalogued class hierarchies but focused on consensus rather than conflict, and class mobility rather than the persistent inequalities among classes. With themes that included group hierarchies, consensus building, and community stability,

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these studies contributed to, and were widely cited in, the literature on pluralist democracy. Senator Pastore’s statements and those of broadcasters invoked these pluralist themes as ideals to be realized through local television. While these circulating understandings of community exposed the pluralist logics of inequality that informed the FCC’s localism goals, the statements of cable operators and subscribers promoted neoliberal rationales that legitimated the stratification of access to television. Despite cable television’s limited availability to those who lived in the more densely populated city grids and who could afford to pay monthly subscription costs, cable operators asserted a “right” to offer a competitive service and subscribers claimed a right to pay for cable without government interference. In this second context I trace how these cable proponents compared choosing to pay for cable with selecting products off store shelves and reduced what they called the “American way of life” to market relations. In the third context I consider contestations over the economies of scale of television. When independent retail merchants testified about the importance of advertising on local television to promote their businesses they exposed conflicts over the increasingly regional and national scales of economic development. Chain retail stores and supermarkets took advantage of scale economies to lower prices while national broadcast networks facilitated the national promotion of branded consumer products. But local merchants had difficulty accessing local television to promote their more personalized level of customer service as network affiliate contracts limited the time local stations could devote to local advertising and cable operators imported programming and advertising from distant cities. Against such practices, independent merchants asserted a right to participate in defining the economic rules of television, as did local and state governments, despite the FCC’s claimed jurisdiction over television as a form of interstate commerce. Lastly I look to the rural communities that erected booster antennas to rebroadcast or “boost” television signals from distant cities. Unlike the profit-­ oriented cable systems that wired homes individually, these mostly volunteer, non-­profit, or publicly subsidized booster antennas entailed more collective responses that sought to bring television to everyone in economically marginalized rural areas. Defying an FCC that banned these boosters, rural residents spoke of television as a valued recreational activity and a necessary service to maintain property values and attract tourists and new residents. In claiming a right to access television as a recreational entitlement, these booster communities challenged the neoliberal rationales of cable operators and the pluralist community ideal of social scientists and federal officials. In emphasizing these contestations over the right to participate in defining the economic rules of television in areas on the margins of television reception, in this chapter I



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complicate policymaking and policy histories that prioritize normative goals such as “localism” and “competition” over questions about economic democracy.

Local Broadcasting and the Pluralist Community Ideal Just two years after the FCC initiated its 1952 spectrum allocations plan, the Senate Subcommittee on Communications held hearings to consider the difficulties that UHF broadcasters were experiencing in establishing and maintaining stations in small and medium-­sized cities. A typical example was Raymond Kohn, president and general manager of a UHF station in Allentown, Pennsylvania, who requested that the FCC reduce the signal radius of the three VHF stations in Philadelphia to twenty miles so that his UHF station in Allentown, located sixty miles northwest of Philadelphia, would not have to compete with these stations. He testified that “from the New England town meeting down to today the opportunity for a community to have the facilities to express itself has been a vital factor in preserving our ideals of democracy.” An Allentown station, Kohn continued, could allow “churches to spread their influence,” educators to “enlighten” the “whole community,” “public service institutions” from the “Red Cross” to “Little League Baseball” to promote their activities, municipal officials to talk about local ordinances, and “local and regional merchants to advertise their products and services.” Kohn concluded that “there are hundreds of Allentowns across the Nation to which each of our thoughts is equally applicable,” and that in every town a television station “should and can be at the very center of every activity, the sounding board and the mirror of a community’s whole personality.”9 These references to local broadcasting as an essential service for realizing the New England town hall democratic ideal were prevalent among broadcasters who testified at the congressional hearings. As with Kohn, broadcasters often invoked this ideal in generic terms that applied everywhere, and frequently included local religious, educational, business, and civic leaders communicating to residents, and charity organizations and youth groups promoting their activities. Such depictions reflected pluralist understandings that democracy in the United States consisted of overlapping group relations and that group leaders played a significant role in mediating these relations. More specifically, these idealizations of democracy reflected the themes and concerns of the widely circulating anthropological studies of community life that proliferated at mid-­century. These empirical studies informed, and were frequently cited in, the literature on American pluralism. These studies’ research goals, methodologies, and conclusions provide a significant context for understanding the meaning of community and democracy that circulated in the congressional hearings.

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In a departure from early twentieth-­century urban sociology that studied segments of city populations, including immigrants, working girls, and Black migrants, community studies researchers set out to examine the social relations that existed in the city as a whole community.10 As Robert and Helen Lynd put it in their influential studies of Muncie, Indiana, their work approached the “life of the people” as “a unit complex of interwoven trends of behavior.”11 Further, the community studies researchers intended their findings to be broadly applicable to American community life more generally.12 Social scientists conceived of their research cities as microcosms of American community life, creating generic names for them including “Plainville USA,” “Jonesville,” “Yankee City,” “Small Town in Mass Society,” and the Lynds’ “Middletown.”13 Indeed, two of the most prominent and widely circulating of these studies were the Lynds’ Middletown (1929) and Middletown in Transition (1937).14 The Lynds began conducting their research at a time when behavioral political scientists began questioning democratic assumptions that all persons were equally qualified to participate in governance. These behavioral scientists, including the influential institution builder Charles Merriam, looked to social science research and qualified professionals to guide decision-­making in an increasingly complex modern world of mass urbanization, industrialization, and communication. In her analysis of the Middletown studies Sarah Igo found that from the beginning the Lynds designed their holistic study to encourage the residents of Muncie, and the residents of all American communities, to become more self-­reflective about the changes that were occurring. Igo found the Lynds’ work to be “steeped in nostalgia for a purer, simpler, even preindustrial, America” and a concern that the “personal autonomy” and “free thinking” of this preindustrial past had given way to an “artificial consumer society” and “worrisome standardization of work and family life.”15 Concerned more about the forces of mass society to disconnect residents from the “seemingly more authentic, American community,” Igo writes, the Lynds elided the class conflicts that were readily apparent to the residents of Muncie. The Lynds prioritized the ways in which “all parts of the community functioned together to create a mostly frictionless unity” through attention to “group solidarity rather than strife.” According to Igo, “the Lynds presented a culture that was bound tightly together regardless of differential amounts of power and status” through emphasizing “certain features of the town, such as Middletown’s obsession with the high school basketball team” while neglecting other aspects, “such as the attempts by the business class to steer town policies on a course to their liking.” In reaction to the 1929 Middletown volume, Muncie residents commented that the Lynds missed the class conflicts that existed between the majority working-­class population and the business class.16



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In conceptualizing the city as a unified community whole the Lynds not only obfuscated class antagonisms and the political influence of wealthy residents, they also prioritized ethnic and racial homogeneity in selecting the city and in conducting the study. The Lynds rejected more racially and ethnically diverse cities including South Bend, despite their more approximate representation of diversity nationwide. Further, as Igo found, the Lynds ignored Munchie’s 5.6 percent Black population and marginalized “immigrants, Catholics, and Jews.” Yet such marginalization was rarely discussed in the critical reception of the Middletown studies. As Igo concluded, “one of the most striking aspects of public discussion about Middletown was the speedy acceptance of the notion that the Lynds had uncovered a community reflecting the entirety of the United States.”17 Lloyd Warner and his research associates also designed anthropological studies to understand the total life of a community that could reflect community dynamics across the United States after working with Australian aboriginals. Warner’s work was influential for defining a community as an interrelated totality of socially functioning status hierarchies.18 Believing that all humans lived in hierarchically structured communities, whether “primitive” or “modern,” Warner chose Newburyport, Massachusetts, to study community status structures.19 Concealing the city’s name, Warner and his associates published five influential volumes on this “Yankee City.” Drawing from surveys, interviews, and observational data from his team of over thirty fieldworkers, he catalogued the “extreme differentiation of behavior between higher and lower social levels” to identify eighty-­nine hierarchical “statuses” that operated to maintain the social life of the community. Warner grouped these status positions into six “social classes,” from an Upper Upper Class to a Lower Lower Class.20 Warner did not consider these classes as existing in antagonist relations, as Marx had. Instead Warner conceptualized class as “two or more orders of people who are believed to be, and are accordingly ranked by the members of the community, in socially superior and inferior positions.”21 Warner considered this class ranking as “naturally and inherently a part of our complex culture,” because in a “society with a large population,” a necessary “high division of labor” means “no populous society can exist without one or more systems of rank.”22 These “naturally” existing hierarchies that distributed “rights and privileges, duties and obligations, unequally among its inferior and superior grades” were not incompatible with the “democracy of the American Dream,” Warner argued in his study of Morris, Illinois, released in 1949 as Democracy in Jonesville. What mattered was that “able men who obey the rules of the game have ‘the right’ to climb” the “ladder” of the “social-­class system.” Climbing the status ladder

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required the individual to exercise “social techniques” that change “the way he thinks and feels and acts” so as to “‘fit’ into the pattern of behavior acceptable in the social class into which the individual is moving.” This required “interrelated and interdependent” behavioral changes including furthering one’s education, aspiring to a higher occupational status, and moving from lower to higher status clubs, associations, cliques, and residential neighborhoods.23 Warner revealed his complicity in accepting that the upper classes were superior in their capacity and qualification for democratic participation by expecting lower-­class residents to model their ways of thinking, feeling, and acting on the upper class as a means to attain democratic enfranchisement. Given this complicity it is not surprising that he chose upper-­middle-­class residents for 90 percent of his respondents.24 Furthermore, by positioning upper-­class ways of life as naturally superior, ways of life that were most characteristic of white professionals, Warner represented working-­class, ethnic, and Black ways of life as inferior and in need of change for upward mobility. In analyzing the first ever strike and unionization of shoe factory works in Newburyport, Warner lamented the “lack of bond of mutuality” between management and workers. He believed the reason for the strike was that workers could no longer climb the ladder and assimilate into management positions.25 Warner found ethnicity to function as a barrier to upward social mobility but believed that with time ethnic difference would “ultimately disappear from American life.”26 This assimilation would be much slower for the “caste system” of race, Warner believed, but again, with time, the racial caste system would dissipate into the singular class system of status hierarchies.27 Though Warner believed that “a certain amount of social mobility seems structured society,” he necessary to maintain social cohesion in our class-­ acknowledged that there was limited “room at the top.” He therefore advocated for an educational system that recognized “the general fact of hierarchy” so that education can produce “a degree and kind of social mobility that is within the limits which will keep the society healthy and alive.” Education, he continued, “should aim to reach an approach to social problems which all American citizens can adopt and which will help them to deal with their inevitable clashes of economic interest in ways which will maintain cooperation among the various social and economic groups in the nation.”28 Taken together, these widely circulating community studies identified community as the totality of social relations among the inhabitants of a city that bound people together. These social relations included naturally existing status and class hierarchies that accepted the norms of upper-­middle-­class, white Protestant behavior as superior to working-­class, ethnic, and Black ways of life. In accepting that high-­status leaders exemplified a form of conduct that



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legitimated their authority in the democratic process, these community studies informed, and reflected, pluralist understandings of American democracy. Such hierarchical understandings of community were prevalent in congressional hearings over the value of a local broadcast station to American democracy. This was the case with the UHF station in Bridgeport, Connecticut, whose station owner, Philip Merryman, was the most frequent spokesperson for UHF station owners in his testimonies at several hearings from 1954 to 1958. In this city of close to 250,000 residents just fifty air miles from New York City’s seven VHF stations, Merryman had difficulty during the first three years of operation in getting more than 10 percent of local residents to purchase the UHF converters required to receive his UHF station. To support his request that the FCC grant him a VHF license Merryman brought Bridgeport community leaders with him to testify at a 1956 congressional hearing about the importance of a local television station in Bridgeport. Bridgeport was a largely industrial working-­class city that had a prominent place in the history of the labor movement. In 1915 Bridgeport munitions workers, most of whom were women, led strikes that won management concessions for the eight-­hour work day, which in turn inspired strikes throughout the Northeast and set a standard for the union movement. With such strong union support, Bridgeport was the first city in New England to elect a socialist mayor. Jasper McLevy, elected as a third-­party candidate on the Socialist Party platform in 1933, served as mayor of Bridgeport until his defeat in 1957.29 Notably, McLevy was not among the community leaders that Merryman brought to the hearing, nor were any representatives of labor unions or municipal officials. Instead Merryman brought a representative from the Chamber of Commerce and religious and charity leaders who spoke of television as a means to build community loyalty. Speaking on behalf of “most of the Protestant people in Bridgeport,” First Methodist Church pastor Dr. William Anderson said that “America is made up of a group of communities, and I think that our sense of national unity grows out of our loyalty to our own local community.” Additionally, according to a Red Cross representative, building loyalty through television required giving voice to civic leaders “to develop a social and civic responsibility” and to set the “tone of culture and intelligence,” which was a “rough job” in “industrial communities like Bridgeport.”30 Furthermore, just as the anthropological community studies subordinated the place of Black members of the community, the owners of UHF stations rarely mentioned Black residents. This was particularly glaring given that these hearings followed in the wake of the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education that found segregated schools unconstitutional, the brutal murder of the fourteen-­year-­old Emmett Till in 1955, and the Montgomery bus boycotts

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in 1955 and 1956. In the few instances when UHF broadcasters made reference to Black residents or viewers, they mentioned a single locally produced entertainment or sports program to demonstrate the ostensible inclusivity of their station’s programming. For example, at a 1954 congressional hearing Merryman mentioned that “the most popular Negro personality in this area produces a weekly half hour variety show.”31 John Johnson, former FBI “special agent” and owner and general manager of a UHF station in Winston-­Salem, North Carolina, boasted that “in a city where almost 50 percent of the population is composed of Negroes,” the station airs a weekly “hour-­long Negro talent program” that was the only “regular all-­Negro television program” in the state.32 Not surprisingly then, coverage of the civil rights movement, particularly in the South, would not come from local broadcasters but from the national broadcast networks. As Steven Classen has written, local broadcasters in the South would invoke local community autonomy to defend their practices of replacing the network’s civil rights coverage with local pro-­segregationist programming.33 Indeed, such acceptance of segregation as an essential aspect of community life in the South led Johnson to boast that the station’s locally originated “live Golden Gloves boxing matches” have “stimulated tremendous interest in boxing in our white and colored schools and YMCA’s in Winston-­Salem.”34 Recognizing that the discourse of community among broadcast station owners reflected the hierarchical thinking of the widely circulating anthropological community studies does not mean that these were the only discourses that defended the importance of local stations to residents, as I discuss later. Instead, the point is to recognize the significance of the pluralist community ideal to understanding the value and meaning of community among broadcasters, FCC members, and members of Congress who remained committed to prioritizing local broadcast service. Further, the pluralist community ideal was not the only hierarchical logic of inequality that circulated in the hearings, as the statements from cable operators and subscribers reveal.

Subscribing to Neoliberal Stratification As UHF broadcasters invoked the pluralist community ideal in appealing to the FCC to uphold its commitment to localism, cable operators and subscribers appealed to the FCC’s dual commitment to competition. The particularities of these defenses of competition in television reveal the significance of questioning their normative authority in policymaking. Indeed, the meaning and expressions of “competition” among these cable proponents differed from those of the FCC when it devised its spectrum allocations plan in the late 1940s. Recall from the previous chapter that the FCC believed that competition would stimulate high-­cultural alternatives to an oligarchical network broadcast culture that



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catered to the low tastes of a mass audience. Here the promotion of competition was intertwined with the hierarchical cultural judgments of policymakers and social scientists who believed that democracy, and the impressionable masses, required the cultural leadership of educated professionals. In contrast, the discourse of market competition among cable operators and subscribers was not linked to cultural uplift. Instead, this market discourse invoked classical economic laws of supply and demand as cable operators defended their practice of offering a competitive television service to broadcasting and cable subscribers defended their opportunity to choose to pay for the service, even if this disenfranchised others who did not have this choice. Cable operators and subscribers also invoked classical liberal justifications for these choices as their “right” to participate in market relations without government interference. Further, these cable proponents extended classical liberal justifications to identify laissez-­faire market relations as an “American way of life.” While such identifications expressed Cold War anti-­communist sentiments they too circulated as neoliberal rationales for living. Here, the right to buy and sell in the marketplace is not just an aspect of a free society but rather a rationale that increasingly defines all life activity as a market calculus.35 One way that the free market discourse of cable operators linked to neoliberal rationales for living was when cable operators described market activities as benefiting “the public.” In a letter submitted to the Senate Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Herbert C. Anderson, interim chairman of the Great Falls Community Television Cable Company, defended his cable television business against the opposition of the local broadcast television station owner who claimed that the cable operation threatened the financial viability of his station, the only station serving Montana’s most populous city. Anderson wrote that cable operations in Montana such as his, which imported three broadcast signals from Spokane, Washington, have developed because broadcast station owners in Montana “have not been able to bring the public what it wants.” Yet only an estimated four to five thousand residents out of the 65,000 who resided in Great Falls lived within the more densely populated city grid where cable was available. Anderson asked Congress and the FCC not to restrict cable operators because “these questions should be answered in the American way—­by free competition in the open market.”36 Similarly, other cable operators invoked free markets as a benefit to “the people” and a means to satisfy the “public interest.” Roy E. Bliss, the owner-­ operator of cable television systems in small cities in Wyoming, wrote in his statement to the Senate Committee: “Under the free enterprise system competition causes one to improve service,” resulting in a process where “the people always benefit,” a “fact [that] is basic to the American way of life.”37 Equally emphatic was Bob Magness, who had built and sold a cable television system in

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North Texas before moving to Bozeman, Montana, in 1958 to build a microwave system to import signals from broadcast stations in Salt Lake City. Believing that neither the state of Montana nor the FCC should regulate cable television, in his testimony before senators at the hearing in Helena, Magness equated free markets with the public interest: “In all industry in all States competition is the backbone of progress. It is the American way. Why should this industry be different? Why should Montana be different? What is the answer? Competition or monopoly? Public interest or private interest?”38 In opposing cable regulations, cable subscribers too made neoliberal justifications for cable television that often invoked the analogy of shopping. Although advertising-­sponsored broadcast television ensconced viewers in the shopping experience, broadcast regulations considered the airwaves a public medium and television a public service that should be universally available. Yet cable television comprised a wired infrastructure that allowed operators to control distribution to individual homes for a fee, rendering access to television much like an individual

IMAGE 3.  In mountainous areas cable operators installed microwave dishes on top of

mountain passes, such as this one on Bozeman Pass, Montana, circa 1965. This microwave station was one of many that stretched from Salt Lake City, Utah, to Billings, Montana. Source: General Collection, TCI Folder, The Barco Library, Denver, Colorado.



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IMAGE 4.  Livingston Cable TV sponsored this billboard in the early 1960s to sell its five-­station service to the roughly 7,600 city residents of Livingston, Montana. The five stations included two from Salt Lake City, two from Billings, Montana, and one from Idaho Falls (see U.S. Congress, Senate Subcommittee on Communications, VHF Booster and Community Antenna, Part 2, 1301).

Source: General Collection, TCI Folder, The Barco Library, Denver, Colorado.

choice to buy a product at a store. In opposing federal cable regulation, cable subscriber F. D. Baird, a long-­term employee of the Mountain States Telephone and Telegraph Co., said that “merchandising in this country has always been on a competitive basis where the merchants place their wares on the shelves for the public’s choice as best fitting their taste and pocketbook.” For cable television subscribers Miriam and John Stock, who wrote to oppose government regulation of cable television, interference in the commodity market of television had Cold War implications: “If I go to a grocery store and buy a steak when I want one, I don’t want anyone telling me I can’t have steak, but I can just have hamburger. That’s the way Mr. Khrushchev runs things.”39

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The socioeconomic implication here of the distinction between hamburger and steak continued to play out as cable subscribers further invoked neoliberal discourses, despite cable television’s potential to stratify access between city and rural residents. In her testimony, Helena “housewife” and “former New Englander” Priscilla Thompson stated that she “believe[d] in free enterprise” and that “patrons in rural areas cannot expect the [television] service received in the cities any more than they could expect municipal water, fire protection, telephone service, etc.” The higher economic status of those who lived in the more densely populated city grids was evident in the large percentage of letters that came from professionals, many of whom expressed little concern that rural viewers might lose access to over-­the-­air broadcast television. A Helena police court judge equated “the people” with city grid residents when he wrote that “our home station may suffer from the advertising standpoint, but until the people can have a selection of programs, I must continue to support the cable company.” Also siding with cable operators was cable subscriber Dr. G. L. Doerling of the Helena Dental Group. He wrote that it was “most difficult to understand why this group of public spirited citizens” believing in the “principles of free enterprise so vital to our progress and natural development” should be “discriminated against” by a “Federal bureau to regulate and extract fees from a growing industry.”40 Disputing these neoliberal rationales for stratifying access to television were rural residents who invoked television access as a right. Henry Dullum, head of a veteran’s organization in Helena, expressed concern that “the many bedridden, sick veterans at Fort Harrison,” just outside of Helena, can only receive reception from “a free TV station” and that issues such as a current “strike” in East Helena would not be covered without a local station. Others living beyond the cabled city neighborhoods invoked the Montana state legislature’s decision to declare access to television for all Montanans an equal right. A woman from Clyde Park, Montana, wrote to the editors of the Park County News that “thousands of letters . . . from Montana rural and small town areas” were sent to state senators “to keep us from being cut off from TV viewing entirely because of these out-­of-­state stations getting control in Montana.”41 Local farmer’s unions and granges uniformly supported restrictions on cable television to protect local broadcast stations. The value of local broadcasting for these farmers was less about maintaining pluralist community relations than about having access to programming that was relevant to their occupations. A number of granges in the Magic Valley of Idaho wanted local broadcasts depicting “the different phases of farming” to continue. The director of information at Montana State College worried about losing the regional programs that connected with rural residents including the Town and Country Show produced by



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the Agricultural Extension Service and shown on Butte station KXLF-­TV.42 Also disputing neoliberal rationales were small businesses.

Small Business and the Right to Define Economic Relations in Television At a 1943 Senate hearing concerning the FCC’s new “chain broadcasting” rules to loosen the broadcast networks’ contractual control over their affiliated stations, Montana Senator Burton Wheeler told FCC Chairman Fly that “small advertisers” had complained that “larger manufacturers” had priority in buying time on local stations and that the new chain rules did not address this bias. In response, Fly defended network broadcasting’s congruence with broader forces of economic nationalization: “The big corporation—­you might say, the one of Nation-­wide activity and of Nation-­wide influence—­is here to stay. Now, the upshot of all that is that they are the people that can put the dough on the barrel head and can get the time across the nation, and it is much simpler for a network to operate that way, and conceivably it is more profitable.” Unsatisfied with this response, Wheeler responded, “While we have been giving lip service to the small businessman, the tendency, and particularly during this war period, is to build up the bigger corporations into bigger and bigger units and to wipe out the smaller businessman all over the country.”43 His concern for the plight of small business reflected trends that included more than a half million small retail, service, and construction businesses closing down between 1939 and 1944 while corporations with 10,000 or more employees increased their proportion of total employment from 13 percent to 31 percent.44 Wheeler’s defense of small business and critique of Fly’s corporate liberal position came from his long career as a Midwestern progressive. Though a supporter of Roosevelt’s New Deal redistributive ethos, Wheeler was critical of Roosevelt’s corporate liberal solutions to managing the economy and held more populist views. As a Montana State legislator in 1910 Wheeler supported the mine workers in his state and ran for governor of Montana in 1920 on the Nonpartisan League ticket, which advocated for state control of mills, grain elevators, and banks to fend off corporate interests. In 1924 Wheeler broke from the Democratic Party to run for vice president in 1924 with Robert La Follette on the Progressive Party ticket on a platform that advocated for government ownership of railroads and electric utilities, support for small farmers and labor unions, protection of civil liberties, and opposition to U.S. imperialism.45 Wheeler’s concern for small businesses to have access to advertise on television was urgent given the diminishing availability of time on local television stations for local small business advertisers, particularly during the primetime evening hours. A congressional investigative report found that from

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1950 to 1960 local advertising as a proportion of advertising time on television decreased from 45 percent to 26 percent, and most of these local ads ran during the daytime. By 1961, only sixty to eighty seconds of the twelve minutes of advertising time per hour in the evening was available to non-­network advertisers. Independent retail merchants increasingly advertised on radio, but reaching large audiences in the evening was difficult because radio listeners tuned in for an average of thirty minutes while television viewers watched for over three and a half hours. In smaller markets often bypassed by national advertisers, small business, and in particular, independent retail merchants, had more access to advertise on television according to a congressional study conducted in 1955 and 1956.46 But in nearly half of these small markets with a cable operator, the operators did not carry the local television station, which further limited small businesses to reach area residents through advertising on television.47 The Helena case mentioned at the beginning of this chapter exemplifies the negative impact that cable operators had on station-­area retailers. Edward Craney, the owner of a network-­affiliated station in Butte, some sixty-­five miles to the southwest of Helena, received a license to operate a television station in Helena, a city with fewer than 20,000 residents. The Helena station carried most of the programming from its sister station in Butte, but added an hour of local programming per day, and replaced advertisements from Butte-­area sponsors with those from Helena merchants. Before the Helena station began broadcasting, a Helena cable television system began importing television signals from stations in Missoula, Great Falls, and Butte for 2,100 subscribers in the city’s more densely populated area. Soon after the Helena station went on the air, however, the cable operator dropped the Butte station and added three more network-­affiliated signals from Spokane, Washington, some three hundred miles away. The result, as Craney’s sales manager testified, was that many of the seventy-­five merchants located in Helena’s downtown shopping district cancelled their advertising contracts with the station because of the loss of exposure to those with cable subscriptions, a particularly valuable clientele for some merchants because they included the wealthier “brackets who can afford the cable.”48 For some of the Helena retailers who continued to advertise on the Helena station, the station sales manager continued, the cable system’s importation of advertisements from Spokane created problems for “the small local rural market trying to compete with the metropolitan market.” In one case, a chain tire dealer in Spokane advertised a tune-­up special of $19.95 during the popular Wednesday night fights, which lead Helena cable subscribers, who were charged $26.95 at the affiliated chain tire dealer there, to demand the same price. After the FCC denied the Helena station authority to boost its signal to reach other “towns in Montana 35 miles down the road” to compensate for lost viewers to



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cable television, the station ceased broadcasting in February 1959.49 The owners of the independent retailer Max & Hamm’s Thriftway Store in East Helena wrote that their lack of access to advertise on television meant their being “relegated to the second-­class citizen status.”50 In contrast to the neoliberal rationales of cable operators and subscribers, who asserted that elected officials and their constituents should not interfere with market relations, retail merchants claimed an economic right to participate that had historical precedents in the chain retailing laws of the 1930s. Following the rapid expansion of chain stores from roughly 4,500 in 1900 to over 100,000 by the early 1930s, in 1936 Congress passed the Robinson-­Patman Act to prohibit suppliers from giving bulk discounts to chain stores even if these lower prices resulted in lower prices for consumers. In justifying the rights of independent retailers to remain in business over the economic efficiency of large business and lower prices for consumers, the bill’s sponsor, Wright Patman from Texas, said: “there are a great many people who feel that if we are to preserve democracy in government, in America, we have got to preserve a democracy in business operations.”51 In addition to federal legislation, state and local governments claimed a right to participate in deciding the rules of economic activity. By 1939 twenty-­ seven states had passed chain store taxes, the first of which were implemented in southern and western states where animosities toward northeastern financial interests were high.52 Such enmity toward outside financial interests were expressed in 1958 by one Montana state senator who appealed to the FCC chair to prohibit cable systems from importing television signals from “outside the State of Montana” because they contributed “nothing in the way of employment for Montana people, nothing in the way of taxes to our counties and State, nothing in the way of Montana advertising, and nothing in the way of Montana groups entertaining or performing for Montana people.”53 These sentiments were shared among labor organizations including the Brotherhood of Railway and Steamship Clerks, who stated that “the people desire live TV, yes. But let’s get it from our Montana stations, locally owned, locally operated; and keep our own Montana market for advertising.”54 In addition to independent retailers, regional manufacturers asserted a right to access viewers through television, including a western manufacturer of cereal who complained that he could not “buy into prime time” in the eleven states that distributed his products, and was therefore disadvantaged in competing with the national television advertising campaigns of General Foods. Wholesalers were not just interested in advertising their products to consumers, but also to those who distributed their products. A representative of the National Association of Independent Business spoke of a “subsidiary effect” of not being able to purchase evening advertising time on television to reach

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“retailers, wholesalers, salesmen, et al.” who were “most likely to be viewing TV” after work.55 In asserting an economic right to advertise on local TV these independent retailers and wholesalers defended their practice of developing personal relationships with their customers against an increasingly national chain store economy that created a commodity relation between regionally and nationally branded products and their consumers. Though small independent retailers could not compete with the lower prices of the larger chain stores and supermarkets, they offered credit accounts and other personalized services that established personal relationships between store customers and store propitiators and employees.56 According to a 1953 study of local advertising on television, independent retailers who prioritized personal relationships with their customers found television to be a more effective advertising medium than radio because store clerks and owners could visually appear in their spot commercials and sponsored programs. Conversely, national consumer product companies paid for national network time and national spot ads that promoted nationally branded products. Further, the corporate manufactures of these branded products covered the cost of chain stores’ local ad campaigns that focused commercial messaging on the branded products and their prices.57 The customer relations of independent retail merchants were significant to the working conditions of store owners and their employees. In his study of a “middle-­sized city,” sociologist C. Wright Mills found that “fifty-­three small merchants and salespeople . . . almost unanimously knew personally the people they served and were very ‘happy’ about their work” in large part because of the “communalization between buyer and seller: 63 per cent spontaneously mentioned enjoyment at contacting their public, which is twice as high as for any other single reason for liking their work.”58 Work autonomy was another important reason for employment satisfaction. According to several studies in the 1940s many wage laborers felt increasingly powerless within large manufacturing plants and expressed a desire for the autonomy of owning a small business. Indeed, most independent retail owners were former wage earners.59 This identification with maintaining some control over one’s working conditions might explain why, according to a 1950 study, customer loyalties to independent retail stores were more prevalent with lower-­income shoppers.60 Despite all this, consideration for the right for independent retailers to advertise on television and participate in determining economic relations was subordinated in radio and television studies conducted by the FCC and social science researchers. Recall from the previous chapter that the FCC’s 1946 public service performance assessment of radio stations compiled statistics on the time allotted to advertising on stations, but did not distinguish between station-­ area, regional, or national advertising. The assessment also valued



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national sustaining programs over local station-­produced sustaining and commercial programming, the latter of which were sponsored by local advertisers. The most influential studies of radio and television conducted under the supervision of Paul Lazarsfeld at Columbia University’s Bureau of Applied Social Research exemplified national scale biases. The bureau’s two prominent studies of “radio listening” published in 1946 and 1948, and its study of “audience attitudes” toward television released in 1963, questioned survey participants about national network programming, made no distinctions between listener/viewer perceptions across geographical regions, and made no reference at all about station-­produced programming or local advertising.61 These researchers’ class sensibilities were less aligned with wage earners and small business than with a professional class invested in uplifting radio and television culture. Reflecting upon the broader goal of these studies, in an afterword to the 1963 study, Lazarsfeld commented that the research sought to understand how to encourage those with less formal education to engage with more “sophisticated” national network programing such as “a public debate or argument by intelligent and verbal critics.”62 These social scientists too devalued national and local broadcast news because they believed without the guidance from intelligent and verbal critics, citizens, and in particular, women, rural residents, and those of low income, were susceptible to inaccurate or partial information.63 Federal administrators and social scientists missed the significance of local television news for viewers, and the importance of local advertising in establishing and sustaining station news departments. Consider the example of news broadcasting in Pittsburgh. The television set manufacturer DuMont built Pittsburgh’s first television station in 1949. Though DuMont owned stations in New York City and Washington, DC, and was attempting to create a television network, DuMont invested in the Pittsburgh station to create a profit to offset losses on its fledgling network. With the only operating VHF television station in Pittsburgh at the time, DuMont carried programs from NBC, CBS, and ABC as well as the DuMont network. The station commissioned an advertising agency to produce fifteen-­minute nightly news casts at 11 p.m. under the direction and sponsorship of Chevrolet’s national advertising agency. The station made no profits from the newscast and relinquished editorial control to the sponsor. But when local advertisers expressed interest in sponsoring news programming the Pittsburgh TV station enlisted the Fort Pitt Brewing Company to sponsor the evening newscast and used those funds to hire news and camera personnel, invest in mobile news-­gathering equipment, and, with funding from other station area advertisers, added newscasts in the morning, at noon, and the early and late evening. The station had full editorial control over the newscasts and by 1960 staffed a news director, two newscasters, two full-­time writer-­reporters, and a full-­time photographer.64

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This significance of local advertisers to staffing station news divisions was evident nationwide. A survey of 220 television stations conducted by the industry trade magazine Broadcasting in 1958 concluded that most television stations earned a profit from their news departments and that “many stations emphasized in their comments that news programming is an important audience and prestige builder as well as important public service.”65 In congressional hearings UHF station representatives testified to the popularity of local news. For example, the station manager of the UHF station in Muncie, Indiana, reported that its two nightly newscasts attracted a 68 percent share of those watching television.66 Recognizing that station area advertisers were essential funding sources for the growth of television station news gathering departments does not entail uncritically accepting these broadcast industry claims that advertising funding had no influence on editorial decision-­making or that perceptions of prestige were not predicated on hierarchical structures of value.67 Instead, I draw attention to small business advertising on local stations to expose the material contexts that were subordinated in national television research and often overlooked in FCC policies despite their priorities to promote local television service. Attention to these material histories of independent retail merchants and regional wholesalers in their attempts to advertise on local television not only recovers these contestations over access to television that have otherwise been marginalized in television histories. It spotlights questions of equality and inequality regarding participation in defining the economic relations of television. Another instance of marginalization in federal level policymaking pertained to areas where population size was too small to economically support a television station. Residents in sparsely populated rural areas and mountainous regions formed voluntary organizations to build and maintain antennas on hilltops that could pick up distant signals and then amplify or “boost” these signals for rebroadcast, a practice the FCC repeatedly refused to authorize. More prevalent than cable systems through the early 1960s, these booster antennas that extended television to everyone in these communities represent an alternative to cable systems, which excluded residents who lived outside of city grids and those who could not afford to pay. An account of the value of television to these residents in rural areas challenges pluralist community ideals and mass cultural assumptions about low-­income and rural television viewers.

Boosting Television Access as a Recreational Entitlement in Rural Areas Cable television was but one means for extending television service to areas outside the signal reach of television stations; far more numerous were “booster” antennas that captured signals from distant television stations and amplified or



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boosted the signal for rebroadcast. A congressional report estimated that there were over a thousand booster antennas in operation in the late 1950s, many of which were located in sparsely populated regions of the north central and western states.68 In contrast to the for-­profit commercial cable television systems, nearly all of the booster antennas were built by non-­profit organizations, volunteer associations, or municipal governments, despite the FCC banning their use.69 Cable operators considered the rapid rise of boosters as a potential threat to their business and pressed the FCC to shut down the unauthorized antennas, claiming that they threatened aviation safety despite the regional Federal Aviation Agency’s testifying that no interference was reported.70 Harsh economic conditions existed in many of these rural areas with booster antennas. When agricultural prices dropped in 1954 farmers had to double their

FIG. 1.  The Tri-­State Repeater Association created this map in 1959 to exhibit the loca-

tions of television stations, potential future television stations, and VHF booster stations in Montana. The large circles represent operating television stations in Missoula, Butte, Great Falls, Billings, and Glendive. The handwritten station symbols represent stations that have closed (Kalispell), stations that have struggled to remain in operation (Helena), locations that have received an FCC frequency allocation but were not developed (Missoula, Anaconda, Butte, Havre, and a second station in Helena), and areas that have not received an FCC spectrum allocation (Livingston and Glasgow). The eighty-­six handwritten and numbered circles represent operating VHF booster antennas. Source: U.S. Congress, Senate Subcommittee on Communications, VHF Booster and Community Antenna, Part 2, 959–­962.

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1944 production to stay profitable, creating what Michael Harrington described as “centers of property-­owning poverty” in the “South, the Pacific Northwest, the Rocky Mountains, and New Mexico.”71 By 1960 unemployment for non-­farm rural labor surpassed urban unemployment, and underemployment for rural laborers reached 15.6 percent.72 Economic hardships in rural areas promoted migrations to cities at a rate of a million annually throughout the 1950s.73 The economically struggling rural residents who volunteered to build these booster towers articulated different perceptions about television’s value than had federal regulators, social scientists, and cultural critics who believed commercial network broadcasting had catered to the low tastes of the less formally educated masses. In congressional hearings rural residents spoke of television as a highly valued leisure-­time activity that was worth the sweat equity required to build a booster tower. Sam McKinney of Lemhi, Idaho, testified that he and twenty other volunteers built a 4.5-­mile road up an 8,000-­foot mountain that required digging forty-­two holes for the power lines with a “‘cat’ and bulldozer” on a slope so steep “that it scared some of us to walk down.” Senator Pastore asked McKinney to address “for the skeptics who were rather critical about the necessity of television” why he and others in this small community of seventy-­five people went to such lengths to get television reception. McKinney responded that “our entertainment facilities are very limited. We can’t go to the museum or the zoo. We do have a few night spots, but that can get old and expensive, and the entertainment might not be the best.”74 Access to television entertainment in these rural areas was significant for promoting tourism. Jack Reinsch, who ran a filling station, general store, and “trailer court” in Ketchum, Idaho, testified that “in the summertime we have a lot of tourists there, old folks that come to be in the mountains [and] have TV’s in their trailers.” So he spent $3,500 to install a booster, without which he “wouldn’t have any business to start with.”75 Television access impacted property values, too. Adrian Burstedt recounted that residents of Challis, Idaho, first received television in 1957 when volunteers built a windmill-­powered booster antenna on top of a mountain to receive a signal from Idaho Falls for “about 1,000 of the happiest people you have ever seen.” Television’s value to these residents, according to Burstedt, was “not only the education and the enjoyment we get out of it” but “it has increased the assessed valuation by many thousands of dollars to have an area that we can receive television.” In one case television reception became important for recruiting workers to Palisades, Idaho. Since collecting donations to install and maintain a booster serving “60 families” in this town in south­ eastern Idaho, Lee Reinhart testified that “the turnover of personnel at the Bureau of Reclamation Dam, the Palisades Dam, has dropped to a minimum. I know several people have told me—­I work at the dam, myself—­that without the television reception in the area they couldn’t get their wives to come to this area.”76



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As an increasingly integral part of daily life and a cultural form that influenced life choices regarding place of work, residence, and travel, some municipal, county, and state governments and their constituents considered the “recreational” value of commercial television worthy of public subsidy. According to Tex Olsen, an attorney for Sevier County in Utah, the “State legislature passed a bill [in 1957] which authorized counties, cities, school districts, to finance the physical facilities to repeat a television signal and bring it in as part of the recreational program for the county and the district.” Soon after the state bill passed, the county commissioners in Sevier County, an area of small towns some 170 miles south of Salt Lake City, called for a “bond election” to fund the construction and maintenance of a booster system to capture the signal of three network-­affiliated stations in Salt Lake City. The bond passed “by a 6–­1 majority.”77 In considering television as a form of recreation worthy of public funding, Sevier County residents associated television with mid-­century ideas of recreation as a healthy community activity for adults and children. This was an extension of the recreation movement which began in the late nineteenth century with the public funding of urban playgrounds and extended into the early twentieth century to include city parks, gymnasiums, and sporting fields. During the Second World War the military organized extensive public recreational programs which carried over into the postwar period as municipal governments increased public expenditures for these facilities.78 Such conceptions of television as a healthy recreational activity contrasted with the concerns among cultural commentators, social scientists, and elected officials that television threatened the health of the nation. Television historian Lynn Spigel found in middle-­class-­oriented magazines concerns that television encouraged passive and addictive viewing behaviors in children which “would reverse good habits of hygiene, nutrition, and decorum, causing physical, mental, and social disorders.”79 By the late 1950s social scientists had conducted volumes of research on television’s effects on children, almost all of which identified some form of negative or potentially negative effect, including lowering school performance.80 In the mid-­1950s and again in the early 1960s Congress called hearings to consider connections between television and juvenile delinquency.81 Further, boosting commercial broadcast signals as a recreational public subsidy constituted a different understanding of local community participation than the pluralist community ideals that were widely expressed in anthropological community studies, FCC localism rationales, and broadcast station owner testimonies. Instead of valuing television as a local communications medium to instill a sense of community solidarity among stratified classes and races, booster systems entailed collective solutions for bringing rural communities a recreational resource that was otherwise concentrated in large cities. This is not to suggest that residents in Sevier County or other communities with boosters

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valued television only as a recreational activity, or that they were not dissatisfied with television’s range of programming or concerned about harmful effects. Rather, it is to recognize that perceptions about what constituted community relations were varied and often incompatible with the FCC’s standardized and rigid spectrum allocation table, which attempted to maximize local service to foster civic community relations. Most significantly, in defying FCC regulations these residents who erected boosters in economically marginalized rural areas, whether though bond initiatives, non-­profit organizations, or volunteer contributions and labor, claimed a collective entitlement to access television that disputed the neoliberal rationales of cable proponents. Indeed, the Sevier County seat of Richfield had a cable television system prior to the bond election. But when the booster system included a collective funding mechanism to extend television to all residents within signal range, the shared costs rendered obsolete the cable television system, which charged subscribers $150 for installation and $3.85 per month for access to just two Salt Lake City stations.82 Over the long term, however, the booster systems had more tenuous funding mechanisms than cable television and would not continue to provide a collective funding base for extending television to remote areas. For those invested in extending television’s reach for profit, cable wires attached to individual homes provided the necessary infrastructure to control access on a per-­ subscriber basis. Collecting payments from residents receiving boosted signals over the air was technically and feasibly prohibitive, especially given that the FCC prohibited the use of booster antennas. Yet what remains significant in recovering this history of booster antenna use, as well as the struggles of small businesses to access television and rural residents’ opposition to cable television, is recognizing them as assertions of equality to participate in defining the economic relations of television. These moments of economic democracy disputed the logics of inequality that informed the pluralist understandings of local community relations that propelled the FCC’s spectrum allocations policy and the neoliberal rationales of cable operators and subscribers. In defining the public interest in television as a leisure time entitlement, as did booster antenna communities, or as a right to reach local area customers, as did independent merchants, these contexts located at the margins of television reception disputed the pluralist and mass culture rationales that informed the discourse of public interest among federal officials and social scientists. These disputes over the right to participate in determining the economic relations of television, and over qualifications to define the public interest value of television culture, intensified in deliberations over whether or not television stations or cable providers could make programs available only to those willing and able to pay a fee to receive them.

3 Pay-­TV Orders

In the 1930s, long before the pay-­TV channel HBO launched its service in Wilkes-­B arre, Pennsylvania, on November 8, 1972, with a hockey game and a Hollywood movie, a number of electronics developers created signal scrambling devices that enabled broadcasters to charge individuals to pay to unscramble programming. In 1949 and 1950 these pay-­TV device-­makers petitioned the FCC to authorize technical tests and later to conduct more extensive tests, including a three-­year trial in Hartford, Connecticut, that TV trials that used over-­ the-­ air began in 1962.1 In addition to these pay-­ broadcasts, experiments in pay-­TV using cable wires were conducted in Palm Springs, California, in 1953; Bartlesville, Oklahoma, in 1957; Toronto in 1960; and Los Angeles and San Francisco in 1964. In December 1968 the FCC authorized the nationwide use of pay-­TV for over-­the-­air broadcasting but limited pay-­TV from showing motion pictures released in the prior two years, sports programming that had been aired live on commercial broadcast stations during the two preceding years, and series and serial programs similar to established genres aired on network broadcast television. In 1970, the FCC applied these “anti-­siphoning” rules to pay-­TV on cable television. However, in a 1977 landmark HBO case, the Supreme Court ruled that these programming restrictions exceeded the FCC’s jurisdiction and violated cable operators’ First Amendment rights.2 Historical accounts of this decades-­ long delay in lifting restrictions on pay-­TV have faulted the FCC for its bureaucratic incompetence and for capitulation to broadcasters and movie theater owners who sought to protect their businesses against competition. Otherwise, according to this historical narrative, the Hollywood studios and other “ambitious entrepreneurs” such as HBO would

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have developed pay-­TV alternatives to commercial network broadcasting much earlier than the late 1970s when the FCC lifted pay-­TV restrictions.3 I propose a different account of pay-­TV history that identifies cultural hierarchies, not industry lobbying, as most relevant for understanding the political significance of this history. I trace how positions on pay-­TV intersected with conflicting perceptions about the value of commercial broadcast television in postwar America and about the equality of people to make aesthetic valuations. I begin by situating the pay-­TV debates within a broad concern among social scientists, political leaders, and cultural critics about the effects of “mass culture” on the stability of American democracy. For these critics, commercial broadcast television culture favored the low tastes of the masses and underrepresented the “superior” tastes of the professional classes whose cultural leadership was thought important in pluralist democracies. For these cultural elites, individual viewer payments for programs could potentially generate revenues for high-­culture alternatives including performing arts concerts. However, a number of organizations representing low-­income residents and municipal governments disputed these cultural rankings through defending the value of commercial broadcast television. In opposing pay-­TV, organizations representing low-­income residents claimed a collective ownership in television through their investments in television receivers that they believed entitled them to a right to determine the economic relations of television. Bed-­ ridden disabled veterans and senior citizens spoke of television as a constant companion that they should not have to pay for. Women’s groups opposed pay­TV through defending the value of the daytime programming that mass culture critics and most lawmakers despised, while manual laborers spoke of the importance of television as a valued leisure-­time activity to unwind after work. City mayors defended their jurisdiction to regulate pay-­TV to protect downtown areas from losing the movie theaters that anchored commercial districts and to protect the right of local residents to watch hometown sports teams on free TV. Attention to this opposition to pay-­TV from groups representing marginalized communities not only restores these voices to histories that otherwise overlook or discount them. It also situates the history of pay-­TV policy as a terrain where hierarchies of cultural valuation and aesthetic competence were constituted and contested, and recognizes that these contestations represented moments when marginalized communities asserted an equality to participate in determining the socioeconomic relations of television.

Restoring Pluralist Order in “Mass Culture” Just as Congress deliberated the prospects of pay-­TV in the late 1950s, publishers released a number of books contemplating the emergence of what had



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become known as “mass culture” and its impact on American culture, society, and democracy. The most prominent of these was a collection of papers by the thirty-­one participants who gathered for a symposium on “mass media” in June 1959 at a resort in the Pennsylvania Poconos sponsored by the left-­liberal Tamiment Institute and Daedalus: The Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The papers of these participants, who included academics from the behavioral sciences, sociology, history, and philosophy, media industry representatives, journalists, and artists, were published in Daedalus and subsequently in hardcopy in 1961 and in paperback printings in 1964, 1965, 1968, and 1971.4 In summarizing the issues of concern to the symposium participants, behavioral scientist Paul Lazarsfeld wrote that “everyone is concerned with two main problems: What happens to highbrow culture in mass society? And what does the great increase in middlebrow culture do to people?” Not everyone agreed on the answers to these questions. While many academics expressed concern about the loss of elite cultural authority with the emergence of television, CBS President Frank Stanton defended television’s record of high-­quality programming, from broadcasts of Leo Tolstoy’s Family Happiness to airing the New York Philharmonic. Some participants believed that middlebrow and lowbrow culture were manufactured and left little room for artistic autonomy, while others thought the mass media catered to the tastes of the masses, a price to be paid for a “democratic” media. But all participants generally agreed about the superiority of the highbrow over the middlebrow, that the lowbrow had no culturally redeeming value, and that cultural taste largely corresponded to socioeconomic status. As Lazarsfeld asserted, “a simple classification of the population by education or by some index of social economic status permits reasonably safe predictions of what people will select on their television sets or do with their free time.”5 Such classifications of persons according to their capacity to make judgments reflected the hierarchical classifications that were central to pluralist conceptions of democracy. These hierarchical classifications were most explicitly elaborated in the symposium’s keynote address given by the prominent University of Chicago sociology professor Edward Shils. In identifying people’s uneven capacity to make aesthetic judgments, Shils argued that the “fundamental categories of cultural life are the same in all societies” due to the intrinsic “disparity in human cognitive, appreciative, and moral capacities.” He identified three hierarchical levels of culture and associated these levels to a person’s socioeconomic status. Highbrow, or in Shils’s terminology, “superior” or “refined” culture was “distinguished by the seriousness of its subject matter,” the “acute penetration and coherence of its perceptions,” and the “subtlety and wealth of its expressed feelings.” Superior culture included “the great works of poetry” and “history, economic, social, and political analyses.” The “chief consumers”

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of superior culture were “those whose occupations require intellectual preparation, and in practice, the application of high intellectual skills” including “university teachers, scientists, university students, writers, artists, secondary-­ school teachers, members of the learned profession (law, medicine, and the church), journalists, and higher civil servants, as well as a scattering of businessmen, engineers, and army officers.” Middlebrow, or “mediocre culture,” he continued, was “less original” and more “reproductive” than superior culture. The “middle classes” comprised the “bulk” of mediocre media consumption that included “popular periodicals,” “inspirational works of theology,” and the “largely philistine” culture of “films and radio, and most recently, television.” Lowbrow or “brutal culture,” according to Shils, lacked “symbolic elaboration” with no “depth” or “subtlety” including “crime films and television spectacles, paperbacks of violence, pornographic oral and printed literature, and the culture of the world of sports.” “Much” of this brutal culture, Shils observed, was consumed by “the industrial working class and the rural population.”6 Within this mass society comprised of these hierarchical tiers, the “problems of superior culture,” Shils worries, are “the maintenance of its quality and influence on the rest of society.” To do so, “superior culture must maintain its own traditions and its own internal coherence” as intellectuals “contend with church, state, and party, with merchants and soldiers who have sought to enlist them in their service and to restrict and damage them in word and deed.” Intellectuals also must resist “philistine Puritanism and provincialism” and the “populism of professional and lay politicians.”7 Shils’s priority to maintain superior culture’s distinctiveness was shared by Bernard Rosenberg, an editor of a collection of essays released in multiple printings between 1957 and 1975 titled Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America that included fifty-­one essays from literary critics, journalists, and academics. Rosenberg, an editor of the left-­liberal journal Dissent, worried that mass culture “dehumanized” people and threatened to make “indistinguishable” the “sacred and the profane, the genuine and the specious, the exalted and the debased.” This blurring of the high and low occurs when “Shakespeare is dumped on the market along with Mickey Spillane, and publishers are rightly confident that their audience will not feel obliged to make any greater preparation for the master of world literature than for its latest lickspittle.”8 For sociologist Rolf Meyersohn, writing in Rosenberg’s collection, this cultural mixing of classical literature and contemporary popular culture inappropriately blurred the distinctions among the classes, genders, and races. Television, Meyerson lamented, “contains enough ingredients to appeal to a highly heterogeneous audience” and “may explicitly cut across a number of economic and class lines by featuring, for example, essentially ‘deviant’ types in the sociological sense—­priests who know all about jazz, soldiers who can cook,



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or still cruder, little Negro girls who are champion spellers.”9 The collection also included Dwight Macdonald’s influential essay “A Theory of Mass Culture,” which labeled this cultural mixing a “slowly emerging and tepid, flaccid Middlebrow Culture that threatens to engulf everything in its spreading ooze.”10 The expansion of this middlebrow culture in the postwar period prompted Macdonald to depart from his earlier position, which he shared with progressive reformers, that emerging popular cultural forms could provide a “meeting place of the great and the small, the powerful and the weak.”11 By 1953 he believed the “conservative proposal to save culture by restoring the old class lines has a more solid historical base than the Marxian hope for a new democratic classless culture, for . . . all the great cultures of the past were élite cultures.”12 Rosenberg agreed that “a genuine esthetic . . . presupposes effortful participation,” which “not everyone can achieve,” so it was the responsibility of those who “know there are greater delectations than cultural papa and gruel” to “say so.”13 Other contributors to the collection were more optimistic that those with greater delectations could both maintain the superiority of high culture and uplift the masses through exposure to high culture on television. This was the case for David Manning White, a journalism professor who expanded on a piece he had written for the Saturday Review, a literary weekly that Macdonald admonished as middlebrow.14 The mass media, White wrote, “hold out the greatest promise to the ‘average’ man that a cultural richness no previous age could give him.” This richness, White believed, was exemplified when NBC aired Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty in December of 1955 and premiered Sir Laurence Olivier’s filmed version of Richard III in March 1956.15 The prominent cultural critic Gilbert Seldes agreed that what he called the “public arts” such as television could potentially “popularize the classic arts,” but that this would require “the managers of all our cultural institutions” to “use the public arts in order to protect our heritage of national culture.”16 Shils too believed that the bearers of superior culture had an “obligation” to infuse their cultural standards into “everyday politics” where “a mutual assimilation of center (i.e., the elite) and periphery (i.e., the mass)” could “result in an expansion of the elements of superior culture which reaches persons whose usual inclinations do not lead them to seek it out.”17 In expressing concern about maintaining the cultural authority of an elite who was thought to possess a superior capacity for aesthetic judgment and recognizing an obligation to manage the relationship between the elites and the masses, these commentaries on mass culture reflected pluralist orientations that valued the relational dynamics between leaders and their group members. In the congressional hearings on pay-­TV, similar pluralist orientations informed the deliberations. The most talked about and valued form of television in these pay-­TV hearings was performing arts concerts. Pay-­TV proponents argued that

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the more culturally discerning viewers would pay to see performing arts performances on television and infuse the arts with needed revenues. Pay-­TV opponents, including the national broadcast networks, argued that the performing arts were already airing on television and that pay-­TV would siphon these programs off free TV and deny the mass audience an opportunity to enjoy them. A consideration of the cultural politics of the performing arts on and off television gives contexts to the hierarchical values and classifications that informed questions of pay-­TV.

Performing Arts Values and Socioeconomic Orders For the mostly educated professionals who participated at congressional hearings on pay-­TV, the future status of the classical performing arts on television structured deliberations over the potential benefits and drawbacks to pay-­TV. In the first of these hearings in 1956, pay-­TV device manufacturers invoked mass culture critiques of commercial broadcast television and predicted that viewer payments for individual programs would stimulate higher quality programming, including performing arts concerts. In a 1956 press release promoting its pay-­TV device “Phonevision,” Zenith described broadcast television as a “continuous stream of 20-­year-­old horse operas and other hackneyed programs that now fill in most of the short spaces between the long commercials.”18 The Skiatron spokesperson at the hearings concurred that “advertising considerations” had “little relationship to art or culture or education,” and that viewer payments represented “a new plane of reference” that could “subsist on limited audiences” for programs such as “opera and ballet.”19 The most elaborated case for pay-­TV came from the chairman of International Telemeter, Paul Raibourn, an executive with stature through his affiliations with a number of media organizations including serving as president of the TV station KTLA in Los Angeles, director of the National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters, and vice president and director of Paramount Pictures. He argued that because television advertisers “appeal to the lowest common denominator of the mass audience,” they will not sponsor “educational programs, artistic programs, opera, good music, and other programs of high cultural value.” He went on to express concern about sustaining the existence of performing arts institutions including “opera companies, symphony orchestras, repertory theaters, and so forth,” and that pay-­TV would enable “the large television audience to contribute to the support of these nonprofit organizations.” Status mobility was at stake because without greater access to the performing arts on television, “the viewer is in no position to improve his lot.” This status order that required cultural improvement for status mobility was best maintained through consumer choice in a free market. With pay-­TV,



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IMAGE 5.  Promotions such as this one of Zenith’s “Phonevision” in the early 1960s

reveal the imagined upscale viewers and performing arts programming that would come to pay-­TV. Source: Searle Collection, Zenith Folder, The Barco Library, Denver, Colorado (also published in Cable Television Business, February 1, 1984, 24).

Raibourn pronounced, the viewer’s “choice is bounded only by his taste and his pocketbook.”20 Throughout the 1950s and 1960s classical performing arts institutions were consistent supporters of pay-­TV. Expressing concern that mass-­oriented broadcast culture threatened the right of a “minority” who appreciated the high performing arts, the manager of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra wrote in a statement to the 1958 congressional hearings that no television network had aired a full-­length symphonic concert and that a local Chicago station had reduced its forty-­five-­minute Chicago Symphony coverage from twenty concerts per season in the early 1950s to just four by 1958.21 The manager argued that “the lovers of fine music, and the producers of fine music, have a right to reasonable use of the publicly owned spectrum.” By the late 1960s as the high performing arts were under increasing financial distress, their leaders increasingly invoked democracy and cultural rights in supporting pay-­TV. In lamenting the demise of theater, ballet, and opera groups in Atlanta, and the passing of the more prevalent classical arts television programming on the broadcast networks’ Bell

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Telephone Hour and Firestone Hour, Blanche Thebom of the Southern Regional Opera seemed to suggest that while civil rights legislation had benefited African Americans, culturally sophisticated minorities had benefited less: “Democracy is dependent upon majority rule, but it must also recognize minority rights, and is doing so at this particular time in a most meaningful way in other fields and for other groups. The intellectually and or culturally sophisticated must also be served and currently, the mass media is doing less than a spectacularly outstanding job of it.”22 However, these democratic rationales for sustaining classical performing arts programs were questioned by civil rights groups as federal, state, and local funding for the performing arts increased substantially in the late 1960s and early 1970s, yet the demographic background of those attending these arts institutions had remained predominantly the white managerial and professional classes.23 This discourse of democracy and cultural rights for the “minority” of arts patrons obscured the ways in which the performing arts contributed to maintaining status hierarchies and legitimating class differences. Studies of performing arts audiences found financial and cultural barriers for lower-­income concert goers. In addition to the cost of attendance, studies found that the “social settings and ambience of high-­art presentations . . . are more familiar to, and comfortable for, the upper-­middle and upper classes than other sectors.” For example, performing arts concerts in open-­air settings such as parks attracted broader audiences in part because in “traditional performance halls” the “physical features (e.g., decor, seating patterns) and interactional rules (e.g., posture, nonverbal interaction with companions, regulation of talk during performances) are likely to be more alienating to the poor and working class.”24 According to one study, because theater-­goers are almost entirely middle and upper class, “theater-­going is a status-­maintaining activity simply because it is primarily attended by one’s peers,” where “one never sits next to an unwashed laborer or hears poor grammer [sic].”25 Further, according to DiMaggio and Useem, “Several studies report that frequent attenders are more likely than infrequent visitors to hear about arts events through their social networks, to count cultural consumers among their friends and to indicate that arts attendance is fashionable in their social milieu.”26 Not only did pay-­ TV manufacturers and performing arts organizations identify with the social milieu of performing arts patronage, so too did broadcast station owners and network heads defend their television performing arts concerts as evidence that pay-­TV was not needed. The most frequently talked-­ about broadcast program during the 1956 hearings was a recent airing of a live Broadway performance of Peter Pan starring the marquee actress Mary Martin as part of NBC’s Producer’s Showcase, which aired live “spectaculars” from the stage and other performing arts on every fourth Monday evening. The motion picture



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exhibitor’s Committee Against Pay-­to-­See TV, the National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters, and CBS all cited Peter Pan as evidence of network broadcast excellence and an example of the types of quality programs that pay­TV would “siphon” away from broadcast television.27 The value of Peter Pan and other performing arts programs for Kenneth Cox, the Senate’s special counsel to the hearings, was evident in his persistent questions about the potential for pay-­TV to siphon Broadway productions away from “free” broadcast television. CBS vice president Richard Salant too warned that “the Peter Pans and Caine Mutiny’s of the future would not be seen free but only for pay.”28 To elaborate such a loss Salant quoted from the New York Times Magazine to exemplify how this expansion of performing arts programming on broadcast television had “taken down” the “barriers that once separated the mass from the arts” where the “erstwhile hayseed is looking at the same things as the supposedly more sophisticated resident of Park Avenue.”29 But his populist rhetoric turned quickly to condescending remarks when questioned about whether viewers would pay to see the Ed Sullivan Show when they had been viewing it for free: “you know what happens when you give a lollypop to a child, or a child gets a lollypop. It is much harder to take it away after it has a few licks than it is not to give it in the first place.”30 Salant’s high-­brow tastes were shared by other broadcast network leaders, including NBC president Sylvester “Pat” Weaver, who left NBC to start a pay­TV venture. As NBC vice president of programming, in 1951 Weaver initiated a programming mission he called “Operation Frontal Lobes” to instill in the mass audience of television viewers “enlightenment through exposure” that would offer “a general indoctrination in things in which they have little interest, and under the continued impact of these things, they will broaden, and mature.”31 This included incorporating the high performing arts as segments on variety shows and as periodic spectaculars in prime time.32 By 1956 Weaver’s vision of enlightenment was not a priority for NBC’s parent company RCA, so Weaver left, first to start his own broadcast network, which never got off the ground, and in 1963 to run Subscription Television, Inc., a pay-­TV venture in California to develop programming for “specialized, not mass viewership.”33 Weaver expressed his cultural aspirations for pay-­TV in the spring of 1964 prior to STV’s scheduled launch that summer in an op-­ed in the Los Angeles Times that contrasted the future of pay-­TV with the future of commercial broadcast network television. In four years, Weaver prognosticated that STV homes would have access to “the complete civilized repertoire of the great drama of man—­ classic, Shakespeare, Shaw, Ibsen, Chekhov, the great moderns. From Broadway the event of the week may be an opening night or a memorable farewell performance, or the peak-­run coverage of a stage hit. It may be an off-­ Broadway play of distinction, a repertory offering from Lincoln Center, or such

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community playhouses as Pasadena, La Jolla, UCLA.” By contrast, “90% of their prime time service on commercial television” will remain “all essentially aimed at the same broad audience and with the same focus on a relaxed viewing habit from the people.” Individual viewer payments for TV programs, just like the attendance features of all box-­ office entertainment” including movies “paid-­ and the performing arts, “finally liberates all men and makes them part of a privilege, because to all, for very small sums, there will be available that which only the rich, the privileged of yesterday could enjoy.”34 Making “all men” part of privilege required that subscribers think differently about television. In the inaugural weekly programming guide for the San Francisco service for the week of August 14, 1964, Weaver reminded subscribers that “this is not television and we do not expect you to sit and stare at the set hour after hour.” Rather, Weaver encouraged subscribers “to study the material about each show to decide if you wish to see it,” and to “sample things you don’t usually see; for example; the Scapino Ballet.” The program guide highlighted Off Broadway plays, symphonic performances, opera, and ballet for seventy-­five cents to two dollars per program.35 However, Weaver’s high hopes for getting subscribers to pay for the performing arts were tempered by his regret that prior to his joining the company the STV leadership chose what he considered to be neighborhoods of “below average income,” a less than accurate description of Sunset in San Francisco and Santa Monica in Los Angeles that skewed toward the middle and upper-­middle respectively.36 Indicating that viewer payments for performing arts programs did not meet expectations, in a speech given to the Economics Club in Chicago on October 1, 1964, Weaver said, “The fact remains that normally with innovations in this country, naturally the people in the upper income groups who have more money and more time and more interest, are the ones who lead the way and I think that will be true in STV and other related services, so that our new areas, beyond the first one, will go into places like Beverly Hills and, when we can get up there, to Nob Hill and the other hills in San Francisco.” Though admitting that interests in the performing arts required money and time to cultivate, Weaver expressed a belief in the objectivity of the cultural valuations of the economically privileged, and an understanding that wealth inequalities were not a symptom of economic relations but of cultural dispositions that must be cultivated: “Poverty is not money, really” because if you “give people of the most modest means—­all of them have television sets—­a way for them to get a college degree at home, to go to the opera, the ballet, the highest class social shindig that anybody can go to, everybody can go to, the minute you make privilege open to all through communications, you change men’s minds. You change their hopes, you change their life view.”37



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Weaver’s intent to expand pay-­TV into upscale neighborhoods to realize his broader mission to change the “life view” of the poor was halted when an anti-­pay-­TV referendum in California passed by a 2-­to-­1 ratio in the November 1964 election. Publicity for the referendum was funded by movie theater owners who believed that movies on pay-­TV would hurt their business. Other groups supporting the referendum included the Federated Women’s Clubs of California, the AFL-­CIO, and the San Francisco mayor. The promotional campaign warned voters that “California Faces the Loss of the Best Programs Now on Free TV.” But unlike the networks who warned Congress that pay-­TV would siphon its high-­culture programs away from free broadcast television, the ads targeting California voters warned of the potential loss of “Ed Sullivan,” “Major Sports,” “Bonanza,” and “Free Hit Movies!”38 Voters had evidence to be concerned about the potential for pay-­TV to siphon sports away from broadcast television because STV held an exclusive agreement with the San Francisco Giants and Los Angeles Dodgers that offered baseball games for $1.50 per game, an agreement made prior to Weaver’s joining Subscription TV. Though the referendum was later overturned by a State Superior Court and upheld by the California Supreme Court, STV halted its service a few days after the referendum and soon filed for bankruptcy.39 Four years later Weaver continued to proselytize the transformational power of the “communications revolution” to “make the common man into the uncommon man” through making “people attend better and more rewarding things rather than trivia and escape,” including “the top cultural performing arts,” of which there is “not much in argument as to whether or not they really are good.”40 These prospects that pay-­TV could bring the performing arts to television were prominent in the Sloan Foundation’s widely circulated and influential report on cable television in 1971. The directors of the foundation’s Commission on Cable Communications, comprised mostly of university leaders and research foundation heads, were motivated by the belief that “the expansion of cable communications can mean much more to the American people than better reception and more conventional [television] programming.” Unlike the “the government” that “has been generally wary with respect to pay television” and more concerned about protecting “the viability of over-­the-­air” broad­ casting, the Sloan Commission regarded pay-­TV as “highly desirable” and recommended “the removal or minimization” of regulations that restricted pay-­TV’s growth to allow “some higher degree of individual choice.” To exemplify the potential for pay-­TV to offer choice in programming, the report offered the example of televised opera that would cater to the estimated 1 percent of U.S. residents who were “opera lovers.” By the end of the decade, the report prognosticated, “the great miracle of the cable system, in its mature state” could offer viewers

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the opportunity to pay for televised opera “without interfering with the ability of the rest of the population to see and hear what they want.” Further, individual payments of $1 per televised opera performance could finance “more and better opera.”41 The Sloan Commission also foresaw the potential for cable television to bring the performing arts to a broader 25 percent of U.S. residents through a “cultural channel” that charged viewers a more affordable one to two dollars per month for a variety of arts programming. The prestige of the performing arts would offer this “wider cultural audience” an opportunity for those “who feel no need for cultural programming themselves but believe they should have it for the sake of the children, or merely to impress the neighbor.” These perceptions that only a fraction of the American people possessed the cultural and economic resources to take interest in, and pay for, performing arts programming, that such interests required cultivation at an early age, and that such exposure facilitated prestige for status seekers revealed the cultural work of the performing arts in maintaining and legitimating class hierarchies in American society. To facilitate this status seeking through pay-­TV, the Sloan Commission recommended deregulating pay-­TV so that television culture would be “determined by the collective judgment of the whole community, worked out in the marketplace by measurable success and measurable failure.”42 Also advocating for marketplace forces to bring the performing arts to cable television were the participants at a 1974 conference on the arts and cable television that included representatives from the “humanities and the performing arts, the cable and pay television industries, public television, and the foundations.” The conference identified pay-­TV as an “electronic box office” that “would allow cable subscribers to directly support high cost, high quality programming that does not have mass-­audience appeal.” But if pay-­TV was to be available to the performing arts, it must be deregulated so that programs with more mass-­audience appeal could make pay-­TV profitable, including popular motion pictures and sports, which the FCC banned from pay-­TV. As Robert Bruce, a lawyer who had worked for the Public Broadcasting Service, and John Goberman, media director at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City, put it, “the interests of promoting ‘low brow’ and ‘high brow’ entertainment on subscription television coincide, since the successful marketing of performing arts programming may depend substantially on wide penetration of cable households by subscription services.” Here a deregulated brow programming would in market that profited from selling popular low-­ essence subsidize the performing arts programming for the minority of performing arts enthusiasts. Against charges that viewer payments went against the universal access mandates of public broadcasting, which had aired performing arts concerns for free, the authors argued that “charging viewers for special



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programming” would be no less “philanthropic” or “non-­ commercial” than operas and symphonic orchestras collecting box office revenues or universities charging tuition.43 The exigency of finding additional revenues for the performing arts through pay-­TV rather than pressing for more federal subsidies was evident in reports that federal subsidies to the performing arts had not diversified audiences, who had remained mostly white and of a professional class background. As one study found, though federal subsidies to the performing arts had increased from $2.5 million in 1966 to $149 million in 1978, and state art agencies from $1.7 million to $55 million, 56 percent of arts patrons held professional occupations, a group that represented just 15 percent of the total workforce, with less than 3 percent of performing arts patrons holding blue-­collar jobs, a group that comprised a third of the U.S. labor force. Further, most arts organizations did not keep data on the race and ethnicity of their patrons, and the few that did reported that persons identified as African American, Asian, or of “Spanish origin” represented a combined 7 percent of the arts audience.44 This evidence suggests that the cultural milieu of the performing arts continued to maintain status hierarchies through the 1970s. These projections that an electronic box office that allowed viewers to pay for individual programs would create new revenue streams for the performing arts were not realized in the years after the FCC eliminated restrictions on pay­TV in 1977. Early pay cable ventures were not conceptualized as box office admissions for single events but as monthly subscriptions to a package of programs akin to magazines, as did HBO when it launched its pay cable service in 1972 under the ownership of Time, Inc., a publishing company built on the monthly subscription model.45 There were early attempts to launch cable networks that had a substantial portion of programming devoted to the performing arts. But three of these networks, CBS cable, ABC Arts, and the Entertainment Channel, were owned by the three broadcast television networks that were to include airing advertisements as a basic cable channel rather than a commercial-­free pay­TV channel. CBS cable, the brainchild of longtime CBS president William Paley, who wanted to continue his commitment to bring the performing arts to television, lasted only a year. The other two merged to form the Arts and Entertainment Channel to combine movies, some performing arts, and other programs. Bravo began in 1980 as a pay cable network focused on international movies and the performing arts, but had a limited budget to spend on programs, and later changed to a basic cable network offering mostly movies.46 Within this commercial cable TV market, performing arts institutions found few prospects for additional revenues. In his keynote address at a conference on “Cable Television and the Performing Arts” in New York in 1981, Les Brown, former New York Times television commentator and founder of Channels

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magazine, warned the “over one hundred and thirty theatre, dance, music and opera people from around the country” that the “people who are running the cable business today are ‘in it for the big bucks’” and do not aspire to create special interest channels as an alternative to broadcasting because “narrowcasting is a myth.” The conference goers broadly agreed that “the market for the arts is relatively small” in cable TV and that gaining “visibility” rather than direct revenues was a more realistic goal in future years.47 Thus, perceptions beginning in the early 1950s that pay-­TV could provide new revenue streams for the classical performing arts did not materialize. Yet the significance of the performing arts in the history of pay-­TV is more than a case of economic miscalculation. Within the contexts of the mass culture critique that valued the superior capacity of educated professionals to make aesthetic judgments and that expressed concern that commercial broadcast culture destabilized hierarchical structures of cultural authority, the history of the performing arts in the pay-­TV policy debates is significant for recognizing the hierarchical logics of inequality and their pluralist justification that informed this history. And when the stature of the performing arts in American culture became grounds for promoting cable deregulation, these pay-­TV debates revealed the class, gender, and race privilege that informed the ideology of classical economic market mechanisms. Similar pluralist hierarchical logics informed pay-­TV proponents who promoted “common carrier” regulations and supply-­and-­demand mechanisms for pay-­TV to restore what they perceived to be a loss of individual autonomy in mass culture.

Classical Economic Myths, Common Carriers, and the Pluralist Pay-­per-­View Society One of the most frequent participants at the congressional hearings on pay­TV was the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), an organization of New Deal and Cold War liberal intellectuals and professionals who strongly supported pay-­TV. The ADA’s cultural reasoning reflected the mass culture critique of other educated professionals who believed that television, in catering to a mass audience, had marginalized the perspectives of intellectuals, credentialed experts. In a statement to the 1956 Senate Committee hearings on pay-­TV, ADA spokesmen Sidney W. Dean wrote that “many of our wisest and most objective men in public life, including educators, social scientists, creative writers, and artists, now believe that the past 30 years of experience in radio, and a few years of television, have proved by demonstration that the present economic system of broadcasting cannot satisfy the great and expanding needs for information, education, cultural, and entertainment services.”48 Of particular concern was



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finding “a practical economic mechanism for profitably serving the multitude of less-­than majority tastes and interests.”49 The economic mechanism that could best address the mass culture problem was to sell “the program unit” of “reasonable maximum length (perhaps 2 hours . . . only on an individual program or weekly cycle basis).” To justify individual payments for television programs, Dean invoked newspapers and magazines as communications media that included individual payments. Because there was “no precedent for assuming that freedom of the air requires free circulation, or no payment by the recipient,” Dean argued, pay-­TV was “completely consistent with traditional American freedom of the press.” In making the argument that viewer payments were more democratic than free broadcasting, Dean analogized classical economic logics as democratic processes: “A direct public payment for a product or service is a voluntary, selective ballot which not only measures the usefulness of that service but provides the economic incentive for invention, competition, and expansion.” Dean imagined a stratification of viewers across varied price differentials such that “a selective interest program, like a lecture or chamber music concert, might be as profitable a venture with 2 percent share of audience at $1 as a popular sports event with 10 percent at 25 cents.” This monetary stratification of access, he reasoned, was no different than the public and private educational opportunities in the United States because “not even Government itself, when it established free public education, regulated against paid private systems of education.”50 This advocacy for a privatized television marketplace conceived as a neutral classical economic space for the selling and buying of television programs seems at odds with the ADA’s membership of liberal democrats. As ADA historian Steven M. Gillon summarized, “in the two decades after its founding in 1947 the ADA emerged as the most forceful advocate of many ideas cherished by political liberals” whose “national leadership included many of the nation’s chief labor leaders like Walter Reuther and David Dubinsky; New Dealers eager to continue the Roosevelt tradition like Eleanor Roosevelt, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Robert Nathan; and prominent members of the liberal anti-­Communist Left like James Loeb, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Joseph Rauh, and Reinhold Niebuhr.”51 However, the ADA, whose members were predominantly college-­educated, middle-­class or upper-­middle-­class white men, began to chart a new course for liberalism that comprised a “vital center” between fascism on the right and communism on the left. Supporting this vital center, according to Arthur Schlesinger Jr., one of the ADA’s most influential founders, meant that in a dawning era of abundance where most Americans have already secured the “economic basis of life,” liberals should dedicate themselves to “bettering the quality of people’s lives and opportunities” through focusing on the “more

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subtle and complicated problems of fighting for individual dignity, identity, and fulfillment in a mass society.”52 As Gillon describes Schlesinger’s position, the “new issues like civil rights and liberties, the environment, and foreign policy were not economic but cultural and personal, concerned with opportunity for fulfillment moral growth and self-­ fulfillment.”53 The conditions for this self-­ were decidedly pluralistic. As one of the contributors to a 1952 issue of Partisan Review on the intellectual’s role in shaping American culture, Schlesinger commented that the “only answer to mass culture, of course, lies in the affirmation of America, not as a uniform society, but as a various and pluralistic society, made up of many groups with diverse interests.”54 To realize this pluralist group diversity the ADA since 1955 had recommended some kind of common carrier regulations for pay-­TV.55 Unlike the FCC’s broadcast regulations that gave broadcasters editorial discretion over what they aired, common carrier regulations required service providers to open their networks for others to use for a set fee, such as with telephone service. In separating the “delivery” function from the “programming” function, the ADA believed that producers compete with each other to attract individual paying consumers. As the ADA began to contemplate cable television’s “unprecedentedly high capacity and high speed capability” in 1971, they imagined that a common carrier broadband system would cater to the most specialized of interests, including “doctors or sixth grade school students or Methodists, for that matter.”56 In the early 1970s when other organizations were advocating that cable operators set aside channels for public access, Dean emphatically stated that the “ADA is completely opposed to the provision of free channels or free services of any kind to anybody.” Such free-­market evangelism under common carrier regulation was hard to accept even for FCC chair Dean Burch, who had been a champion of free markets over government regulation, including as the former Republican National Committee chairman during Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign. Incredulous that market forces existed in such classical economic purity in television, Burch retorted to Dean: “there is not a single system such as you have described in the United States, and this technology has been available for twenty years.”57 While the ADA’s pluralist sensibilities and classical economic logics informed their vision that common carrier regulations could counter a menacing mass cultural conformity, other supporters of common carrier regulations concerned about racial inequalities did not believe that free markets worked so ecumenically. In testifying on behalf of the National Urban League at the FCC’s 1971 hearing, Ronald Brown supported common carrier regulations but disagreed with “some basic assumptions of people who have appeared before the Commission” that “the open marketplace theory is what we need here and will be adequate to protect minority and low-­income people.” Rather, Brown



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argued that “the people housed in our ghettos tend to be less mobile, enjoy fewer economic options or suffer a more acute alienation from commercialism of through-­the-­air television than the rest of the population.” Pay-­TV could accentuate this, he continued, by making “amusement” a “luxury only to be enjoyed by those who can pay.” Therefore, Brown recommended a “publically guaranteed subsidy” through a “trust fund from cable television profits” or a progressive tax as had been used with electricity rates for low-­income users. He also recommended that cable systems “should be required to build and maintain a number of separate program origination centers around the community for use by the citizens in the area.”58 Also advocating for common carrier regulations in 1971 was Lowvell Dyett, representing Howard University, the historically Black college that had recently held a workshop on “urban cable television.” Speaking on behalf of the conference participants, including “41 Black elected officials,” Dyett stated that while common carrier regulations could “ensure all comers an equal opportunity to make use of the medium,” this did not mean that market forces would allow viewers to freely choose programming of their interests because “the Black community is not a rich community.” Dyett recommended that public assistance include “low-­cost, long-­term loans” for subscribers in low-­income neighborhoods and “community development corporations who initiate subscriber-­ owned cable television in the largest cities.” Far from the classical economic relations envisioned by the ADA, Dyett prioritized the collective ownership and governance of cable television akin to a “political precinct” where “the subscribers acting as a democratic group of shareholders should exercise the control over programming.”59 While other organizations with more political power with Congress and the FCC too supported common carrier regulations in the 1970s, in the years prior to 1984 when Congress declared that cable television was not a common carrier service the FCC never seriously considered applying common carrier regulations to cable television. For example, the Nixon administration’s Office of Telecommunications Policy submitted a “Report to the President” in 1974 recommending common carrier regulation for cable television, but proposed that such regulations should not apply for ten years or until a future date when cable television was connected to more than 50 percent of households nationwide, a period of time that facilitated the entrenchment of cable industry practices that allowed operators to own programming and control access to its wired infrastructures.60 For its part, in 1956 the FCC reasoned that cable television could not be regulated as a common carrier because it was not available to all of the public but was rather “a specialized service for a limited part of the public under special contracts,” a position that was upheld by the courts through the 1970s.61

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However, the question about why cable was not regulated as a common carrier is less significant than the cultural politics that informed the rationales for promoting reclassification. In posing questions about equality in assessing these cultural politics we find clear differences between the ADA and organizations representing African Americans. Reflecting pluralist logics of inequality, the ADA looked to, and shared the perspective of, the “wisest and most objective men in public life, including educators, social scientists, creative writers, and artists” to diagnose the problems of broadcast television culture. They subordinated the unequal ability for citizens to pay for TV through analogizing free markets to the ballot box. By contrast, Black participants disputed the idea that markets could operate outside of structures of racism and called for state subsidies and incentives for Black ownership and governance of cable systems. Others too opposed pay-­TV and its potential to stratify access to television. Unlike scholars who attribute pay-­TV’s long delay to the power of the movie theater lobby, recognizing the testimony of dozens of organizations representing low-­income residents restores these voices that opposed unequal access to television. These voices too counter mass culture critiques that disparage the quality of commercial broadcast television and the viewing masses whom critics consider to lack critical capacity to make aesthetic judgments.

Disputing Pluralist and Classical Economic Orders Among the frequent opponents of pay-­ TV at the congressional hearings were veterans’ organizations. On August 25, 1957, the national convention of AMVETS, a national veterans’ organization “composed exclusively of World War II and Korean veterans,” voted to oppose what they described as “one of the greatest giveaways of public property for private gain ever seen.” The AMVETS claimed equality to access television not in the abstract language that the airwaves were a scarce public resource but through the more material observation that viewers comprised the majority owners of television through their investments in television receivers. “The television industry is too frequently looked upon as the property of networks, station owners, and advertisers,” the AMVETS argued. Of the $17 billion invested in the television industry, the AMVETS figured, broadcast network and station expenditures comprised only 3 percent and advertisers 15 percent. Because the “remaining 82 percent represents the investment of the 42 million owners of TV sets,” the “American people have the greatest vested interest in this matter.”62 Though the lowest priced television receivers dropped from $400 to $200 in the early years of the 1950s, this still remained a significant amount for the 42 percent of American families, according to the 1950 Census, who made less than $4,000 per year, and the 20 percent



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who made less than $2,000. Including installation and service fees, so-­called free television was indeed a costly investment for these low-­income families.63 The spokeswomen for the General Federation of Women’s Clubs too voiced concern for low-­income viewers, but unlike veterans’ organizations, this federation included few low-­income viewers among its 750,000 paid members. At a 1956 congressional hearing, a federation spokeswoman stated that “you do not have to travel far in this country to see apartment houses with regular forests of antennas on the roofs, and we know that those sets have been purchased by families, painfully paying a little down at the beginning and so much a week for the privilege of what they believe to be free entertainment and free information.” Revealing of the Progressive Era heritage of this organization of middle-­class white women who championed volunteer service dedicated to educating and culturally uplifting the poor, the spokeswoman testified that “nothing should be done to interfere with their access to the very highest type of entertainment and information—­the panel discussions, which are a liberal education; the very high type music programs which we have; the theater.” But in addition to valuing education and high culture, the spokeswoman said she was a “fan” of Dave Garroway’s Today show and the Home program with Arlene Francis, two daytime talk shows that were overlooked as valued television programming by the men who presided over the hearings.64 Another spokeswoman for the federation reprimanded lawmakers at a 1958 congressional hearing, saying: “I am being asked by these groups of women before whom I appear, why seven men have the authority to sell our last free natural resource, the free air, the only thing seemingly that we have free.”65 Most labor unions opposed pay-­ TV for stratifying access to television according to the viewer’s ability to pay. In 1956 the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-­CIO) unanimously passed a resolution at a constitutional convention in December 1957 that “unreservedly opposed pay TV.” Invoking their members’ ownership stake in television, as had many veterans’ groups, the AFL argued that for the 46 million Americans who spent $7 billion on television sets, 13 million were labor union members. The AFL argued that pay television would “break the pledge of the Federal Government, signed into law, that television would be free,” and, in particular, “work a hardship on the low-­income part of the population.”66 Working-­class union members spoke of the value of television in their daily lives. Consider William Podgurnsky’s testimony to a 1974 FCC hearing on pay-­TV. In representing his local Southington, Connecticut, lodge as well as the 1 million members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, Podgurnsky said he and his fellow manual laborers valued television as “an entertainment medium that affords them a built-­in babysitter, a diversion from

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their daily trials and tribulations, and an escape, if you will, from the pressures of everyday grind.” Podgurnsky further elaborated that “television is something to look forward to during the arduous working day and coming home, getting a beer from the refrigerator, kicking off my shoes and sipping on that beer while relaxing before the TV set, watching a ballgame is infinitely important to the state of mind.” In addition to situating leisure-­ time activity in relation to the demands of manual labor, Podgurnsky spoke to the impact of escalating inflation to wage earners where “an after dinner drive is now a luxury,” the “cost of McDonald’s hamburgers” has risen beyond affordability, and “even the occasional movie venture has moved out of reach for the inflationary spiral.”67 Whereas these wage laborers defended television as a valued free entertainment medium for relaxing after an arduous day at work, the unions representing film and television actors prioritized the potential impact of pay-­TV on the employment opportunities for their members. The 20,000 performers with the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) expressed concern that pay-­TV would “reduce the opportunities for rank-­and-­file members” who worked in staple network genres including daytime programming for “what is known as a woman-­type audience.” In unanimously opposing pay-­TV in a resolution at their July 1955 convention, AFTRA testified that pay-­TV would be likely to funnel employment away from the three-­quarters of their members who made less than $1,000 per year and toward the “million dollar spectaculars” that paid large salaries to star performers.68 This class-­conscious defense of rank-­and-­file radio and television performers contrasted with support for pay-­TV from the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), which represented mostly motion picture actors. The more conservative SAG had since separated from the more militant Conference of Studio Unions and cooperated with the House Un-­American Activities Committee in the late 1940s. At a congressional hearing on pay-­TV in 1969, SAG president and Hollywood star Charlton Heston announced the guild’s belief in the “free enterprise society” and argued that pay-­TV would “give the public the choice of better entertainment, culture, and education in the home.”69 This especially included, as Heston elaborated at a 1974 FCC hearing, “minority programing appealing to small interest groups, ballet fans, fans of [Eugene] O’Neill, fans of Tom Sawyer.” At this hearing Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Producers Association of America, analogized this viewer choice to the democratic process: “If the American family under the Constitution will be free to choose its leaders secretly at a ballot box, surely it ought to be given the opportunity to choose their entertainment choices in their own home.”70 As SAG and other Hollywood guilds came to support pay-­ TV, the AFL-­ CIO Executive Council voted unanimously in 1967 to reverse its 1957 position against pay-­TV. In managing the “considerable diversity of opinion” among AFL



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members, the Executive Council no longer defended the entitlements of low-­ income viewers to free TV but reasoned that “the development of new programming resources would be in the interest of the viewing public.” However, unlike performing arts organizations and many common carrier advocates, the AFL supported the FCC’s restrictions on pay-­TV to ensure the continued availability of programming on free over-­the-­air broadcast television.71 Similar dynamics of class and aesthetic valuation were evident in testimony from over a dozen organizations representing senior citizens at the 1969 congressional hearings. Those supporting low-­income seniors typically opposed pay-­TV and spoke of the value of TV to their everyday lives, while wealthy seniors and those who lived in middle-­class communal environments tended to support pay-­TV to uplift television culture.72 The National Association of Retired Civil Employees representing 900,000 federal annuitants and their survivors voted to postpone legislation that would authorize pay-­TV because of concern that the three-­quarters of its members who received annuities of less than $3,000 per year could not afford the estimated $75 per year that pay-­TV would probably require. The association spoke of the importance of television in the daily lives of many of their members who “live alone” and “would go crazy” without television, which they watch for “10 to 15 hours a day.” Television was a day-­long companion for these low-­income seniors, not an occasional box office attraction.73 The perspective was different for gerontologist Mary Mulvey who was active in health advocacy for seniors at the state and national levels. Despite the price of pay-­TV programs that would probably range “between $1 and $2,” a price that would “be outside the budget of many of our senior citizens living alone,” Mulvey believed that the “free market system” in pay-­TV would offer “the finest of cultural events,” including “quality first-­run movies, opera, ballet, Broadway plays, symphony concerts, sports events,” for “segments of the population which might otherwise not be so privileged.” For seniors who could not afford pay-­TV, Mulvey argued, that “competition is healthy and in the long run . . . can only upgrade commercial television.” While this belief that pay-­TV would uplift television culture was consistent with other proponents of pay-­TV, other seniors expressed pleasure in viewing popular broadcast network programming but expressed animosity toward the advertisers who sponsored broadcast network programming. Representing the Congress of Senior Citizens in Miami, Max Friedson felt “brainwashed by the merchandising experts with the constant repetition that all of us have bad breath” and “distressed by the free-­TV making merchandising peddlers out of such fine personalities as Hugh Downs, Arthur Godfrey, Barbara Walters, Perry Como, and many others whom the elder citizens admire.” The critique of advertising-sponsored network broadcasting was not that the networks catered to a lowest common denominator, as was the charge with the mass culture critique, but that ads disrupted program narratives: “The

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free-­TV shows are so cut up by the merchant peddlers that it is most times difficult to follow even the plot of the story, and it leaves the viewer hanging in midair, much to his discomfort and frustration.”74 From the perspectives of elected officials at the municipal level, understandings of television and economic relations were not focused on national network practices but on local infrastructural concerns. Dozens of mayors from medium-­ sized and small cities in California, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin submitted statements to this 1969 congressional hearing opposing pay-­TV as a potential threat to the vitality of their downtown movie theaters. Many of these mayors reported that the introduction of television led to movie theater closures, which had a significant impact on downtown economic development. They believed pay-­TV would only accelerate these closures. Pittsburgh’s mayor opposed pay-­TV to preserve the “$1,400,000 per year from amusement taxes.” Charlotte’s mayor wrote that theater closings had “nearly eliminated tax revenues from downtown theaters.” Madison’s mayor witnessed “the adverse consequences of these closings in business districts of small communities around the state,” and did not want this to happen in Madison with the advent of pay-­TV. Indeed, smaller cities were particularly vulnerable to further theater closings because of their significance in bolstering other downtown businesses. The mayor of Belmont, California, wrote that “thousands of theater-­going patrons support our numerous restaurants and gas stations along with other local businesses vital to our American city.” In small cities with just one theater, as in the industrial town of Monessen located in southwestern Pennsylvania, the loss of the theater threatened tax revenues for essential public services including the “school budget.”75 By 1973 many mayors had reversed their position on pay-­TV as cable began to expand in major cities as a broadband conduit that could provide channels for municipal governments to communicate and deliver services to constituents. But these mayors did not perceive pay-­TV as a nationwide supply-­and-­demand mechanism to diversify programming but as a city infrastructure that should be subject to local municipal oversight. At an FCC hearing A. J. Cooper, the mayor of Prichard, Alabama, testified in qualified support for pay-­TV on behalf of the Conference of Mayors, which represented “virtually all of the cities with a population of in excess of 30,000.” However, unlike other pay-­TV supporters who invoked free-­market rationales, Cooper conceived of cable television as a public service for the “common good of the entire city,” including protecting the “public from wanton siphoning of programming” away from free TV while allowing some pay-­TV to make “low density areas more profitable to wire.” And because pay-­TV could potentially impact movie theaters and attendance at paid sporting events, the conference believed municipalities should have rights to regulate



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cable television in the interest of protecting local tax revenues. This included local authority to require pay-­TV operators to “delay films until the local run is complete” because “theaters constitute a link in our cultural and economic stability.” Further, Cooper stated that because “most sports facilities are municipally financed in whole or in part” and “the few totally private facilities . . . would not be operating today without massive spending by local governments for access and public health and safety measures,” municipalities should have authority to require a pay-­TV operator “to offer his service to residents of the community at a reduced rate from the fee charged to others outside the city.”76 Members of Congress were generally leery of the FCC’s proposals to move forward with pay-­TV experiments out of concerns that pay-­TV might siphon programs away from free broadcast television. Though these lawmakers had long denigrated the value of popular commercial network genres, including sitcoms, westerns, crime shows, and, most explicitly, shows with large women audiences including soap operas, these male lawmakers were passionate about sports and persistent in their opposition to televised sports migrating from commercial broadcasting to pay-­TV. At a House subcommittee hearing on pay-­TV in 1967 to consider a bill to ban pay-­TV, lawmakers expressed concern that Zenith’s three-­ year pay-­TV experiment in Hartford, Connecticut, indicated that pay-­TV viewers were quite willing to pay for heavyweight championship boxing and college football and basketball games. Zenith president Joseph Wright said he believed there was “great potential” in offering professional football and baseball over pay-­TV. With the passions of sports fans rather than the staid demeanor of public servants, committee members drilled Wright about the potential loss of broadcast televised sports to pay-­TV. Subcommittee Chairman Macdonald from Massachusetts emphatically stated that what bothered him the most about pay­TV was the potential loss of sports to commercial broadcast television “because sports occupies a large part of the public’s thinking,” then exclaimed, “you know the world series are in Boston today.” New York Congressman Richard Ottinger added that “along with our chairman I am a real sports enthusiast” and that “if the end result is that the general public is excluded from these events it is a bad thing.” Wright replied: “If you are suggesting really that the public has some right to see anything on free television regardless of whether the owner of that property wants to exclude it from television or not, you are suggesting something that goes pretty far under the present system.” Macdonald intervened to state that “when you say the public does not have any right it is the broadcasters who don’t have any right actually because they are operating under the regulations and the gift of the U.S. Government.” Wright did not agree: “Mr. Ottinger, the only uses I know of the airways that are purely public are perhaps educational television and Government service.” Ottinger concurred with Macdonald, stating, “I believe that any agreement which excludes a public

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attraction from being shown on certain media or blocks out certain geographical areas is in restraint of trade and should be prohibited.”77 These defenses of sports as a “public attraction” that entailed a public right to view them on commercial broadcast television indeed suggested something pretty far from considering sports as private property, and far from pay-­TV proponents who called for classical economic relations in television. It also suggested something different from lawmakers, federal administrators, and critics who embraced the value of documentary, public affairs, and the performing arts but looked down on popular commercial broadcast programs as catering to the low tastes of the masses. As the only popular commercial broadcast television that was widely valued by members of Congress, sports not only stood as an exception to concerns for mass cultural conformity but also to pay-­TV proponents’ support for classical economic market logics. When the National Football League decided that individual teams should not negotiate TV contracts individually but through a league contract so that revenues could be evenly distributed to teams in otherwise differently sized markets, Congress passed the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 to give the league antitrust immunity to do so. Also, Congress contested market logics when it opposed sports teams “blacking out” television coverage in the city of the home team when the stadium was not sold out. Further, throughout the 1980s Congress voiced concern when baseball and football franchises began entering deals with cable companies to show home games exclusively on cable television and again defended, as one congressperson put it, the “quasi-­public interest” of sports being available to all home team residents.78

In considering early pay-­TV policy as a context where socioeconomic orders were constituted and contested, the political significance of this history pushes beyond questions of industry propaganda and administrative procedure. Within the context of cultural, political, and educational elites defending a social order that linked one’s capacity for cultural judgment to one’s socioeconomic status, pay-­TV constituted a site for sustaining and contesting that order. As national political organizations imagined classical economic forces to work like voting in a democracy, organizations representing low-­income residents, women, African Americans, and municipal leaders spoke of economic relations as intertwined with complex forms of sociality and asserted an equality to participate in defining these socioeconomic relations. Such contexts of hierarchy, equality, and socioeconomic relations pertained to other cable policy contexts, including the significance of cable television as a medium for local community expression.

4 Local Origination, Public Access, and the Hierarchical Logics of Civic Culture

Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s the belief in the cultural value of television as a medium for local community expression continued to inform the FCC’s rationale for cable television policy. Notably, when in 1966 the FCC implemented new rules that virtually banned cable television from importing distant broadcast signals into the nation’s one hundred largest cities, it claimed it did so to protect UHF stations in these cities as outlets “for local self-­expression.”1 The cable industry responded through promoting cable television as a medium that too could originate local programming, as many cable operators had since the late 1950s. In response, in December 1968 the FCC proposed that all but the smallest cable systems must originate local programming as a condition to carry local or distant broadcast television signals.2 Furthermore, the potential for cable television to serve as an outlet for local community expression prompted the FCC in 1972 to lift most restrictions on cable television in large cities and require operators in these cities to make available four separate channels for public, educational, government, and leased access as a condition for relaxing distant signal importation restriction.3 Cable historians have differed in their assessment of the FCC’s application of their localism priorities for regulating cable television. Some have found that these “illogical” localism rationales actually facilitated ownership concentration in the cable industry, which ultimately reduced the prospects for locally originated cable programming.4 Others have considered public access cable television to represent an important democratic challenge to corporate commercial television by offering an “electronic soapbox” for anyone to voice their perspective.5 In the more comprehensive histories of cable television, locally originated

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cable programming and public access programming receive little attention in narratives of regional and national program evolution.6 Instead of considering the significance of local cable programming as a democratic practice that has been marginalized by corporate media developments, I consider the ways in which commitments to local “community” expression were themselves bound to hierarchical forms of social relations that legitimated class, gender, and race inequalities. I begin with situating the FCC’s statements in support of locally originated television in the early 1960s, and cable operators’ public relations campaigns to promote their local programming, within the contexts of a widely circulating behavioral science study called The Civic Culture. Drawing from, and contributing to, pluralist democratic rationales, the study set out to understand how the United States remained the world’s most stable democratic society at a time when totalitarianism advanced abroad. The authors concluded that civic culture comprised a stabilizing process through investing high-­status professionals with a larger role in civic participation and in providing leadership to manage the participation of those with less formal education. In conceiving of civic culture as a stabilizing process guided by an overwhelming majority of white educated men, this study legitimated class and gender inequities in participation, and failed to even mention Black citizens. The FCC and cable operators invoked similar hierarchical civic cultural processes in addressing the value of local television. As the FCC began to consider the civic value of locally originated cable television in large cities in the late 1960s, a related set of discourses of civic culture and community informed its decision-­making. In the aftermath of the urban race rebellions in the late 1960s, the FCC referenced the War on Poverty’s signature Community Action Program (CAP) as a basis for promoting locally originated programming in urban areas. Believing that a significant cause of the race rebellions was urban alienation and a lack of community connectedness, CAP developed initiatives to encourage urban residents to participate in government assistance programs. FCC commissioner Nicholas Johnson too believed that urban residents were alienated from their local communities and that commercial broadcast network programming contributed to that alienation. To reinvigorate civic culture Johnson promoted public broadcasting and drew from countercultural participatory idealism to support public access cable television. But civil rights activists and Black residents faulted the failing CAP programs for not committing significant federal resources for economic development and for limiting residents’ political authority over administering such programs. Black activists too disputed the FCC’s belief that community participation through public access cable channels could lead to solutions to urban poverty and racism. Instead, Black activists sought to own cable television systems for economic development.



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The contexts of cable television in New York City expose similar civic cultural rationales that informed the FCC’s decision to set aside cable channels for public, educational, and government access. The idea for channel set-­asides came from a task force headed by ex-­CBS News president Fred Friendly, who expressed frustration that educated professionals and civic leaders did not have more authority over commercial broadcast network programming. Friendly believed that public broadcasting and local cable television offered civic alternatives, as did prominent public access advocates who influenced the FCC’s cable access provisions. As with Friendly and Johnson, these public access advocates spoke of commercial television’s pacifying effects and looked to redefine television as a local participatory medium. But their anti-­commercialism and theories of cable access were at odds with Black entrepreneurs, who consulted local residents, not participatory ideals, to develop local programming on leased access channels. In identifying the hierarchical logics of civic culture that informed commitments to locally originated programming on cable television I do not mean to overlook the diverse local programming that has circulated through public access cable channels since the early 1970s nor to disregard the varied meanings of these participatory experiences.7 Instead, I prioritize questions about equality and inequality to avoid associating notions of civic culture and local community life as necessarily democratic practices. Most, but not all, of those who made or influenced FCC decisions shared assumptions that formally educated professionals were better qualified than others to make decisions about issues of public interest, about the quality of commercial broadcasting, or about the value of local television. I identify these assumptions as paradoxical to democracy understood as the equal capacity of everyone to participate in determining the rules for life in common. Black activists challenged these democratic paradoxes through disputing the hierarchical norms of community, civic culture, and localism that prevailed in policymaking. These activists did so by redefining the terrain of democracy as a right and equal capacity to participate in determining the economic and cultural relations of television.

Civic Culture, Public Relations, and Locally Originated Cable Programming in the 1960s During three days in late June 1959, community antenna operators and manufacturers gathered in Philadelphia for the National Community Television Association’s Eighth Annual Convention. There was a particular urgency to that year’s convention because just two months prior the FCC asked Congress for authorization to require cable operators to gain consent from television stations to carry their broadcast signals. This requirement, which the Senate

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Subcommittee on Communications would deliberate just days after the NCTA’s convention, implied that broadcasters held a property right over their programs and could charge cable operators for their signals, a cost that threatened cable operator profits.8 At this critical moment when the FCC asserted a broadened authority over cable television and Congress contemplated its first statutes to regulate cable television, the NCTA Conference Board chose “public relations” as the conference theme to aid in their efforts to contain this regulatory threat to cable operators. The Conference Board recognized that the central concern among members of the FCC and Congress was to ensure that cable television did not threaten the financial viability of television broadcasters to offer local programming to area residents, particularly in smaller markets where cable operators were importing distant signals from multiple stations in larger cities.9 To address the issue of local expression, the conference organizers spotlighted cable operators who had included locally originated programming on their systems, and encouraged other operators to do so as the best method for building good will in their communities and with federal administrators and lawmakers. In an address to the conference attendees, a prominent cable technology manufacturer called for “the immediate institution of a closed-­circuit channel for civic use in your community . . . as the most practical method open to you for entrenching yourselves in your own town.”10 The cable industry’s public relations campaign did in fact help to forestall congressional legislation that would give the FCC authority to regulate cable television. After deliberating this legislation in the fall of 1959 and the spring of 1960 that granted the FCC this authority, in May 1960 a divided Senate voted 39 to 38 to send the bill back to the subcommittee, where the bill died.11 The civic value of locally originated community programming would structure FCC and congressional deliberations over broadcast and cable television policy throughout the 1960s. The FCC continued to restrict cable operators from importing distant signals to protect the civic value of local broadcast television programming just as the cable industry continued to promote its civic capacity to offer locally originated programming. But what was the meaning of this civic value of community programming that found consensus among competing industries, elected officials, and FCC administrators? What was this value that was assumed yet rarely elaborated in policy forums? One significant site for examining the meaning of civic culture is in the expansive literature in the 1950s and 1960s on the significance of civic culture to the stability of democracy. Most of this literature came from the behavioral social sciences that found that civic participation in democracies is uneven and typically correlates to one’s socioeconomic status in society.12 The most prominent and influential of these studies was The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and



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Democracy in Five Nations, first published in 1963 by Stanford University social scientists Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba. The authors wanted to understand why democracy in Britain and the United States was more stable than in Germany, Italy, and Mexico. The authors made clear that they were not concerned with “the substance of political demands and outputs” but with “the kinds of personality tendencies and socialization practices that are likely to produce congruent political cultures and stable polities.”13 The authors called these stabilizing social practices “civic culture.” The authors concluded that successful democracies, including the United States and Britain, comprise a “distribution of individuals who pursue” the more “ideal citizen” role of active participation, and the “ordinary citizen,” who is more passive. According to Almond and Verba, the active citizens are more likely “those of higher social status” where family life and occupational status facilitate more opportunities to participate in decisions, and, most significantly, those who have more formal education: “the educated classes possess the keys to political participation and involvement, while those with less education are less well equipped.” The less educated ordinary citizen, the authors continue, does not have the time or capacity to engage as full citizens: “Given the complexity of political affairs, given the other demands made upon an individual’s time, and given the difficulty of obtaining information necessary for making rational political decisions, it is no wonder that the ordinary citizen is not the ideal citizen.” Also of lower status and limited participatory capacity were women, whose place within civic culture was relegated to their role in family socialization. In making no reference to people of color, the authors assumed a white normativity for civic culture.14 Because the authors perceive those with low income and little formal education as ill-­equipped for rational political participation, they found their political passivity to be conducive to democratic stability. The ordinary citizen’s passivity allows “elites . . . to be powerful and make authoritative decisions” while containing the ordinary citizen’s “intense emotional involvement in politics” that can lead to “intense commitment to particular political parties or groups” and “an unstabilizing level of fragmentation in the system.” Politically active “elites must believe in the democratic myth—­that ordinary citizens ought to participate in politics and that they are in fact influential,” and in turn must “act responsively, not because citizens are actively making demands, but in order to keep them from becoming active.” These tempering civic “norms” of managed political participation create a “sense of community over and above political differences, [keeping] the affective attachments to political groups from challenging the stability of the system.”15 When small market broadcasters, cable leaders, FCC administrators, and federal lawmakers, the vast majority of whom were formally educated white

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men, spoke of television as an important medium for community expression, they frequently referenced the value of civic leaders communicating to citizens to build a sense of community. In defending its decision to virtually ban cable operators from entering the nation’s largest cities in 1966 to protect the expansion UHF broadcast stations, the FCC wrote that the “most important” reason was that cable “does not serve as an outlet for local self-­expression,” such as “local discussions, the local ministers or educators, the local political candidates, etc.”16 Similarly, FCC Chairman William Henry told Congress of his intent to ban cable originated programming except for civic-­minded local originations such as “the mayor’s report or local discussion forums.”17 The House Commerce Committee agreed and approved a bill in June 1966 that supported the FCC’s restrictions on cable program originations.18 Cable industry leaders did not dispute this civic cultural ideal but made claim to it in their public relations campaigns to loosen the FCC’s cable restrictions. In the wake of the congressionally sanctioned FCC restrictions on cable television, NCTA president Frederick Ford addressed the association’s 1966 convention with a call to arms for local origination: “I urge each of you, if it is at all technically and economically feasible, to immediately institute on one channel of your systems, programs designed to serve the needs, desires, and interests of the community of which you are a part.” Though this would be “costly” and not “immediately profitable,” Ford told conventioneers, it was “essential” for gaining “a place in the good will of your subscribers that ALL of the adverse propaganda of the detractors of CATV cannot dislodge.”19 Following Ford’s lead were the editors of the October issue of the cable industry trade magazine TV Communications, who devoted the issue to locally originated cable programming with themes that touched on civic leadership and community stability. The editors wrote that “by affording an opportunity for the leaders in your community to have access to the living rooms of the entire community, you will become an invaluable asset to your operation.” Another commentator wrote that because a cable system is “a physical web that draws the community together” through “community communications and service, it is very unlikely that those who are afraid to let it grow, will keep cable television from assuming its right functions for too long a time.”20 Of course the locally originated programming on the mostly small town cable systems in the 1960s was certainly more varied than these idealized forms of civic address. The focus here, instead, is on how the major economic stakeholders and public officials in cable policy broadly shared an understanding that the value of local television was in its capacity to bring civic leaders and residents together to create a sense of community. This civic value was claimed by broadcasters when lobbying for federal policies that favored their business, by local cable operators who sought good public relations with the



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municipal leaders who held sway in granting cable licenses to operate, by cable industry leaders who lobbied for favorable federal policies, and by members of Congress who might have defended their local commercial broadcasters to maintain good will with a media source that could impact their reelection bids. As the question of local television service shifted from the smaller cities and towns where cable operators first developed to the large cities where cable operators were eager to expand operations, the values of civic culture and connected communities continued to inform FCC deliberations over cable policy. However, the question of race that was so conspicuously absent from congressional and FCC hearings and reports on the value of locally originated television through the mid-­1960s was no longer avoidable by the end of the 1960s when race rebellions erupted in cities across the country. As civic culture and community rationales informed federal government programs to address race rebellions and urban poverty, as they did FCC rationales for valuing cable television as a medium for local community expression, civil rights activists, and Black residents disputed these rationales through political demands for racial justice and economic enfranchisement.

Urban “Alienation,” “Maximum Feasible Participation,” and the “Quest for Community” In recognizing that cable television could offer locally originated programming, the FCC considered lifting UHF signal importation into large cities with provisos that cable operators either produce local programs or make channels available for local residents to do so. In 1970 the FCC continued to reference civic community ideals in referring to local programming as significant for developing “the sense of ‘community’ of those within the signal area of the stations.” But in moving away from thinking about community relations in smaller cities to those that existed in large urban areas, the FCC referred to the Johnson administration’s Community Action Program (CAP), which was “directed toward increasing citizen involvement in community affairs.”21 FCC Commissioner Nicholas Johnson made connections between television and the core themes of “alienation” that the CAP programs sought to address. “Those who study and write about the trends in our society,” Johnson wrote, “report a growing sense of alienation, loneliness, emptiness, despair, and hostility among the central city residents in the larger urban areas. Many believe that these trends are, at least in part, exacerbated by the existence of television and radio stations which have been authorized by the FCC to serve audiences of millions, rather than neighborhoods and small urban areas.” Johnson found in cable television a “potential to remedy this situation” through making available “originations by members of the local neighborhood community.”22

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Such beliefs that local originations could alleviate urban alienation prompted the FCC to include in its 1972 cable rules, which lifted the ban on cable television’s entering the country’s largest one hundred cities, the requirement that cable operators make available “one dedicated, noncommercial public access channel,” one channel for “instructional programming and other educational purposes,” and one channel for local government. These access channels in large cities, the commission reasoned, had “more diverse minority groups (ethnic, racial, economic, or age) who are most greatly in need of both an opportunity to express their views and a more efficient method by which they can be appraised of governmental actions and educational opportunities.”23 A closer consideration of CAP reveals the cultural politics that informed thinking about citizen participation and the FCC’s requirements that cable operators set aside these channels. Significant to these cultural politics were the clashing perspectives between the federal regulators and social scientists who designed CAP and Black civil rights activists. For the latter, urban poverty was not a result of Black alienation but of structural racism across economic and governmental institutions, the solution to which required giving Black residents more political authority in making decisions. A closer analysis of Nicholas Johnson’s thinking about civic culture reveals countercultural motivations that too clashed with Black activists who believed that cable television ownership, not public access to cable channels, was required to address racial discrimination and economic marginalization. The centerpiece of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty that Congress passed as the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 was the service-­oriented Community Action Program. By most accounts, CAP failed to substantially change the conditions of poverty in America because it ostensibly focused on mobilizing the poor to participate in local civic action rather than confronting the lack of resources required to create permanent jobs.24 The program did not redistribute significant resources toward the War on Poverty but instead sought to mobilize existing “public and private resources of a community in a comprehensive attack on poverty” to be “developed, conducted, and administered with maximum feasible participation of residents of the areas.” “Special consideration,” the statute continues, will be given to “programs which give promise of effecting a permanent increase in the capacity of individuals, groups, and communities to deal with their problems without further assistance.”25 One source for locating the cultural politics of CAP is the retrospective account of then Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan. With a Ph.D. in sociology and academic posts at Harvard University and Wesleyan University, Moynihan’s account is useful for identifying the intellectual currents that informed him and his fellow federal administrators, and for exposing the genuine surprise that the program’s enthusiasts felt when the poor demanded



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political and economic decision-­making authority, not just training in civic participation. Moynihan writes that the impetus for CAP did not come from persons living in poverty but from “a striking echelon of persons whose profession might justifiably be described as knowing what ails societies and whose art is to get treatment underway before the patient is especially aware of anything noteworthy taking place.” This influx of “professional reformers” who were brought to the White House by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, Moynihan argues, and other professionals who were funded by non-­profit foundations to address social problems were influenced by “a set of ideas making their way from university lecture rooms and professional journals to the halls of Congress and the statute books of the national government . . . in surprisingly short order.” These ideas galvanized around perceptions that the “the same conditions of hysteria and fear born of insecurity and rootlessness which provided the setting for the onset of totalitarianism in Europe” was evident in “the American mass” with the seemingly irrational rise of “a populist anticommunism” and “the erosion of those institutions by which persons in the mass relate to one another on terms that give rise to shared expectations, confidence, and trust.” Moynihan believed that these sentiments were best encapsulated in Robert Nisbet’s book The Quest for Community, with its central theme of “alienation.”26 Nisbet identified in the social sciences a perception that the large-­scale organizations of modern society have “resulted in masses of normless, unattached, insecure individuals” as a result of “the decline in functional and psychological significance of such groups as the family, the small local community, and the various other traditional relationships that have immemorially mediated between the individual and society.” The significance of these traditional group relations, as Nisbet elaborated, was to instill a structure of “authority” as a “form of constraint” that is “based ultimately upon the consent of those under it.” Invoking the language of pluralism, Nisbet found himself and other intellectuals in a quest for a community that sought “integration, status, membership, hierarchy, symbol, norm, identification, group.” In the absence of these stabilizing community structures of hierarchy and authority, he surmised, “men have unavoidably turned to the state to provide this sense, and that has repeatedly and probably necessarily ended in totalitarianism.”27 In addition to locating these themes of alienation and the quest for community in the writings of Nisbet, an “avowed conservative,” Moynihan found them in the writings of Paul Goodman, who became a “guru of the New Left” with his widely published critique of American society in 1960, Growing Up Absurd.28 Like Nisbet, Goodman was searching for a civic ideal to counter the perceived threats of mass culture. Goodman critiqued “corporate boondoggling” and a “class of politicians” who subordinated “human beings to a rational

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economic system.” This instilled in the American people a “creeping defeatism and surrender by default to the organized system of the state and semimonopolies.” Goodman was concerned that working-­class youth were “mesmerized by the symbols and culture of the rat race” and therefore capitulated to, rather than challenged, the monopolistic capitalist system. “Indeed,” he continues, “the group in society that most believes in the rat race as a source of value is the other underprivileged: the ignorant and resentful boys who form the delinquent gangs” who “are conformist, one-­upping, and cynical, to protect their ‘masculinity,’ conceal their worthlessness, and denigrate the earnest boys.” Lost within this “Organized Society” of “national conformity” and “deadening centralism” was the “ideal of the town meeting, with the initiative and personal involvement that alone could train people in self-­government and give them practical knowledge of political issues.”29 In his concluding chapter, titled “The Missing Community,” Goodman invoked the pluralist themes of group relations, community stability, and balanced cultural hierarchies. Goodman looked back to the nation’s “revolutionary modern tradition” to realize a more “balanced” society comprised of “a stable and whole community in which the young can grow to manhood.” This included abandoning the prevalent “permissiveness” in childrearing to instill “strong values and esteemed behavior at home and in the community, so that the child can have worth-­while goals to structure his experience.” Goodman argued that Americans “have to learn again, what city man always used to know, that belonging to the city, to its squares, its market, its neighborhoods, and its high culture, is a public good.” Leery of large-­scale development, Goodman argued that “the units of human service . . . ought to be smaller, to avoid the creation of masses” where “the community is planned as a whole, with an organic integration of work, living, and play” and where “social groups are laboratories for solving their own problems experimentally.”30 The federal lawmakers, administrators, and CAP directors who drew from Nisbet, Goodman, and the social scientists who shared an understanding that poverty resulted from a lack of committed involvement in one’s community were surprised, Moynihan recalls, when the disenfranchised participating in CAP programs expressed an “almost antithetical view of the style and function of ‘community action.’” This was particularly evident among Black and Latina/o participants in the cities who, far from alienated, had organized and become empowered through the civil rights movement. Expecting more than services for community building in “cooperation” with officials in city hall, many CAP participants demanded more structural “institutional changes.” Inner city residents were critical of CAP funding that went to program heads and consultants rather than allocating funds directly for job creation. Indeed, for low-­income inner city residents, CAP was not valuable for its goal of training residents to



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participate in civic life, but for creating at least some jobs through employing field representatives who were 25 to 35 percent people of color. But when inner city residents demanded majority decision-­making power in running CAP agencies, federal and city officials resisted.31 The FCC’s commitments to setting aside channels for public use drew from similar concerns as the “striking echelon” of professionals who believed urban poverty and race rebellion stemmed from alienation and a lack of civic participation and community building. This was most evident in the FCC’s most vocal advocate for cable access channels, Nicholas Johnson. In March 1964 President Lyndon Johnson appointed the twenty-­nine-­year-­old Johnson to head the Maritime Administration. The president’s staff had identified Johnson as a promising young attorney who worked for a Washington, DC, law firm that was known as a recruiting ground for administrative posts. Prior to joining the law firm, Johnson clerked for appellate and Supreme Court justices and taught administrative law at the University of California, Berkeley. After his aggressive and outspoken twenty-­eight-­month tenure at the Maritime Administration alienated ship manufacturers and unions, Lyndon Johnson appointed Johnson to the FCC where as commissioner his outspoken views would contribute to, but not dictate, the actions of the seven-­member commission.32 And publicly outspoken he was. Joining the FCC in the wake of the commission’s 1966 decision to virtually freeze cable television in the largest cities, Johnson wrote editorials in law journals, widely circulated magazines, and two books that elaborated his opposition to policies that inhibited cable television’s growth, and more broadly, his ideas for ethical civic living. To an upscale readership of the Saturday Review in November 1967, Johnson expressed his disdain for a television culture he believed constituted a “tyranny of banal mass-­audience programming.” As with others who shared this mass culture critique of commercial broadcast television, Johnson believed that the group most excluded from television’s “vast and undifferentiated mass audience” was “the social and intellectual classes whose interests and tastes were ignored.”33 In supporting the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, Johnson wrote that this non-­commercial television system was a much needed “response to the defects of our present mass communications system” that would transform television into “a medium for cultural enrichment through the provision of refined and sophisticated entertainment.”34 Not only did Johnson differentiate between an intellectual class that he believed possessed tastes that were more refined, cultured, and sophisticated than those who watched “banal mass-­audience programming,” he believed that television had a persuasive power over the impressionable and supposedly less intelligent masses. This was particularly the case with violence on television, as Johnson explained in How to Talk Back to Your TV Set, published in 1970. Johnson

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agreed with the Interim Report of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, which concluded in its three-­year investigation into violence on television that “the excessive amount of televised crime, violence, and brutality can and does contribute to the development of attitudes and actions in many young people which pave the way for delinquent behavior.” Johnson believed that violence on television influenced the violent protests in Black urban neighborhoods across the country during the summer of 1967 and the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. As proof for this Johnson quoted the behavioral psychologist Albert Bandura, who wrote that “it has been shown that if people are exposed to television aggression they not only learn aggressive patterns of behavior, but they also retain them over a long period of time.”35 Such behavioral science conclusions about violence on television have since been discounted for their manipulative and decontextualized laboratory-­based experiments and for drawing attention away from the broader socioeconomic contexts of economic inequality and racial discrimination that precipitate violence.36 As historian William Boddy argues, the congressional hearings on juvenile delinquency were less historically relevant for revealing the social harm of television violence than they were for promoting a new paradigm of behavioral research that assumed a “television audience as irresponsible and fundamentally childlike.”37 In suggesting that violence on television contributed to the urban rebellions, Johnson too obfuscated the structural racism that precipitated the rebellions and assumed that urban protesters were impressionable and in need of protection from television violence. Johnson’s low regard for the rational, critical capacity of the masses prompted him to recommend that a panel of professionals and experts guide FCC decision-­making. Johnson agreed with journalism professor Harry Skornia that FCC oversight must include a “national academic standard or prerequisite to” practice “news and public affairs” reporting including a “definitive standard of intellectual accomplishment, morality, [and] character qualification.”38 Johnson agreed with the 1947 Commission on the Freedom of the Press and other social scientists and television critics who called for creating an independent agency to monitor and report on the performance of broadcasters. This agency, Johnson surmised, must include funding from “foundation and other private sources” to support the “between fifty and two hundred professional people” that would be required to execute its tasks.39 In believing that these professionals were more qualified to define the public interest than non-­professionals among the viewing public, Johnson felt a “professional responsibility to think about, and help fashion, societies that will contribute to the ‘life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness’ of their members.” He attempted to do so in his second book published in 1972 called Test Patterns for



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Living. The alternative format of the book listed quotations on all even pages, indicating the pastiche of themes and intellectual influences that ran through its pages. He quoted from those who expressed concern about mass culture’s effects on the individual, including political commentators Walter Lippmann and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and social scientists Paul Lazarsfeld and Wilbur Schramm. Johnson applauded economists including Milton Friedman for his ethical theory of free markets and John Kenneth Galbraith for his admonishing the complacencies of the affluent society. Quotes come from existential psychologists concerned about human disconnectedness including Rollo May and Erich Fromm, and from environmentalists including Charles Reich, Paul Swatek, and Buckminster Fuller. Johnson likewise found inspiration from New Left guru Paul Goodman and the counterculturalists Tom Wolfe, Carlos Castaneda, Theodore Roszak, and Allen Ginsberg. And Johnson was inspired by the cybercultural utopianism of Alvin Toffler, Marshall McLuhan, Michael Shamberg, and the Whole Earth Catalogue collective.40 The central themes and “best answers” for the pursuit of living, Johnson concluded, “involve a sense of unity, of wholeness, of centering, of interconnectedness—­‘the whole thing.’”41 To achieve this he found inspiration in the countercultural and environmentalists’ desire to live more simply, advocating for an alternative lifestyle that included “regular contact with nature” and living on less income. This lifestyle called for “a committed participation in life-­support activities” including growing one’s own food and eating simple unprocessed foods, living close to work, bicycling, and getting rid of unnecessary material possessions such as most electric appliances, manufactured hygiene and beauty products, and fancy home furnishings.42 As with the libertarian cyberculturalists, Johnson lamented that “corporations have tampered into destruction the genius of the free market system,” a system that works when “products are manufactured to satisfy preexisting needs, that the cheapest and most functional products will be selected on their merits by the consumer.” Johnson equated free-­market transactions with democracy when he stated that the consumer, “through his ‘voting’ with dollars in the marketplace,” will ensure that “the best manufacturers will prevail and profit.” Invoking pluralist assumptions about the stabilizing and balancing effects of overlapping group relations, Johnson believed that there was nothing wrong with “free private enterprise” because “there would be a sufficient number of countervailing pressures from family, church, school, the creative-­artistic-­ intellectual community, and government to keep it all in balance.” However, this balance was threatened by what Johnson called the “corporate interlock,” a “corporate plan” for living that promoted corporate white-­ collar jobs, suburban living, automobile commuting, restaurant eating, and dressing for success, a plan that Johnson believed caused “inflation,” “urban

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unrest,” and “personality disorders.” Television reinforced this corporate plan “in millions of us hour after hour,” creating “passivity and a sense of powerlessness . . . at the outset regardless of what’s programmed on it.” Worst of all, he perceived television as a “communication medium that discourages, and makes more difficult, communication and a sense of community among Americans.”43 In locating the sources of society’s ills in a corporate interlock that used the technology of mass commercial television to fracture Americans’ sense of community, Johnson found in cable television a new technology that could regenerate community through mandating channels for public access. In his testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Communications in June 1971, Johnson argued that “one of the advantages of cable over over-­the-­air broadcasting is that it is no longer necessary for any person who wants to use television to own a station. He can simply have access to the cable television system for perhaps a single program once in his lifetime, or a program once a year, once a week, once a night, or whatever, and use the cable television system as a community resource that is available to the community.” New “half-­inch video tape equipment” made this possible and affordable because it costs “roughly 1 percent of what it would cost to produce a program in a television studio” and “can be used essentially by any elementary student after training for half an hour.”44 However, to unleash the community building power of public access cable television, Johnson believed that cable operators needed financial incentives to commit large capital investments to wire the largest cities. He thus advocated strongly for lifting restrictions on cable television expansion in the top one hundred markets, and in doing so, invoked the neoliberal rhetorics of free markets that would come to define the first cable legislation a decade later. In his 1971 testimony Johnson reasoned that “if a businessman is willing to provide the service, and a homeowner is willing to pay for it, there is no technological or economic reason today why any American need be denied the television programming of any station in the world—­let alone the United States.”45 Johnson’s assumptions that free-­market mechanisms operated ecumenically, that community alienation was a source of societal problems, and that public access cable channels provided a solution were disputed by Black activists in advocating for cable television policies. At a four-­day workshop on cable television and “minorities” in late July 1971 convened by the Urban Institute, the Urban Communications Group, and Black Efforts for Soul in Television, Johnson gave the concluding keynote address. Yet unlike Johnson, the Black conference organizers and participants did not prioritize public access channels but rather ownership in cable television systems. Speaking to this were representatives of the Bedford-­Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, a Brooklyn, New York–­based community-­development organization that received funding from the Office of



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Economic Development and the Ford Foundation. Morton Janklow, the cable television consultant to the corporation, stated that “people ask, why Bed-­Sty doesn’t just go in and muscle the city and demand two of the channels that’s going to be for their use?” Janklow answered, “That’s not what we’re after. We could do that very easily. What were after is community development—­profits plowed back into the community—­a kind of militancy and a kind of use of the system that won’t be very acceptable” to the FCC and other proponents of cable access channels. Bed-­Sty president Franklin Thomas added that while minority community organizations are often encouraged to seek access to cable channels rather than ownership of the system, cable systems were a unique industry for “local economic development” because “the major source of revenue is the subscribers in the community . . . the very community that you’re trying to serve.”46 But Johnson still believed that cable television was more important for community expression than economic development. In his conference address, Johnson argued that it was “a mistake to overemphasize” cable television’s “economic opportunity” because the power of television lay in its power to “inform” to elicit people to take political action. Invoking the condescending rhetoric of the mass culture critique Johnson agreed with a television commentator who said that “the act of getting 100 million Americans to focus their attention in the prime time evening hours on westerns and situation comedies is a political achievement, the equivalent of the Roman circuses.”47 Pushing back against Johnson and the direction of the FCC to prioritize access channels over ownership, conference organizer Charles Tate of the Urban Institute concluded: If this proposed “access” policy were applied across the board, there would only be white-­ owned businesses in every sector; a conclusion not only at odds with the goals of self-­determination, but one certain to render blacks and other minorities even more powerless and dependent. If it is adopted as the public policy for minorities in the field of cable communication, it is certain to increase the power of the white business community, utilizing minority [subscriber] revenues as subsidy. In other words, ghetto communities will be placed in a position of “paying” for their powerlessness and economic dependency.48

In addition to advocating for cable ownership over access to public channels, African Americans challenged the geographically bounded understandings of community that had informed the civic cultural ideals of Johnson and the FCC’s localism policies. William Wright, the national coordinator of Black Efforts for Soul in Television (BEST), and Theodore Ledbetter, the organization’s CATV Task Force director, conceptualized community as a form of race consciousness in their submitted statement to the FCC in October 1970. In their statement in support of allowing large cities to important distant signals, Wright and

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Ledbetter referenced the programs of interest to communities of color: “Black programming in Washington should be available to Blacks (and other interested parties) in every other city, if they want to see it. The World Cup Soccer match between England and Brazil in Mexico City. TV programming from Puerto Rico or East Los Angeles should be available for Puerto Ricans or Mexican Americans (and others) wherever they live.”49 Further, unlike Johnson who supported public broadcasting as “one of the proudest achievements of the decade,”50 Wright and Ledbetter on behalf of BEST “opposed the five percent tax on cable subscription revenues for public broadcasting” proposed by the FCC because “public educational television is not any more sensitive and responsive to the needs, desires, and aspirations of the black community than are the majority of commercial broadcasters.”51 Wright’s sentiments came from his ongoing campaign to call on the FCC to strip the Alabama Educational Television Commission of its broadcast license for not airing Black-­ themed shows including Soul!, On Being Black, Black Journal, and the Denver Panther Trail.52 Most significantly, Wright and Ledbetter viewed paying for public broadcasting through a flat 5 percent tax on cable subscriber fees to constitute a regressive tax because “poor families would be assessed a significantly higher portion of their income than middle-­income or rich families.”53 In emphasizing economic justice rather than civic participation, Black activists in cable television challenged the FCC’s civic community idealism and the cable operators who invoked the ideal to limit restrictions on their economic pursuits. At an FCC hearing in March 1971 Ledbetter confronted FCC commissioners and television industry representatives about the limits of policies that set aside channels for public access but that did not address issues of ownership and control over cable systems. Irving Kahn, president of one of the nation’s largest multisystem cable corporation, and Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Pictures Association of America, supported the FCC’s public access provisions but warned against FCC policies that might inhibit the profitability of their industries. Kahn said he believed “that cable systems have an absolute obligation to provide public access channels to all individuals and groups with a reason to address their fellow citizens” but clarified that he did not think “municipalities, non-­profit organizations, or minority groups need, should, or should want to ‘own’ CATV systems merely in order to have access to channels of expression.” Valenti agreed that access channels should be set aside for public use as long as the FCC held cable operators fully responsible for recognizing the copyrights of the commercial entertainment companies he represented, a demand that Kahn opposed.54 Ledbetter subjected these arguments about copyright protections and the civic value of public access cable channels to a critique of the forms of structural racism that have silenced Black perspectives and limited economic



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opportunities. Ledbetter said that he “could support Mr. Valenti’s proposal much more strongly if it were not true that the motion picture industry is having problems in its employment and hiring practices” with respect to people of color. Regarding public access channels, Ledbetter invoked the economic marginalization of people of color as a significant factor for considering the effectiveness of using public access channels. “The importance of operating a local origination station or channel as a subsidized or non-­subsidized business,” Ledbetter said, “cannot be stressed too strongly” because “the success or failure of origination will depend on its income. Whether it is advertising, pay cable, foundation or CATV system support, there must be income to pay for the equipment facilities and personnel. And in that sense, cablecasting is just like everything else.”55 In refusing to divorce questions about equal access to economic opportunities from questions of civic participation, and situating both as intertwined in institutional structures of racism, Ledbetter and other Black activists challenged the logics of inequality that informed civic cultural rationales for policymaking. While Nicholas Johnson elevated the judgments of educated professionals over the masses and schooled the masses on how to live more connected lives, Black cable activists claimed an equality to participate in developing cable television as an infrastructure for Black economic development. Instead of a quest for past group relations, status structures, and participatory practices that had formed stable community life prior to the emergence of mass culture, Black activists inaugurated a quest to challenge past and present structures of inequality that have historically disenfranchised people of color. making Such attention to extending economic and political decision-­ authority for the historically disenfranchised, however, was not a priority for proponents of cable access television in New York City. Because cable access developments in New York City influenced the FCC’s decision to set aside channels for public, educational, and governmental access, a consideration of cable television in New York City sheds further light on the cultural politics of the FCC’s decision-­making.

New York City Public Access Cable TV and the FCC Narratives of public access cable television in New York City often begin with accounts of documentary filmmakers who initiated a “community television movement” through empowering the public to participate in making television programming.56 But proposals to reserve cable channels for public use were hatched in a boardroom populated by less than a dozen city officials and consultants who comprised a task force appointed by New York City Mayor John Lindsay. The recommendations of the Mayor’s Advisory Task Force on CATV

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and Telecommunications that were released in September 1968, and NYC’s 1970 cable franchise ordinance that included channel reservations for public use, influenced the FCC’s 1972 policy to set aside channels for public, educational, and government use.57 Therefore, attention to the task force’s report and the New York City cable ordinance is significant for understanding the cultural politics that informed FCC decision-­making and that provided a blueprint for cable ordinances across the country. Lindsay established the task force on June 22, 1967, to address two issues. The first was to assess the potential for the proposed World Trade Center to create interference with broadcast television reception. The second was to review the present and future uses of telecommunications in the city, including cable television, which had been operating in the city since 1965.58 Lindsay asked former CBS News president Fred Friendly to chair the committee of nine that included advisors to the mayor and Morris Tarshis, the Board of Franchise director. Because Friendly headed the task, his perceptions about broadcast television and the promise of cable television to create alternatives reveal much about the cultural politics that informed the task force recommendations. Soon after resigning as CBS News director in February 1966 when the network refused to air the live hearings of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Vietnam, Friendly elaborated his critique of commercial broadcasting in the concluding chapters of his memoir published in 1967. He wrote of his battles with network executives during his years at CBS, which included producing with Edward R. Murrow the monthly news magazine program See It Now for seven years in the 1950s, executive producing the monthly documentary series CBS Reports for five years, and heading the CBS News division from 1964 to 1966. Friendly reminisced about a golden age of broadcasting prior to the mid-­1950s when network executives exemplified a “responsibility for true public service and personal taste in entertainment and cultural programs.” Since then, according to Friendly, network television had been driven by a “vending-­ machine bureaucracy” that prioritized ratings and profits over good taste and public mindedness.59 Friendly had no doubts about how to distinguish “what is good and what is bad,” for he was convinced that the good resided in “the pride and sense of judgment” of “the chairman of the board and the president of each of the three networks.” Indeed, Friendly said of the CBS executives, “I would be quite content to see network schedules which would satisfy the taste and intellectual standards of a Bill Paley or Frank Stanton.” The “mediocrity” of the “interchangeable situation comedies or Westerns or crime shows,” however, have “create[d] appetites and style[d] the nation’s taste” among “those viewers who have been brainwashed to select their own brand of popcorn, while those of more discerning tastes simply give up watching or listening.” This created a quandary for



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Friendly: “If the audience that used to turn to See It Now . . . is gone” while “those we have made addicts of mediocrity have become the nation’s taste makers, who is responsible?”60 With these perceptions that the masses lacked the tastes and responsibility to participate in determining public interest standards for television, Friendly joined the Ford Foundation as television advisor and the Columbia University’s School of Journalism in a position funded by the Ford Foundation.61 While at the foundation, Friendly became increasingly interested in the “revolutionary” potential of satellite and cable technologies to transform television culture. He developed a proposal to fund a national non-­commercial television network through a portion of the savings from distributing commercial network television through geostationary satellites, a method thought to be much cheaper than over landlines.62 He also became interested in the revolutionary potential of cable television itself. At a congressional hearing on public television in July 1967 Friendly predicted that “by 1975 the whole profile of how we communicate in this country is going to be changed greatly by CATV,” where “into our living rooms may come as many as 30 or 40 different channels.” But he warned that absent careful planning and foresight “we are now in danger in my city and in most cities of developing electronic ghettoes,” just as had commercial broadcasting.63 Friendly brought his concerns about cable broadcasters catering to the mediocre tastes of the masses and his beliefs that responsible, civic-­minded leaders must guide public interest alternatives to the task force under his leader­ ship. The Mayor’s Task Force held two board meetings to establish a plan of inquiry. Attending the board meetings were David Garth, the mayor’s campaign consultant on radio and television advertising; Morris Tarshis, director of the NYC Board of Franchises that oversaw cable television; Seymour Seigal, director of New York City’s municipal radio and television stations; city attorneys Norman Redlich and David Smith; electrical engineer Irving Rosner; and Columbia University journalism graduate student Tom Bettag. Friendly asked the board if “there was any proof CATV would work in NYC,” and when he was assured that there was, he wanted to make sure that cable operators not hold a “monopoly.” To this David Garth suggested the task force recommend that “five channels be held open for the city to dispense.”64 Subsequently, Friendly instructed Tarshis to arrange separate hearings for each of the three cable operators. The task force board members asked the cable operators’ leadership and councils about their progress in laying cable, the structural and legal impediments to doing so, their program origination operations, and whether they would object to providing the city with five channels. All three cable operators answered that landlords were a significant impediment to wiring apartment buildings. The cable operators said their local

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programming included local community news, local sports, and motion pictures, and that these programs were a valuable selling point for subscriptions. All cable operators agreed that setting aside five channels for the city would not be a problem. The board held one more hearing for Hughes Aircraft about its proposal to use microwave towers as an alternative to wiring city blocks.65 The task force archives include no records of any other hearings or meetings before Friendly released the task force’s report on September 14, 1968.66 This indicates that the task force believed it was sufficient to hear from only the cable operators before making recommendations rather than hold public hearings that included a wider array of groups and residents in the diverse city. The task force’s recommendations for allocating cable channels prioritized the perspectives of city officials, educators, and cultural institutions. In addition to setting aside eleven channels for local TV stations, the task force recommended the city require cable operators to set aside seven channels for other uses. Of particularly “high priority” were three cable channels to be reserved “for the exclusive use of the City Government” free of charge to help “carry out municipal functions” and to serve “the interests of the general public.” These three channels might be used “for education in the schools or for the conduct of vocational training programs.” They might also be used to give exposure for “candidates for public office,” or access for “private educational and cultural institutions.” The channels might also be used for “nonprofit organizations serving an economically deprived community, or a particular ethnic group.”67 The remaining four channels were designated for “program origination.” Two of these were to be granted to cable operators to use as a “general broadcaster,” one for programming at the cable operator’s discretion, and the other for exclusively “public service programs” that would include “a variety of educational services,” “services to meet the needs of the ethnic communities,” and for “candidates for public office in New York City.”68 The other two program origination channels were to require cable operators to make time available for lease on a “first-­come, first-­served basis,” one of which was to be reserved “for leasing by such users as educational and cultural institutions and non-­profit organizations serving the so-­called ghetto areas of the city.” To supervise the daily operations and performance of cable operators, the report recommended that the state legislature create an office of telecommunications with a director appointed by the mayor.69 Though Friendly wrote in his summary letter that “we are ultimately concerned with methods of communication that can materially help educate our children and meet the special needs of those in the City who are economically and culturally deprived,” the report offered no economic support for the programming costs. The public access channels required users to lease space and cover their own production costs, provisions that delighted the cable operators



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because they required little additional financial commitment. The task force also saw no need to ensure that the economically and culturally deprived had assistance in owning cable franchises. As the report stated, “The Task Force is of the hope that they will include new companies formed and financed by members of the City’s various minority groups” but “in the end . . . the final selection among the applicants for a particular area should be made by open, competitive bidding.”70 The one task force provision that entailed the redistribution of economic resources was a 25 percent tax on the gross receipts for pay-­TV revenues that was to be used to cover city franchising administrative costs and contribute to a city treasury that was in fiscal distress. For the cable operators who saw pay-­TV revenues as essential to their future profits, this greenlight for pay-­TV more than offset the minor costs to make channels available for public and city government use. Indeed, the president of Sterling Manhattan Cable said of the report that “it is an excellent and thorough study of the situation” to allow operators to develop the “full capabilities of the cable.”71 Favoring the plan too was Irving Kahn, president of TelePrompTer, another cable franchise operating in New York City and one of the nation’s largest multisystem operators. Kahn was so thrilled that he went beyond the task force recommendations to “open our public channels at no charge.”72 When the New York City Board of Franchises released its plans for cable regulations in June 1970 prior to a scheduled public hearing, the plan reflected many of the recommendations of the task force, including: setting aside one channel for free city government use; two public access channels for first-­come, first-­serve lease; two leased-­access channels for other uses; and a 25 percent tax on pay-­TV revenues. Still, Friendly publicly criticized the Board of Franchises for not including open competitive bidding for the two existing cable franchises in Manhattan and not creating an office of telecommunications to supervise cable operations.73 With two public access channels for first-­come, first-­serve lease available in New York City, public access advocates organized to make use of these channels. Theodora Sklover and Red Burns were the two most prominent public access advocates who served as spokespersons for public access cable in the city, and who testified at FCC hearings. These influential activists shared similar perspectives with Fred Friendly regarding the negative consequences of commercial broadcast culture on the masses who watched for hours every day, and sought alternatives to reenergize civic participation through public access cable television. Holding an advanced degree in childhood education and working with Fordham University on methodologies for teaching with television, Sklover took interest in cable television as an alternative technology for education. She

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participated in the Sloan Commission on Cable Television in 1970 and followed developments in the cable television industry.74 Reflecting on her experience at a Chicago conference on “cable-­casting” in April 1970 that was planned in response to the FCC’s recent rule to require cable operators in large markets to originate programming, Sklover lamented that all the talk of local origination was “really a do-­it-­yourself kit for smaller versions of the standard mediocre television fare now offered by over the air television.” These included “shows for the pre-­schooler . . . a la Sesame Street,” “How-­to shows,” “sports shows,” “travel formats,” and “game shows.” Instead, Sklover believed cable television should be used as a local service for community expression. “Constructive use of television as an information system rather than exclusively as an entertainment medium,” she wrote, could be best utilized through cable television’s capacity “to speak to the needs of one small community, one block or even one apartment house.”75 Sklover was inspired by the media-­centric philosophies of Marshall McLuhan and his students. Citing McLuhan in an interview conducted in the spring of 1972, Sklover said that she believed “television has compartmentalized us all, destroying natural communications between people.” She was also sympathetic with the Raindance Corporation, an alternative media think-­tank co-­founded by a McLuhan student, and its media-­centric philosophy that, as Sklover put it, posited that “power is no longer measured in land, labor, or capital, but by access to information and the means to disseminate it.” As a new technology that seemingly transcended the socioeconomic relations of property, labor, and capital, Sklover argued that public access television constituted “a neutral cable roadway with the public creating its own messages.” However, for this cable alternative to commercial television’s “prepackaged crap for the masses” to work, Sklover continued, there must be “a concerted, effective promotional effort to tell people about the channels and a parallel effort to train people in the actual use of the equipment as a crucial part of the overall learning process.”76 To do so Sklover founded the Open Channel to enlist professionals to help groups make videos for public access and to instruct teachers on how to make videos for classroom use. But Sklover found these efforts to encourage the public to use public access cable television frustrating. At a symposium on cable television in Los Angeles in the fall of 1972, she lamented that the public’s “experience at this point right now is that . . . public access is not working” because of the difficulty in “helping a society that has always been very passive in terms of television to become participants in television.” “Unless there is a tremendous amount more of institutionalizing in the community in terms of what public access means and how it can function,” Sklover worried, “we will have failed to realize [cable television’s] ‘wonderful potential.’”77



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However, at the symposium a cable program producer from Flint, Michigan, disputed Sklover’s conception of public access television as a non-­profit alternative to commercial broadcasting that required training the public to think differently about television. Doyle Dugans said that his “position is a little different from everybody else’s [because] I am in it to make money first of all.” Duggan had left his job in “community development” with the City of Flint to make money through producing cable programming and selling advertising on the local cable system’s leased-­access channel. “So in order to make money,” Dugans explained, “I have to find out what kind of programs black people in Flint are interested in.” This meant belonging to “nine or ten community organizations” and talking to Flint residents to find out “what they are talking about in the streets,” such as the problems with school busing or “the rotten politicians down in City Hall.” In response Dugans produced a “very popular” series called People’s Law School that invited attorneys from the National Lawyers’ Guild to “talk about the law as it relates to people in the streets,” such as “tenants’ rights, bankruptcy proceedings,” and what “to do if you should get arrested” or “think you are going to get arrested.” Unlike the priority of Friendly and the participants in the Mayor’s Task Force who prioritized channels for municipal government to train public servants and inform constituents, the People’s Law School reflected skepticism among Flint’s Black residents that their concerns would be heard by politicians or that they would be treated equally under the law.78 Other programs on Dugans’s leased access channel included Black Talk, hosted by a woman who talks not just to “women who have made it” but to “any black woman in the community, be she a prostitute, a drug addict.” “If she has a story to tell,” Dugans continued, “we feel that the community should hear her story and this way she has a chance.” Dugans also produced a series called War on Campus that dealt with the “problems that black students have on campus” at Flint’s three colleges and a Gospel program called Apocalypse. He also scheduled a program on “black personalities” that had included the comedian and civil rights activists Dick Gregory and Julian Bond, who helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Southern Poverty Law Center.79 Dugans did not approach the Black residents of Flint as if they lacked civic mindedness or the critical capacity to critique mass culture. Instead, Dugans began with the lived experiences of local residents to experiment with what local cable television might look like. Sklover intervened to say that Dugans’s process of “trying to give them what they want” sounded like the commercial broadcasters and that Dugans and her vision were like comparing “apples and oranges.” Sklover was invested in creating a non-­commercial alternative to fill “the void” left by commercial television that required “changing the way people thought about television.”

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Sklover conceded that Dugans’s concept of cable as that of an “entrepreneur” to make money was a “wide-­opening field for minority participation without question.” However, while this was a useful “start” in giving “minorities” the types of television programs “they are used to,” Sklover’s “access” concept required training minorities to realize the potential of non-­commercial applications, “a concept of cable farther down the line [that] is very individual, is very small.”80 Sklover’s dispute with Dugans regarding the meaning of “access” in public access cable television reflected similar disputes between Community Action Program advocates and Black residents. Both Sklover and the social scientists and federal administrators who created CAP diagnosed urban inequalities as a problem of community alienation and devised a solution to reinvigorate civic participation. But Black activists challenged CAP through demanding decision-­ making power to reallocate federal and state resources for Black economic development. Similarly, Dugans did not approach Flint residents as alienated and civically apathetic. Instead he began with the experiences of community organizations and residents and found a vibrant community who shared in the struggle to challenge institutionalized forms of racial exclusion. For Dugans, making a living in leased access cable was not antithetical to the participatory spirit of cable access, but a necessity in a city with limited economic opportunities. Another prominent cable access advocate in New York City who interacted with FCC administrators was Red Burns, co-­founder with George Stoney of the Alternate Media Center (AMC). Stoney had experience working in the participatory filmmaking movement in Canada and headed the undergraduate film and television department at New York University. Burns formerly worked at the Canadian National Film Board and excelled at working with the cable industry, foundations, and regulatory agents to support the AMC and to advocate for public access cable television across the country.81 Burns agreed with Sklover that cable access was a local service that challenged commercial understandings of television. On a panel with Sklover at the Los Angeles cable symposium Burns stated that “cable is not television,” it “is not network,” and “it is not national.” Instead, cable “is amateur, it is non-­professional, it is the first conceivable way of people really plugging in locally to a situation.” The significance of cable access, Burns continued, was not the “end” program and “how much went on the cable,” but “about the participation in making and talking about making the tapes.”82 Burns agreed with Sklover that the first mission was to “make people understand or want to understand that for the first time there is some kind of access possibility,” but disagreed that it should be “professionals” that helped users realize their programming goals. She believed that the process of making cable programs could “de-­mystify the experts” and challenge their “objective myth” that journalism could cover all sides. Unlike civic culture and pluralist



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perspectives that legitimated the role of experts, professionals, and group leaders in managing stability and guiding civic conduct, Burns said “I don’t know who the expert is,” and added it should not be assumed that “somebody knows more about how to present information than anybody else does.”83 Burns and AMC were most interested in facilitating communications among members of a community through low-­cost, volunteer, and experimental methods. Against those who suggested that cable be regulated as a common carrier and that commercial cable revenues be taxed to pay for public access programming, Burns believed that the cable operator should be required to provide the “initial seed,” but then “it should be left up to the community—­after a period of time, to find its own local funding sources to sustain itself.”84 This low-­cost, community self-­development approach was embraced by multisystem cable operators who saw public access cable as a low-­cost means to satisfy local origination requirements and build good public relations. Such was the case with Monroe M. Rifkin, chairman of the American Television and Communications Corporation that formed in 1968 through merging the operations of fifteen cable operations. Rifkin saw an article in the Denver Post in October 1971 that mentioned the work of Burns at AMC and instructed his head of operations to contact Burns to “find out if there is some manner in which we might work together.” The public relations timing for American Television was particularly important given that the company was negotiating with the Justice Department to merge with another multisystem cable operator, Cox Cable.85 American Television and AMC created pilot public access experiments in Reading, Pennsylvania, and Orlando, Florida.86 Burns extended AMC’s pilot projects to include two-­way interactive cable experiments. In one test AMC teamed with the City of Reading, the Berks County Senior Citizens Council, and the Reading Housing Authority to equip three senior housing facilities with low-­cost video cameras and 117 in-­room terminals where seniors could watch live programs and participate over the phone. Although the consortium supported a small staff, most of the work was done by volunteers. The initial experiment set out to evaluate how two-­way cable could facilitate the dissemination of federal social services such as Medicaid and the food stamps program. However, because senior citizens were given power to plan and implement their own programming, they produced a series of short segments that promoted these services, and developed other programs on preparing wills, nursing home and funeral services, and peer group counseling for issues such as sex, insomnia, and when to stop driving a car. Each week, the mayor or a city council member would cable-­conference with the centers on issues of interest to seniors. The two-­way experiment produced over four hundred hours of programming in a fourteen-­month period. When the experiment ended the community formed a non-­profit organization governed by a board

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comprised of local city officials, senior citizen organizations, educators, private firms, and the local cable television company. Funds came from individual donors, local industry, and the city and county governments. The live programs were moved to the evening from the daytime, and made available to all 35,000 area cable subscribers. A local Penn State University satellite campus used the system for adult education and a state mental hospital received a federal grant to link the hospital with the cable system.87 In many ways the Reading interactive cable experiment countered the logics of inequality that informed the discourse of civic culture during the FCC’s deliberations over cable policy. For pluralist social scientists of civic culture, cable operators, CAP administrators, and the mass culture critics Fred Friendly, Nicholas Johnson, and Theadora Sklover, the apathetic masses required the guidance of educated professionals to rejuvenate civic participation. By contrast, the Reading team provided the communications tools for seniors to experiment with and discover forms of participation that went far beyond the coalition’s initial goal to disseminate federal social services. However, AMC’s focus on experimenting with new technologies to foster “a sense of community at the local level by increasing the community’s dependence on its own resources, rather than imported ones” mirrored the civic cultural thinking of the War on Poverty’s Community Action Program that failed to address the institutionalized structures of racism that African Americans rebelled against in cities across the country.88 While Black cable activists questioned the value of cable access channels for confronting systemic economic marginalization and instead advocated for ownership in cable systems, Burns and the AMC contributed to a “Blue Skies” enthusiasm for deregulating cable television to release its revolutionary potential. This enthusiasm for the market development of cable television would make Black efforts to own cable systems nearly impossible.

5 Blue Skies, Black Cultures

In a special issue of the politically left-­leaning weekly newsmagazine The Nation dated May 18, 1970, freelance writer Ralph Lee Smith wrote a twenty-­ four-­ page exposé on the revolutionary potential for cable television to “influence every aspect of private and community life.” “As cable systems are installed in major U.S. cities and metropolitan areas,” he wrote, “the stage is being set for a communications revolution—­a revolution that some experts call ‘The Wired Nation.’” The revolutionary cable wire “will provide newspapers, mail service, banking and shopping facilities, data from libraries and other storage centers, school curricula and other forms of information too numerous to specify.” The cable will “cater to specialized community, minority, and individual needs and tastes,” energize “electoral politics,” and “perform functions of special importance” in “depressed areas and ghetto neighborhoods” that otherwise “live in anonymous invisibility until they are torn by riot.”1 Yet, Smith worried that “despite the importance and imminence of this new force in society, its possibilities and problems are almost unknown to the public” or to “local, state, or national legislators.” The people with better foresight, he wrote, were the economists, engineers, and social scientists who in the past three years had initiated research on cable television at think-­tanks including the RAND Corporation, industry organizations such as the Industrial Electronics Division of the Electronic Industries Association, and special task forces including one ordered by President Lyndon Johnson. Standing in the way of the Wired Nation, Smith believed, was the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which restricted the growth of cable television in large cities, and Congress, which refused to act due to “the power of the broadcast lobby.” “The way forward now,” Smith recommended, was to establish a “Presidential

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commission on the Wired Nation” that “should conduct extensive consultations with economists, the business community, communications technicians, and social scientists” to develop “a plan for creating a national broad-­band communications system in the United States during the 1970s.”2 Winning the National Magazine Award for Public Service and later published in extended form as a paperback book in 1972, Smith’s article and book gave national recognition and a brand identity to this “Blue Skies” enthusiasm for wiring the nation.3 Cable television histories have represented this Blue Skies period as a significant moment when “public interest” priorities took over commercial profit motives in cable television development. Though overly utopic and technologically deterministic, according to these histories, Blue Skies visions identified an important role for government, non-­profit foundations, and other public institutions to develop cable as a new technology for social benefit.4 I agree that this period is a significant moment in cable television history; however, I believe the significance of this period lies in accounting for how civil rights activists challenged Blue Skies assumptions about cable television’s potential to resolve the urban crisis in the wake of the race rebellions of the late 1960s.5 While social scientists, engineers, and non-­profit foundations identified Black isolation and alienation as a significant cause of the violent protests and believed cable television could alleviate this through facilitating communication within the Black “ghettos” and, more centrally, between a white establishment and Black ghetto residents, civil rights activists disputed this diagnosis and argued that race inequality stemmed not from alienation but from institutionalized structures of racism and economic marginalization. Civil rights leaders, Black business owners, and community organizations sought to channel the rebellious energies of African Americans who had endured racial discrimination and economic marginalization into campaigns to own cable systems for job creation and access to media representation. I begin this chapter by examining two prominent forums that addressed race in America in the 1960s: the American Academy of Arts and Sciences initiative on the “Negro American,” and President Lyndon Johnson’s National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. I consider how the nation’s white establishment leaders in the social sciences, business, and federal and state government articulated pluralist rationales that addressed these “civil disorders” as communications breakdowns between the white establishment and inner city residents of color. The civil rights leaders who attended these forums disputed these pluralist rationales through critiquing an American system that they found to normalize white middle-­class sensibilities and devalue Black perspectives and experience. Next, I identify how these pluralist sensibilities informed the electronics industries and social scientists in their advocacy for two-­way



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interactive cable television, and their promotion of cable industry deregulations to incentivize cable development. I then consider perspectives on Black economic development among civil rights activists and their advocacy for Black ownership of cable television systems. Case studies of Black cable ownership in Los Angeles, Dayton, Ohio, and Gary, Indiana, reveal the forms of structural racism in city government and in an increasingly deregulated cable industry that inhibited Black cable development. The chapter ends with the celebration that launched the country’s first operating African American–­owned cable television system in Gary in 1973. Recognizing this moment in cable history restores a lost narrative within this Blue Skies period that prioritizes Black experience and struggle against race and economic marginalization. Considered as a staging of equality that disputed pluralist logics of inequality, the celebration confronts us not with questions about the revolutionary possibilities of technology. Instead, it demands attention to the struggle for equality as a defining context for considering the democratic politics of technological development.

Communications as a Pluralist Solution to Race Inequality In the summer of 1964 the Planning Committee of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences invited twenty-­four social scientists to write papers addressing the place in society of “The Negro American.” This esteemed honorary society held a conference to discuss these papers in May 1965, which included few Black participants. The academy’s journal Daedalus published these papers, the conference proceedings, and other papers commissioned after the conference in the fall 1965 and winter 1966 issues.6 The twenty-­seven papers found wide distribution in book form in 1966 which the Saturday Review hailed as “the most complete summary of our racial crisis available today.”7 President Lyndon Johnson stated in the foreword to the collection that the “will of government and of the people has been committed to resolving the long, bitter trial of the Negro American in the only way that was ever really possible: by including him in our society.”8 Yet the perspectives about what constituted “our” society were so contentious that the planning committee included two introductions to the published collection of articles. Conference participant and Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons wrote an introduction that he believed represented the general perspectives of the conference participants and the papers assembled for the book. African American psychologist, scholar, and civil rights activist Kenneth Clark wrote a second introduction that challenged these perspectives. Considering each reveals fundamentally different perspectives about the sources and solutions to race inequality that characterized racial politics in the 1960s.

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Parsons approached the question of race through an explanation of why the actions and demands of the civil rights movement had taken so long to emerge after what he calls a long “latency” period following the Civil War. The two most significant changes “in our view,” Parsons intoned on behalf of the essays in the collection, was “the release of the Negro masses from the social isolation of the rural South, and their exposure to the main absorptive forces of the larger society.” Describing these absorptive forces, he argued that “only in a highly urbanized, hence individualized and pluralized, society does the opportunity emerge for a saliently different minority group to diffuse itself through the society” and “break up its monolithic separateness.” Reflecting the significance of professionals in guiding group relations within pluralism, Parsons argued that enabling this diffusion of separateness was “the emergence of an increasingly large and competent Negro ‘middle class,’ especially as participants in the higher reaches of the occupational system where substantive educational qualifications are required.”9 Further elaborating this pluralist reasoning at the conference, Parsons spoke about the “the very great importance of aggressive pluralization of the social structure.” Given that the “members of the lower groups participate very much less than the members of the higher groups,” he continued, the key to shedding the “inferiority status” of African Americans will be to bring middle-­ class African Americans “into the pluralization system.”10 In his introduction to the book, Parsons quoted other conference goers who argued that this pluralization could continue as long as the civil rights movement remained “nonviolent,” “symbolic,” and “aimed at the conscience.” Though Parsons expressed concern that “the more radical elements” of the civil rights movement that “have now taken up protest” against higher education and “American involvement in the war in Viet-­Nam” posed a more significant threat, he concluded that “American society . . . seems to have reached a level of pluralization which makes it unlikely that any polarization process” between the “‘radicals’ and their opponents” can destabilize the pluralist system.11 Kenneth Clark’s introduction to the collection, in contrast, rejected this pluralist understanding of the civil rights movement. Invoking his experience working with the Supreme Court on its 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate schools and his organizing an anti-­poverty program in Harlem, Clark wrote that “the missing ingredient that has forced the redirection of American power is not reflected in any of the papers contributed to this volume.” Rejecting pluralism and its “semi-­mystical notion that right or justice tends, in the end, to prevail in terms of itself,” he argued that the civil rights movement caught America “with its ideals exposed by a new type of challenge in the world at large, by the emergence of an adversary which offered effective



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ideological, psychological, and military competition.” Instead of being absorbed into the American pluralist system, Clark argued that African Americans have become “immunized and somewhat cynical to egalitarian promises which had never been fulfilled.” The civil rights movement, Clark concluded, was not a byproduct of evolving pluralist social relations but rather a continued struggle for “economic justice” that began with the New Deal programs in the 1930s and later broadened into a “world-­wide racial revolution” against “imperialism.”12 Also critiquing pluralist understandings of civil rights was the novelist and literary critic Ralph Ellison, one of the few people of color attending the conference. The “concepts which are brought to bear” in the field of sociology, he told the attendees, are “usually based on those of white, middle-­class, Protestant values of life style.” As an example Ellison cited the work of Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who identified the unstable Black family and Black identity as sources of poverty and barriers to middle-­class integration.13 Instead of pathologizing Black culture as a threat to the pluralist order defined through white middle-­class norms, Ellison argued that Black working-­class experience and perspectives must be integral to defining the collective commons of political participation. “Each minority group, including Negroes, tries to impose its sense of the total experience upon everyone else,” he said, and that this was “nothing to be frightened of” and rather “something which can be very, very creative for all of us.” He was concerned that the everyday experiences and “certain ways of doing things” of African Americans, including “Negroes who wait on tables or who work as domestics in the South,” were not available in fiction or sociology and that these experiences must become “a vital contributing part of the total culture.”14 These conflicting responses to race inequality between social scientists who believed the United States constituted a pluralist social system and Black scholars and activists who challenged the normalization of class and race privilege that constituted pluralist rationales were likewise evident in the immediate recommendations of the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. Following dozens of race rebellions in cities across the United States in the spring and summer of 1967 during which eighty-­three persons died, the vast majority of whom were African American, President Lyndon Johnson appointed the commission to study the reasons why these “civil disorders” occurred and report back with proposed solutions. Otto Kerner, governor of Illinois, chaired what became known as the Kerner Commission. The other ten commissioners included congressmen, industry and labor leaders, a police chief, the Kentucky State commerce commissioner, and the NAACP executive director. In the words of the New York Times political columnist Tom Wicker, who wrote the introduction to the final report released in early 1968, the commission did

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not include “black radicals, militant youth, or even academic leftists,” but rather “representatives of the moderate and ‘responsible’ Establishment” to speak “with a force so effective, so sure to be heard in white, moderate, responsible America.”15 Reflecting pluralist thinking about the importance of connecting high-­ status leaders with their group constituencies, this view from the “Establishment” diagnosed the immediate problem as “a widening gulf in communications between local government and the residents of the erupting ghettos of the city.” To rectify this “deep seated hostility toward the institutions of government” the Kerner Commission recommended the establishment of “neighborhood action task forces” headed by “a key official in the mayor’s office” and including “ranking city officials from the operating agencies serving the ghetto community, elected leaders, representatives from the local business, labor, professional and church communities, and neighborhood leaders, including representatives of community organizations of all orientations and youth leaders.” Recognizing that the “the number of Negro officials in elected and appointed positions in the riot cities is minimal,” this pluralist response did not seek to address racial discrimination as a structural barrier to decision-­making power for African Americans but to reestablish communications between white government officials and Black residents to mollify “perceptions” of racial discrimination.16 In his testimony before the Kerner Commission, Kenneth Clark disputed this understanding that racial discrimination was a problem that could be immediately addressed through better communication across city agencies and between ghetto residents and the so-­called “responsible” Establishment. Clark told the commission that he was “reluctant to accept” the invitation because the responsible and respectable officials in power in the past have not responded with policies to alleviate ongoing poverty and racial discrimination. He referenced the inactions that resulted from a report of the race riots in Chicago in 1919 that revealed the “terribly poor housing of Negroes in Chicago, the criminally inferior education, the unemployment and underemployment.” Clark too cited that after the race riots in Harlem in 1935, 1943, and 1964 “nothing was done by the respectable controllers of power, financial, real estate, and political power.” Instead of addressing these forms of institutional racism, Clark continued, the respectable society interpreted ghetto poverty as “a reflection of the inferiority of the ghetto prisoners.” Addressing institutional forms of racism, Clark argued, required “looking particularly at the respectable privileged segments of the society” and the way this privilege not only influenced the “political component of our society” but also “other institutions . . . including our churches, our labor unions, our academic and educational institutions.” He concluded that “our ghettos are the most concrete manifestations of the persistent, pervasive immorality of the American system, and it is difficult for privileged Americans, white or black, to



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face it in its full significance and implication.” Solutions would require “solid, serious programs for action which have observable positive consequences” with the allocation of sufficient resources that the respectable society has given to the military and “space exploration.”17 Clark proved correct in his skepticism that political leaders would question the amorality of the American system and devote significant resources to redressing the systemic economic, social, political, and cultural disenfranchisement of the less privileged residents of America’s urban ghettos. The Johnson administration took no action on the Kerner Commission’s recommendations to increase federal support for employment, education, welfare, and housing. Instead, Johnson turned attention to satellite and cable communications as new technologies for addressing urban poverty and other social issues, as did the electronics industry, non-­profit foundations, and research think-­tanks.

The “Wired Nation” as a Communications Solution to Race Inequality and Urban Renewal The vision that most influenced Ralph Lee Smith to write his exposé on the Wired Nation was a report submitted to the FCC in October 1969 by the Industrial Electronics Division of the Electronic Industries Association, a Washington, DC–­based political lobby that represented the giants of the electronics industry, including IBM and General Electric.18 In the report titled “The Future of Broadband Communications” the IED/EIA proposed a two-­wire system. One wire consisted of a video telephone system similar to the “Picturephone” system that AT&T was developing to provide video phone and facsimile service. The other wire would use cable networks “coupled to computers” to “provide a virtually unlimited access to information sources for all subscribers in relation to their needs and within their ability to pay.” As a communications wire system envisioned redistributing solution to the urban crisis, the two-­ people not resources. In referencing that “eighty percent of the people in the United States live on less than 10% of the land area,” the report concluded that “no other vertebrate congregates in such masses as man—­it’s not natural.” The wired system would facilitate urban flight through providing the means “to communicate for business, entertainment, and sociological purposes,” which would allow more persons “to work at or near their suburban homes.”19 For the residents choosing to remain in the inner cities, cable communications could promote the civic ideal of small town life through creating “small, self-­determining communities” to facilitate “order, identifiable territory, community pride, and opportunity to participate and vote on matters that can be of local option—­ education, cultural pursuits, recreational interests, etc.” It was clear though that as a commercial endeavor, the wires would not funnel

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resources into the inner city but rather develop first in the affluent suburbs: “From the business point of view, the suburban population will be by far the most important as it is expected that the residents of the suburbs will earn about 50% of the total family income in the United States” and “home computers will be a luxury item in the more affluent homes.” To cope with the immediate “growing incidence of crime,” the cable system could provide “facsimile pictures of criminal elements randomly accessed to facilitate rapid identification, and closed circuit video scanning of streets, merchandise, vaults, etc.”20 While the IED/EIA imagined broadband cable communications to facilitate white flight to the affluent suburbs and criminal surveillance in urban areas, Lyndon Johnson commissioned a Task Force on Communications Policy following the release of the Kerner Commission’s report. The task force enlisted the RAND Corporation, a research think-­tank, to study the benefits of “Telecommunications in Urban Development.” The study recommended that the task force fund a “Wired Ghetto” pilot project, which consisted of installing “a four-­channel wired system in South Central Los Angeles that would provide programs on job information, educational opportunities, city-­hall news, and cultural events.”21 The study’s methodology and conclusions reflect the Kerner Commission’s pluralist assumptions about the importance of maintaining communications between a mostly white establishment and Black ghetto residents. Despite finding in South Central Los Angeles “a surprisingly large number of community organizations,” and, among its residents, “a keen awareness of the political atmosphere in Los Angeles, and a rather high degree of political sophistication,” the RAND researchers were not interested in asking residents how they might want to use communications technologies. Instead, the researchers believed that a lack of “telecommunications media” to provide “information about jobs, job training, health and welfare services, housing, political events, public services, and cultural activities” was “to some degree, responsible for the isolation of ghetto residents and for their inability to enter into the economic mainstream of their cities.” To illustrate the centrality of communications between the white establishment and African Americans to facilitate this entry or assimilation, the RAND report cited two other studies that came to similar conclusions. In their study of educational television “in the Ghetto,” the National Association of Educational Broadcasters recommended to use “television for communication between white and black society.” Similarly, a report to the Detroit mayor concluded that “the most important problem . . . was the improvement of communications between the core inhabitants and the white power structure” to facilitate “the integration of these groups into the larger society.”22 These visions of broadband cable as a communications tool for integrating African Americans into the mainstream pluralist order were evident in the



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capacity of cable to facilitate “two-­way” interactivity. In 1970 the FCC took interest in cable’s interactive capacity when deliberating policies to deregulate cable television.23 FCC Chairman Dean Burch told a Senate Subcommittee in June 1971 that “we are contemplating requiring that there be built into the system the capacity for two-­way non-­voice communication” that “even if rudimentary in nature, can be useful in a host of ways—­for surveys, marketing services, burglar alarm devices, educational feedback, to name a few.”24 Convinced of the benefits of two-­way cable television the FCC included in its 1972 cable rules, which lifted some restrictions on cable television entering the nation’s largest one hundred cities, the requirement that cable systems in these large cities “maintain a plant having technical capacity for nonvoice return communications.” These two-­way systems, the FCC wrote, could allow television viewers to “push a button” to respond to a political survey or for student viewers to indicate whether or not they understood the teacher.25 Since cable television operators did not find near-­term market benefits for investing in two-­way services, the federal government and non-­profit foundations financed interactive cable experiments to demonstrate the technology’s potential social benefits.26 The most substantial funding came from the National Science Foundation, which in 1974 requested proposals for “Design Studies of Experimental Application of Two-­Way Cable Communications for Urban Social Service Delivery and Administration.” Of the fifty proposals, the NSF awarded seven approximately $100,000 each to develop their designs. Three of these received a portion of nearly $3 million to implement their experiments, including the RAND Corporation for experiments in home education and daycare worker training in Spartanburg, South Carolina.27 A consideration of the Spartanburg interactive cable television experiment reveals the class and race privilege that informed communications solutions to race inequality, and how social scientists eager to develop interactive technologies recommended deregulating cable television. Spartanburg in the 1970s was a city of under 100,000 residents in northwest South Carolina that was in transition away from the cotton textile mills that had grown the city in the nineteenth century.28 The RAND Corporation chose Spartanburg to conduct these tests because the cable system in Spartanburg, installed by TeleCable, a multisystem cable company that had previously tested two-­way cable television in Overland Park, Kansas, was one of the most advanced two-­way systems in the country. RAND conducted three interactive experiments: an in-­service training for staff professionals at daycare centers; a home course in child development for parents and daycare providers; and an adult education course for students wishing to complete their high school education through passing the General Education Development (GED) exam.29

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The daycare training involved running workshops for three groups of daycare workers. One group participated in the workshop through a two-­way audio/video interactive cable network that allowed participants to interact with the workshop staff. A second group viewed the workshop through a non-­ interactive one-­way cable, and the final group did not participate in the workshop. The experiment results indicated that the one-­way group learned more than the two-­way group, possibly because, as the report surmised, the two-­way participants experienced “greater evaluative anxiety” with the staff monitoring their participation. But instead of concluding that these results negated the value of two-­way cable, the report found a potentially positive outcome because if the two-­way participants “know they are visible to the workshop staff and other participants . . . the workshop staff may be able to exert more pressure on the two-­way than on one-­way participants to conform to norms espoused in the workshop.” As a tool of surveillance, the two-­way cable television, the report concluded, could be most effective for in-­ home daycare providers because they receive less on-­site supervision than providers in daycare centers.30 These conclusions indicate that the researchers’ approach to interactivity was not to involve daycare workers in creating a more effective training program that might provide feedback for altering training norms. Instead, the researchers approached the experiment from a top-­down management perspective that sought a cost-­effective tool to enforce existing training techniques.31 The second experiment also addressed daycare, but focused on mothers “because the primary mechanism of care in this country is the mother taking care of her children at home.” The experiment recruited eighteen white mothers and nineteen women daycare providers, six of whom were Black, to take a non-­credit course based on the child development theories of Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget. The study ran for one hour per day, three days a week for twelve weeks beginning in September 1976. The researchers randomly assigned participants to two groups. One group could use only the telephone to ask questions before or after the program while the second group could use the telephone and an eight-­button data-­return terminal to respond to multiple-­choice questions during the program regarding the content and pace of the session.32 When the results of the experiment indicated that the telephone-­only group performed better on the course test than did the telephone and data-­return terminal group, the report called the results inconclusive because the data-­return group had more than twice as many daycare providers who on average had lower high school and college graduation rates than did the mothers. Because less formal education indicated a lower “ability and willingness to learn,” the researchers believed that these differences in educational background “may be expected



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to produce different results on measures of cognitive gain from the curriculum.” Determined to find a positive educational result for the data-­return group, the research team dropped the day care providers from a second experiment so that all participants would be mothers who were “strikingly similar on all the background characteristics explored.” They were “all white” and “most were college-­ educated housewives with two children” with college-­educated husbands.33 Though the results to the adjusted experiment showed little statistical difference between the telephone group and the telephone plus data-­terminal group, the researchers recognized that in the first experiment the educated participants used the telephone more than the less educated participants. Thus, the RAND researchers recommended home cable education for the “better-­ educated population.” To advance these interactive technologies the RAND researchers supported the commercial expansion of cable television, including their redlining practices of prioritizing cable buildouts in more affluent neighborhoods: When one debates the future of home interactive education, the potential benefits for the educationally disadvantaged are only one concern. The usefulness of a system for average or well-­to-­do citizens who wish to extend their education must also be considered. This latter group represents the main commercial market for interactive education programs because it includes current cable subscribers and those who might subscribe if educational programs were put on cable. When cable operators consider the installation of interactive service, this paying population is naturally their primary interest.34

Such conclusions indicate that this research, which was initially intended to address urban inequalities, was in the end more invested in promoting the development of new technologies, whatever their application. The third interactive cable experiment too exposed the limitations of viewing technologies as solutions to urban inequalities. This experiment created an interactive home course for preparing adult students for the GED exam in a city where only 35 percent of adults had completed a high school education. The highly publicized program offered students free connection to cable systems and free converters and home terminals for the interactive experiment. The curriculum and instructors were drawn from the same GED classes that had been offered at Spartanburg Technical College. Interactive functions allowed the instructor to take attendance, conduct quizzes with true-­or-­false questions, and receive signals from students during lectures to indicate whether they were following the lesson or not. However, out of a population of an estimated 18,000 adults in Spartanburg who did not have a high school degree, an average of only

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10 students enrolled in each class offered in the spring and fall semesters of 1976 and the winter semester of 1977.35 RAND conducted a follow-­up survey to explore why so few students enrolled, which revealed the overlooked structural inequalities of education and cable distribution in Spartanburg. Cable television was not available to 7,000 of the 21,000 homes in this city, including many located in public housing projects and “mill villages” near the textile plants, a significant source of work for the residents who might be interested in such courses. Also, of the adults who had not completed high school, 46 percent had less than an eighth-­grade education, making them less likely to be candidates for a GED program. Further, many survey respondents stated their preference for attending classes in person rather than at home while others felt a high school degree would not help them find better work opportunities. The RAND report concluded that “subsidies and detailed regulations to establish such systems do not seem warranted.” Instead, the “most promising avenue appears to be the growth of commercial interactive cable systems” including uses for “pay cable television, fire and security systems.” To realize this potential the report recommended “removal of federal regulatory barriers” to commercial cable television development.36 Thus, one of the significant results of these recommendations to deregulate cable television from the RAND Corporation and its researchers—­who conducted interactive cable experiments to address decaying urban conditions—­was to make it more difficult for African Americans to participate in owning cable systems for Black cultural and economic development. Proponents of Black cable ownership broadly shared the perspectives of civil rights activists including Kenneth Clark and Ralph Ellison, who believed that the race rebellions constituted a protest of America’s institutional structures of race and class inequality, not just a reflection of a breakdown in communications among a mostly white establishment and ghetto residents. This movement for Black cable ownership sought to build upon Black experience to generate community support for Black urban development, an orientation that contrasted with the electronics industry’s vision of suburban flight and the Johnson administration’s, NSF’s, and RAND Corporation’s focus on social service delivery through new communications technologies.

The Cultural Politics of Black Economic Development Following the race rebellions in 1967 and the emergence of the Black Power movement, Richard Nixon campaigned to bring “law and order” to American cities as well as “black capitalism” as a means to offer African Americans not “dependency” but a “piece of the pie.” According to Sallyanne Payton, an African American member of Nixon’s White House staff, Nixon’s solution to the



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urban rebellions was to encourage “more Black people to behave like whites” through programs to assist them to “get into business, go to school, become homeowners.” Nixon instituted his “Black capitalist” program through a 1969 Executive Order to create the Office of Minority Business Enterprise within the Department of Commerce. But the OMBE’s small budget of $60 million per year was limited to helping coordinate existing private and public programs and stimulate private investment. With limited funding the program did little to reduce the stark disparities between white and Black business ownership. In 1969 African Americans and Latinos/as comprised 17 percent of the U.S. population but owned only 4 percent of the nation’s businesses and, because these businesses were small and mostly service-­oriented, owned just 1 percent of its business assets. Alleviating these disparities was less of a concern for Nixon class African than his political calculus to increase support among middle-­ Americans without alienating his white majority constituency. According to Nixon’s Commerce Secretary Maurice Stans, the OMBE’s “relatively small budget impact” “can put the Administration in a good light with Blacks without carrying a severe negative impact on the majority community, as is often the case with civil rights issues.”37 Civil rights activists, and in particular those who supported Black ownership of cable television, disputed this characteristically pluralist orientation to addressing race inequality through culturally integrating African Americans into the institutions of the white establishment. Charles Tate was one of the most prominent activists in the movement for Black cable ownership. As a researcher at the Washington, DC–­based Urban Institute, the policy think-­tank established in 1968 by the Johnson administration, he wrote about approaches to Black economic development and organized a conference on cable television and minorities in 1971. In 1972 he joined the Booker T. Washington Foundation to research and promote Black economic development, and in 1973 established, with OMBE seed funding, the Cablecommunications Resource Center, a national clearinghouse for economic and business opportunities for minorities in cable television.38 As an influential participant in promoting Black economic development and cable ownership, his activism and writings reveal much about the cultural politics that informed the thinking and actions of the movement for Black cable ownership. After graduating from LeMoyne College, the historically Black college in Memphis, Tennessee, Tate worked in Dayton, Ohio, as a contracting officer and senior procurement policy specialists with the U.S. Department of Defense. In the late 1960s he took a year off without pay to help organize Dayton’s civil rights campaign against racial discrimination and segregation in public housing, schools, and employment. With his wife, Florence Tate, he co-­founded the Dayton Alliance for Racial Equality.39 In 1969 he left Dayton to work as a policy

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researcher at the Urban Institute and soon drafted a working paper surveying the Conceptual Origins of Black Economic Development and a Review of Residual and Contemporary Forms. Unlike the Nixon administration, which sought to promote middle-­ class white behavior as a foundation for Black capitalism, Tate looked to the disenfranchised Black participants of the urban rebellions in thinking about Black economic development. He identified the race rebellions between 1965 and 1967 as the “most forceful impetus given to the programmatic definition of Black Power as economic development of Black communities” when “white-­ owned stores and the police were the main targets of the ghetto residents” while “Blacks and Black-­owned businesses were the targets of the police and national guardsmen.” The “revolts,” Tate continued, “demonstrated that the urbanized Black masses at the lowest end of the socio-­economic scale had not materially benefitted from the Civil Rights Movement or its offspring, the War on Poverty.”40 In surveying the history of Black economic development, Tate was sympathetic with Black scholars including Marxist sociologist E. Franklin Frasier and economist Abram Harris, who both believed that capitalist Black economic development would empower a Black bourgeoisie and exploit the Black working classes. But Tate believed that the Black revolts indicated a social force that “neither author apparently foresaw” which was “the potential of economic development as a weapon for the Black masses to protect themselves against both the ravages of white racism and the exploitation of the Black bourgeoisie.”41 With this potential of the Black masses to challenge economic and racial exploitation in mind, Tate surveyed the views of “white liberals,” “white capitalists,” “Black moderates,” and “Black radicals” regarding Black economic development that were voiced at a Columbia University conference on the topic earlier that year. Tate critiqued the “pluralist” orientation of white liberals who sought to integrate African Americans into white mainstream society through either tax incentives for white business investment in Black ghettos or “wage subsidies to employers” to incentivize the “dispersal of ghetto residents into suburban areas.” But these two white liberal approaches, which Tate called the “ghetto gilding” and “ghetto dispersal,” “presume that the controlling factor of Black economic development will be what white capitalists and white politicians want and can be persuaded to do, not what Blacks want or can be persuaded to do on an independent basis.”42 Tate was also critical of Black moderates who “usually accede to the white position,” including the supporters of the Hough Model, named after a community organization in Cleveland that characterized “most of the economic development projects now underway.” The Hough Model saw social change not coming from the demands of the Black masses but from the leadership of a



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“small group of individuals” who may or may not be ghetto residents and who prioritize attracting “major non-­ghetto industry” to inject “external capital” as “inducement or catalyst for resident interest, support, and participation.”43 Tate found this model limited for its “tacit acceptance of the rules of artful compromise and negotiation to settle disputes and disagreements” at the expense of utilizing more “militant protest methods.”44 Tate was more sympathetic to Black radicals including Roy Innis and Dunbar S. McLaurin. Because the “apparent alternative of relying on the good will and benevolence of whites to provide for the needs of Blacks has been proven unfeasible,” Tate summarized, these “Black theorists call for a massive transfer of capital, capital instruments, and corporate control to the Black community” as necessary to “achieve self-­determination.” This radical view built upon the frustrations of the revolting Black masses and their community structures to demand this transfer just as the government had given “preferential, protective treatment” to “American industry” through “tariffs, subsidies, etc.” Conceding that “commercial intercourse with the larger economy is desirable and perhaps necessary,” Tate nevertheless agreed with the radical view that African Americans must have decision-­making authority. He cited Baptist minister and civil rights activist Leon Sullivan’s work in Philadelphia as a successful model where this charismatic leader “organized protest action (including boycotts) against white firms conducting business in the ghetto” and identified an “initial investment project” that was first designed and initially funded by ghetto communities before securing “outside support.” Tate also found value in the “Black Muslim model” for “directing the religious program to those ghetto residents at the lowest end of the socio-­economic scale” and for converting “ghetto income into equity capital through a tithing and systematized saving system.” He concluded that both “the Sullivan and Muslim models appear to be superior in that a strong community base or constituency will better equip such projects to overcome obstacles and inefficiencies and to survive crises and financial reversals.” Though Tate recognized that political and economic obstacles created significant barriers to success, he believed that “frustration may provide the creativity needed by Blacks to establish a business infrastructure.”45 In identifying ghetto communities as strong bases of support for Black economic development, including through cable television, Tate articulated an approach that contested the white liberal assumptions that guided Blue Skies approaches to wire the nation. For Tate, Sullivan, and Black Muslims, ghetto residents were not alienated from the pluralist system in need of communicative guidance from the white establishment. Instead, Black revolts indicated a shared anger against the institutions of the white establishment that demanded solutions that would come from the struggle for race equality among ghetto residents. One such solution was Black ownership of cable television,

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which would create job opportunities for ghetto residents, funnel subscription revenues back into the local cable operation and community, and create a new medium for Black expression. The following case studies of Black efforts to own and develop cable systems in Los Angeles, Dayton, Ohio, and Gary, Indiana, reveal a movement that broadly shared, and drew from, Tate’s orientation to Black economic development. Yet Tate’s belief that community support could help overcome political economic obstacles would prove insufficient. In Los Angeles and Dayton, where African Americans comprised a minority population, white majority political structures created barriers to Black ownership. More significantly, in all three cases, access to financing through the government or the private sector proved nearly impossible at a time when owners of multiple cable franchises held decision-­making authority over access to financing and construction.

The Racial Politics of Cable Television in Los Angeles In an old discount furniture store, one of the few commercial structures left standing on 103rd Street in Watts after six days of violent rebellion in August 1965, young Watts community activists, writers, and artists gathered to discuss the outrage that led to the rebellion. They formed the Mafundi Institute (meaning “artisans” or “creative people” in Swahili) to support creative expressions about life in Watts. With a small grant from the Kettering Foundation Mafundi sponsored a film by a teenage resident titled Johnny Gigs Out. The film expressed frustration at the racist structures that prevented the protagonist from pursuing a career as a jazz musician. The film ended with a police officer killing Johnny when he mistakes Johnny’s trumpet for a gun.46 The film’s effectiveness in identifying the structural economic and government barriers to Black enfranchisement attracted established Black artists. This led to support from the City of Los Angeles and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to build a Watts Neighborhood Center for creative projects and, from a Model Cities grant, to fund a ten-­week cultural awareness program.47 However, the Mafundi Institute was dissatisfied with these marginal funds and created a Watts Communications Bureau (WCB) to plan and build an interactive cable television system and training center to create employment opportunities and a local communications infrastructure. At a symposium on cable television held in Los Angeles in October 1972, Mafundi Institute director James Taylor expressed his frustrations about being “hung up in this same bag of you know . . . the Model Cities and you name it and Ford and Rockefeller disappointments and turndowns, the usual things that happen, you know, in black communities all over the country.” As an “avenue whereby we could create some



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real jobs and really make an impact on economic development,” Taylor continued, “we began to kick the cable idea around in ’68.”48 The Mafundi Institute’s ideas for two-­way cable television critiqued the pluralist white middle-­class normativity of the NSF and RAND Corporation, which funded interactive cable television experiments to extend educational opportunities within existing educational institutions. At a seminar on cable television in Los Angeles in November 1972, Don Bushnell, acting director of WCB, questioned those “educational applications” that limited the “student learner at home or wherever” to “minimum choice response.” Instead, Bushnell argued that the potential of two-­way cable in an urban community for educational purposes has a lot more to do with changing the structure of urban education systems, urban school systems, creating alternatives to the public schools for kids who either can’t speak the language required of them in the schools or who in one way or another get rapidly turned off because they don’t hold themselves in the proper way or they don’t, in effect, move into that middle class milieu which is dominant in the public school system.49

Bushnell’s critique of this middle-­class normativity derived from his experience working within the established institutions that were developing educational technologies. He worked at RAND in the early 1960s on research in computer-­ assisted education. In the late 1960s he was a member of the National Evaluation Team of the U.S. Office of Education, an advisor to the National Commission on Instructional Technology, and a member of the Committee on Evaluation within President Nixon’s Task Force on Education.50 Bushnell believed educational reforms should not come from the social science advisors to these commissions but from “the organizations within the community that are in fact giving educational community to young people,” including “the seven organizations that have been in Watts since the uprising in ’65.” Doing so entailed putting “the production equipment in the hands of learners so we don’t have now the teacher predigesting material and trying to present it over cable television, but we let the student take the portable equipment . . . to use it for his own creative purposes.”51 Further, while the Blue Skies discourse among non-­profit foundations and social scientists emphasized cable television as a communication tool to connect alienated ghetto residents to mainstream institutions, Bushnell and the WCB thought of cable television as both a communication medium for Black expression and a local infrastructure for Black economic development. In its first application for a cable franchise on August 18, 1971, the WCB linked the

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absence of Black ownership and management of the existing “822 authorized commercial television stations” to “the inability of commercial television to acknowledge the issues and concerns of 80 million black, brown, red, and yellow Americans except when ‘there is trouble in the streets.’” There “is an even greater need for jobs in the new industries of the media for minorities,” the bureau emphasized, because “our businessmen want to own and manage the cable networks serving our communities” and “our engineers want to manufacture CATV hardware, our electronics trainees want to install and maintain the circuitry of cable systems, our artists want to create and produce programming relevant to our culture and collective interests.”52 The WCB’s nine-­member board of directors reflected the Mafundi Institute’s commitment to involve local businesses, residents, hospitals, arts organizations, and churches in the planning process. Board members included James Taylor, Mafundi director; Leon Woods, president of the Watts Manufacturing Company; Tommy Jacquette, executive director of the Watts Summer Festival; Doris Fuller, a “Welfare Mother” and board member of the Watts Health Advisory Council; Dr. Alfred Cannon, director of the Martin Luther King County Hospital; Reverend H. Belford Hannibal of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles; and Hazel Steward, the executive secretary of the California Minority Employment Council. Also on the board were Mary Jane Hewitt, an educator, arts curator, and producer of the NBC series Negro in American Culture, and the film and television actress Diahann Carroll. To assist with fundraising, WCB acting director Don Bushnell recruited professionals with ties to non-­profit foundations and educational institutions including Hallock Hoffman, board chairman of the Pacifica Foundation, an operator of non-­profit radio stations; Charles F. Kettering II, board chairman of the Kettering Foundation; and John R. Seeley, an independent sociologist whose work focused on mental health. The board’s plan was that once the first phase of the cable system was operational, which included installing two-­way cable for service to 16,000 “dwelling units” in Watts, interconnecting schools, hospitals, and businesses and building neighborhood studios, the WCB board would transfer its majority shares in the operation to the Mafundi Institute.53 When the WCB’s largely non-­profit organizational structure created difficulties in raising the estimated $2 million for phase one, the board consulted a venture capital firm, which recommended creating a limited partnership for investors who would benefit from “all depreciation of the capital equipment . . . after the initial five years of operation.” The newly constituted Watts Cable Communications Association (WCCA) submitted an amended franchise application with this organizational structure in place. To reduce costs, the application limited the two-­way capacity to an experiment connecting area health, educational, and social service agencies to fifty units in Ujima Village, a Black-­owned



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and controlled moderate-­to low-­rent housing complex recently completed with aid from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.54 But the WCCA board had difficulty gaining majority support in the Los Angeles City Council and from the mayor.55 Frustrated with the delay in the city of Los Angeles, WCCA applied for a franchise in the unincorporated neighboring areas of Willowbrook and Athens, which were just outside the city of Los Angeles and under Los Angeles County jurisdiction. The WCCA franchise application proposed wiring 11,000 households and installing two-­way connections with community groups and organizations including the Martin Luther King Hospital in south Watts. The five-­member county Board of Supervisors approved the application “upon presentation of acceptable financial guarantees of ability to construct the system.” Yet even in this scaled-­down application, the WCCA was unable to secure the estimated $640,000 in stock sales and bank loans required to begin construction.56 While the community-­based non-­profit organization Mafundi and its affiliated franchising groups faced barriers to raising startup capital and negotiating Los Angeles City politics, other for-­profit ventures to build cable systems in South Central Los Angeles faced barriers as well. The details of these efforts reveal the structures of wealth and power that existed in city politics and the influence of the more highly capitalized multisystem cable operators in the franchising process. Clinton Galloway, a medical doctor in South Central Los Angeles, organized a franchise bid that resembled the Hough Model for Black economic development, which sought financing from sources outside of the Black community. Clinton and his brother Carl, an auditor of major construction companies for an international accounting firm, owned Megavision, a big-­ screen television store in northwest Los Angeles. The Galloways sold the store to pursue a cable franchise in the South Central and Harbor areas of Los Angeles. In February 1980 the brothers formed Universal Cable Systems, Ltd., a partnership with Six Star Cablevision, a cable operator with systems in Los Angeles and several other states. The partnership with the established Six Star enabled the Galloways to secure financing for the franchise while maintaining 60 percent control in the company. But according to the Galloways, two city councilmen and the Mayor’s Office pressured the Galloways to partner with close associates of these elected officials, including Councilman Robert Farrell’s deputy, Channing Johnson, and Mayor Tom Bradley’s senior consultant and commercial real-­estate developer, Danny Bakewell. When the Galloways refused, Johnson left office and partnered with Bakewell and others to form Community Telecommunications (CTI) to bid for a franchise.57 When neither CTI’s nor the Galloways’ applications received majority votes in the Los Angeles City Council, the real-­estate conglomerate Kaufman and Broad filed an application. Its founder was Eli Broad, a major donor and

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supporter of Mayor Bradley’s campaign for the governor of California. When the city urged the applicant to include 20 percent minority ownership, KB awarded 9.75 percent of the company to Bakewell’s community fundraising organization Brotherhood Crusade, 6.25 percent to Johnson, and the remainder to other politically connected South Central residents.58 When KB proposed to dedicate over $11 million for free service to community institutions, local programming, and job training, the City Council awarded KB the franchise in 1983.59 Two years later, KB had made no efforts to build the system but profited from selling the franchise to multisystem operator American Cable Systems (ACS). The newly created Department of Telecommunications authorized the sale. Far from the Mafundi Institute’s plans to involve the Watts community in the cultural and economic development of cable television, ACS committed to operating just two video studios and a mobile van for local programming in the franchise area of 180,000 residents. Construction did not begin until 1987 making South Central the last area of Los Angeles to install cable television. The franchise was subsequently sold three more times including to the nation’s largest multisystem operators, Comcast and Time Warner Cable.60 The Los Angeles case places in stark relief the racialized structural barriers that prohibited the Mafundi Institute from developing cable television as an infrastructure for Black economic growth and cultural expression in South Central Los Angeles. Though Black cable ownership advocates including Charles Tate believed that financial hurdles could be overcome with a strong community base following the late 1960s rebellions, access to financing from investors or banks proved impossible. As multisystem operators developed the economies of scale and financial resources to build systems in Los Angeles, their priorities to develop more affluent neighborhoods meant South Central would have to wait for cable television. Even in a city with a Black mayor whose record indicated consistent efforts to involve African Americans in city development projects, requirements to win a majority of support in the city council for a cable franchise and pressures for elected officials to maintain ties to deep-­pocketed political donors proved insurmountable for developing a Black controlled and operated cable system in South Central. Impediments to Black cable ownership too came from non-­profit organizations and social scientists who sought to develop a model cable franchise ordinance for municipalities across the country. A consideration of how these organizations chose Dayton, Ohio, as a city to establish a model ordinance and the civil rights activists who opposed their recommendations exposes another layer of structural racism that impeded the movement for Black ownership of cable television.



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Institutional Barriers to Black Ownership in Dayton, Ohio The story of cable television in Dayton began when, following the expressed interests of three cable companies to build a cable system in the affluent Dayton suburban township of Oakwood in October 1970, Oakwood Vice Mayor Bonnie Macaulay called for a voluntary freeze on granting cable franchises until the Miami Valley Council of Governments (COG) could study prospects for cable television in the greater Dayton metropolitan area. Macaulay was also president of COG, a governing body that included the city of Dayton and twelve surrounding suburban townships. The Dayton-­ based Kettering Foundation expressed interest in the prospects for cable television and partnered with the Ford Foundation to provide $80,000 for the RAND Corporation to conduct a study in the Dayton Miami Valley. As the nine-­month study got underway COG recommended that other cities, villages, and unincorporated areas in the surrounding Montgomery and Greene Counties also refrain from granting franchises to cable companies until the study was completed.61 In the final report released in January 1972, the RAND team recommended the private ownership of a single two-­way system that interconnected Dayton, its twelve suburbs, and the unincorporated townships to create “economies of scale.” The report recommended building separate head ends and trunk lines so that “10 to 24 separate communities” could potentially produce and circulate “individualized local programming” within their communities. Though Dayton city residents expressed “much concern . . . about the potential difficulties of encouraging cable operators to serve low-­income areas,” the report concluded that “this problem is alleviated, at least in the city of Dayton, because the greater housing density per square mile in low-­income areas reduces the cost of serving each household.”62 The RAND staff researchers who led the project and wrote the report had previously worked on defense industry research and on satellite and cable technologies.63 Their approach to cable television’s pubic interest value shared many of the pluralist characteristics that guided the Kerner Commission and the social scientists involved in the Negro American project. The Dayton report expressed concern about the city’s rigid segregation and proposed cable television remedies that focused on communications between the city officials and Black residents, and on educational programming. The report cited how cable television could help the city ombudsman “communicate with the public” and provide public health programs to guide, for example, children in brushing their teeth and expecting parents on prenatal care. Neighborhood programs could focus on “leadership development programs in the ghettos” and “school board and city commission meetings.” In recommending a single cable franchise owner for Dayton and its surrounding suburbs and townships and thinking

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about cable television as a communications medium “to serve the black audience,” the RAND researchers did not think of Black residents as participants in owning cable television as an infrastructure for Black economic development. Indeed, the report assumed that the “question of who controls access to cable television channels is, we believe, separable from the question of who owns the cable system.”64 At a seminar on Urban Cable Television held in Los Angeles on January 15, 1972, advocates for Black participation in cable development disputed the RAND report’s recommendations and economic reasoning for a single metropolitan-­ wide system. Theodore Ledbetter, head of the Cablecommunications Resource Center that Charles Tate established to promote Black participation in cable television systems, argued that residents in the more densely populated areas in the city of Dayton would end up subsidizing the higher costs of cabling the less densely populated suburbs. Ledbetter situated this potential as a continuation of ongoing trends among white professionals who worked in the city of Dayton but took their paychecks and spent them in the affluent white suburbs: “You are asking the cities, which are going downhill, to subsidize the suburbs, the cities are where people earn their living but they take it home to the suburbs to spend it.” Advocates for Black participation too critiqued the report for accepting the unequal representational structure of the COG. C. J. McLin, a funeral home director in Dayton, Ohio, a state legislator and an advisor to the Ohio governor on Minority Affairs, stated that although the City of Dayton had 250,000 residents while one of the suburban villages “may have 4,500,” they each get a single vote in COG. This not only disenfranchised city residents, but more so, Black residents because they comprised 31 percent of the Dayton city population but a small percentage of the twelve suburban areas represented in the COG.65 While RAND was conducting its research for the report, Black Dayton residents organized to develop an alternative plan to facilitate Black ownership of a cable system to serve the majority Black population in Dayton’s southwest district. These efforts were a continuation of actions that followed a week of race rebellions in September 1966. Dissatisfied with the limited benefits of the federal government’s Model City program that invested in Dayton, Dayton residents began to organize to wrest control over political and economic decision-­making in the southwest district.66 The impetus for developing a Black-­ owned system in the southwest district came when in early 1971 the Pasadena, California–­based Cypress Communications approached Dayton leaders in a bid for a city franchise. McLin was one of the eleven board members selected to form Cypress Cable TV of Dayton, but was dissatisfied that only he and another board member, Dr. J. E. Cromartie, the chief of medical staff at Miami Valley Hospital, were Black.



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So McLin joined with other Black residents of Dayton’s southwest district to develop a strategy for developing a Black-­owned cable system. They began through organizing a conference in Dayton on January 14, 1972, to bring together cable operators, including Cypress, and national civil rights activists interested in promoting Black cable development to discuss possibilities. In organizing the conference just a week prior to a Dayton conference hosted by the Kettering Foundation to discuss the RAND report, Dayton’s Black residents and Black cable advocates expressed their frustration that RAND, Kettering, and the COG never consulted them in compiling the report.67 Of the cable companies that McLin and his colleagues negotiated with during and after the conference, Cypress offered the most promising arrangement for Black ownership and control. The Cypress proposal created two cable franchises for the City of Dayton, one encompassing Dayton’s southwest district and the other the rest of Dayton. Cypress would own 50 percent of the southwest franchise and reserve 50 percent ownership for Citizens Cable Corporation (CCC), which would be “controlled and owned by blacks and southwest Dayton residents.” Cypress would provide CCC with a ten-­year low-­interest loan of $400,000 while CCC would raise $100,000 in selling stock to southwest residents. Though given half ownership, Cypress insisted on having majority control of the southwest franchise until the loan was paid back, and the CCC could not distribute system profits to their shareholders. However, CCC was able to negotiate control of the planned cable television programming studios in southwest Dayton, a significant factor given that even the local radio station that catered to Black residents was white-­owned and had been criticized for not engaging with Black political concerns.68 To ensure economic opportunities, the CCC secured promises from Cypress to fund a jobs training program for southwest residents and either employ southwest residents or hire southwest contractors for work on Cypress cable systems throughout the metro and suburban areas should Cypress win franchises there.69 Despite the promise, realizing this novel way to leverage Black ownership and control was destabilized as larger multisystem cable operators, including Cypress, increasingly merged to create economies of scale and secure venture capital to expand operations. Between 1969 and 1972, Cypress President Leon Papernow had acquired small cable systems or merged with other multisystem cable operators to establish operations in seventeen states serving 165,000 subscribers.70 In addition to Dayton, Cypress had applications for franchises in forty-­one cities from Chicago to New Orleans, and was the first cable operator to offer stock to the public.71 Furthermore, the corporate culture of the Cypress headquarters in Los Angeles created a geographic and cultural distance from the places it bought or installed cable systems. This was particularly evident with regard to southwest Dayton’s Black residents when the Cypress corporate

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development director commented that “it was a nebulous thing to deal with” until McLin “acted as liaison between us and the blacks.”72 Cypress itself was purchased in May 1972 by Warner Communications, owner of the Warner Bros. film studio and cable operations including systems in Columbus and Akron, Ohio. Though the Warner Communications CEO said in November 1972 that the agreements between Cypress and CCC would remain the same, and that “it’s easier to get money if you’re operating as Warner Communications than if you’re operating alone,” in January 1973 Warner announced it was no longer interested in building a system in Dayton.73 Other multisystem cable operators declined to work with the CCC on a Dayton franchise. John Gault, vice president of American Television Communications, said he didn’t think that CCC had the legal right to “go around peddling” their plans with another operator even though southwest residents had invested money to support the CCC effort. TelePrompTer, the nation’s largest multisystem cable owner, showed no interest and said about CCC that “what it boils down to is somebody getting something for nothing.”74 Unable to secure a financial arrangement from an established cable operator CCC solicited funds from the Model Cities Planning Council in Dayton and profit foundations, but was unsuccessful. Meanwhile yet another from non-­ multisystem cable operator, Viacom International, had bought the franchise for all the Dayton districts except the southwest in 1974, and in 1977 CCC sold their investments to Viacom, which at that time was awarded the franchise for Dayton’s surrounding suburbs. Though Viacom’s separate contracts for southwest Dayton and for the rest of the greater Dayton area stipulated that Viacom must begin laying cable in both contract areas, Viacom created a schedule of construction that began clockwise in the northwest suburbs and ended in southwest Dayton. When southwest residents claimed racial discrimination, city officials dismissed the charges.75 The one success that emerged from the Dayton campaign for Black economic development came from Tate’s Cablecommunications Resource Center when it solicited funds from the U.S. Department of Labor under the Concentrated Employment Training Act of 1973 to establish a training center for disadvantaged Dayton-­area residents to work in the cable television industries. In its first two years the program trained two hundred technicians with a 92 percent placement rate with cable operators throughout the Midwest.76 The case of cable television in Dayton exposes a confluence of institutional structures of racial discrimination. The COG’s metropolitan-­wide political structure weighted representational authority to the affluent suburbs. The COG’s president, who represented one of the suburban districts, did not consult Black residents when working with the Kettering Foundation and RAND on the cable study. The staff social scientists working for RAND on the Dayton study



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did not consult Black residents or think about cable television as a potential infrastructure for Black economic development at a time when affluent white residents spent their earnings in the suburbs. The multisystem operators that held decision-­making power over cable financing would not partner with Black residents and investors. Given that in cities such as Dayton, whose Black population constituted a minority of city residents, it is perhaps not surprising that the first city to grant a franchise to a Black-­owned company had a majority Black population. Still, Gary, Indiana, residents likewise faced institutional barriers including disenfranchisement from local media control and access to financing. An account of the success in establishing Black cable ownership there, though for a brief period, exemplifies the cultural and economic possibilities of Black cable owner­ship, and a historical example from which to think about race and new technologies today.

Celebrating Black Culture and Cable Ownership in Gary, Indiana In Gary, a city in northeast Indiana just thirty miles from Chicago’s Southside, twenty Black residents invested $150,000 to form the Gary Communications Group (GCG) in 1972 to acquire a cable franchise. The occupational backgrounds of GCG investors were diverse. According to publicity materials, the investors included “two financial analysts, two lawyers, three steelworkers, . . . three technicians with experience in electronic systems and equipment,” a professional basketball player for the New York Knicks, and a professional football player for the Oakland Raiders. The GCG president was Dr. A. William Douglas, a metallurgical engineer at Inland Steel. On behalf of GCG, Douglas spoke of the economic and political significance of owning a cable system in Gary. Despite the majority Black population that comprised 65 percent of the city’s 176,000 residents, Gary’s newspapers and radio stations were white-­owned. When Richard Hatcher became Gary’s first Black mayor, Douglas recalled, “whites were upset,” prompting a “campaign of terror . . . by the white press against the black community.” Despite “several boycotts against the white newspapers” and radio stations, Douglas continued, “they failed because our black media were not able to make up the slack through lack of adequate financial support.” Owning a cable system would give Black residents a voice in politics and the economic means to support it through subscription revenues.77 As with other Black ownership efforts, GCG encountered resistance from multisystem cable operators. In 1970 the Gary City Council awarded a cable franchise to TelePrompTer, the country’s largest multisystem operator. This heavily capitalized multisystem operator sought to stop the council from awarding a franchise to GCG despite Indiana state law allowing two cable operators in the same area. TelePrompTer launched, as Douglas reported, a “sophisticated

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public relations campaign, which has left even some local blacks thinking that Gary has only one cable-­TV company.” Also, TelePrompTer offered free installations to undercut GCG despite the city council’s stating that this went against provisions in the franchising agreement. Further, GCG construction was delayed when TelePrompTer hung its cables on telephone poles in such a way that left no room for GCG to hang its cables.78 When it became clear that neither franchise would be successful in competing with each other in the only market in the nation that had two competing franchises, and with City Council support for GCG, TelePrompTer agreed to sell its operations to GCG. But purchasing TelePrompTer assets and raising capital to expand the system beyond the existing 10 percent of homes that GCG had cabled required additional financing. Though GCG contracted with Michigan-­ based Arrow Electronics and Construction, the only Black-­owned cable construction company in the United States, GCG had to switch to a larger cable construction company to gain access to more financing. In initiating a potential contract with the Phoenix-­based cable manufacturer Theta Leasing Company, Theta required GCG to pay $6,000 for a feasibility study conducted by a Pennsylvania-­based consulting firm. Though the firm reported that because Gary did not have a local broadcast television station the city was an economically viable market for cable television, it also stated that GCG ran the risk of becoming “too black” and therefore could economically suffer from a backlash from white residents.79 GCG also sought $400,000 in funding from the Economic Development Administration (EDA) to purchase TelePrompTer’s equipment. The EDA was tasked with helping to create permanent jobs in economically depressed areas, of which Gary was on the administration’s list of eligible cities. But during application proceedings with GCG the EDA announced a new policy that stated because cable television was a media business it did not qualify for funding, despite the EDA having previously pledged support for rural cable systems. This prompted Douglas to say this new policy was “a racist act solely directed at GCG.” Without federal aid and at a time when a sagging economy sent interest rates skyrocketing, GCG was unable to raise capital to continue operating.80 Significant in the Gary case is that even in a small city with a majority Black population and political control of the city council, the structural barriers to public and private financing for Black cable television were too great for GCG to become fully operational. Yet the Gary case is significant too because, as the first Black-­owned cable franchise to begin operations, GCG supporters exemplified the Black community’s vision for television that was on display during the GCG’s three-­day celebration to launch its service in 1973. Attracting national attention, this “Turn-­on” weekend from October 5 through 7 included a “Black film festival,” a street parade, evening concerts, and midnight cabarets. To assist



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others in owning a cable system GCG organized “cable strategy work sessions” on franchising, financing, construction, programming, and on offering education, health, and welfare services.81 The Black film festival included a range of films from fiction films released through Hollywood studios and independent distributors to feature-­length and short documentaries and international films. On Friday night festival audiences watched former professional football player Fred Williamson star in a film named after his nickname The Hammer about a dock worker who became a prizefighter, followed by Busted Dreams, a thirty-­minute documentary chronicling the racist obstacles that had squelched the life dreams of African Americans in New Jersey. Documentary topics included those on Malcolm X, Frederick Douglass, the Black Church, Black women, and the national liberation movement in Mozambique. Several films directed by the widely known and commercially successful actor and civil rights activist Ossie Davis played alongside the film As Above, So Below, directed by Larry Clark, a leader in what became known as the Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers.82 The festival’s films from Nigeria, South Africa, and Senegal and their anti-­imperialist themes exemplified the diasporic identities that constituted a shared sense of challenging racial discrimination internationally, including the film Emitai, directed by Ousmane Sembene, the Senegalese writer and filmmaker who influenced the anti-­imperialist Third Cinema movement.83 In addition to this range of Black filmmaking, the cable television programming strategy session generated a list of ideas for cable television that addressed everyday interests and needs including a “handy man show” to help viewers with “minor repairs”; a cooking show called Food for the Soul; a show for preschool children; a teen variety program; health programs on first aid, prenatal care, and seasonal diseases; a program on bridge playing; an exercise program; a dance show; and programs on real estate and investment. Attendees at the programming session expressed interest in televising local sports and professional and collegiate sports that were otherwise blacked-­out on broadcast network television. Many of these programming topics of everyday interest would become staples of cable network programming twenty years hence. The programming panel too suggested programs that gave residents a voice in political affairs, including a call-­in program to allow residents to ask the mayor questions and a local discussion program. Black cable ownership to secure these local public affairs programs was all the more exigent at a time when public broadcast television stations were cancelling Black public affairs programming in a dozen cities that had carried them in the late 1960s and early 1970s.84 This celebration of Black cultures at the GCG Turn-­ on weekend that included commercial and non-­commercial, local and international, and documentary and fictional forms of Black expression were far removed from the

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IMAGE 6.  Gary Communications Group ribbon cutting. From left: Charles Tate, William Marshall, unidentified, GCG President William Douglas, Theodore Ledbetter, and GCG Vice President Ray Fisher.

Source: Searle Collection, Gary Communications Folder, The Barco Library, Denver, Colorado.

discourses of “mass culture” that informed pluralist orientations to assessments of the public interest. Recall that the mass culture discourse identified commercial culture as pandering to the low tastes of lower educated audiences. Public interest alternatives to mass commercial culture required status leaders to cultivate civic mindedness in the masses through non-­commercial programming or local access channels for community neighbors to communicate with each other. Instead, the GCG’s Turn-­on weekend exemplified what Adam Green has identified as a less hierarchical orientation to aesthetic valuation within Black commercial culture. When Black musicians and entrepreneurs asserted greater control over music production and circulation in Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s to form the commercial music genres of gospel, rhythm and blues, and soul, Green writes, “the market played a catalyzing, rather than diluting or compromising role in these arts’ developments.” Further, in its national circulation this music promoted a “sense of racial distinction” that facilitated struggles against race inequality. Even in the pages of the nationally circulating Ebony magazine,



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IMAGE 7.  Promotional material for Gary Communications Group.

Source: Gary Communications Group Press Kit, Calumet Regional Archives, Indiana University Northwest Library, Gary, Indiana.

which critics have dismissed as selling out African Americans to a culture of middle-­class consumption, Green argues the magazine included “a surprising array of cultural diasporic affinities” that promoted a form of “racial resistance” that constituted “hybrid affinities of class feeling among African Americans.”85 The GCG Turn-­on weekend celebrated these hybrid class and diasporic affinities through presenting special awards to the commercially successful Gary natives Fred Williamson, who achieved success in professional sports and film, and William Marshall, whose career spanned from the Blaxploitation film Blacula to commercial network television and Broadway theater. The works of Ossie Davis shown at the Black Film Festival epitomized hybrid and diasporic

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affinities, which included his television series on the Heritage of the Negro and the film Gordon’s War, a Hollywood Blaxploitation film about a returning Vietnam veteran who takes down the Harlem drug lords. But Davis too recognized the race barriers that existed in the “motion picture and television industries” and commented that if “we can indeed own and control cable systems, like GCG’s achievement in Gary, we can guarantee full minority participation before the exclusionary ties develop.”86

IMAGE 8.  Gary Communications Group officers and staff in front of the

GCG offices at the Hotel Gary. The cable antenna and amplifiers were on top of the eleven-­story hotel. Source: Gary Communications Group Press Kit, Calumet Regional Archives, Indiana University Northwest Library, Gary, Indiana.



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This understanding of full participation was not linked to pluralist civic norms but to addressing the historic and contemporary wrongs of economic and representational disenfranchisement among people of color. As the Turn­on Weekend publicity material made clear, “cable television is a technology that Blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans can own, control, and use . . . to launch long-­term, planned economic, social, and cultural development in many of the underdeveloped communities in this country.”87 Exemplifying this celebration as a national movement was the attendance of Black civil rights leaders including Congressman Parren Mitchell of Maryland; National Business League representative Berkeley Burrell; Philadelphia-­based Baptist Minster Leon Sullivan; Alex Armendaris, director of the Office of Minority Business Enterprise; and FCC Commissioner Benjamin Hooks. Also, the organizers scheduled the Turn-­on weekend to coincide with the National Cable Television Association’s annual meeting in nearby Chicago to encourage cable industry leaders to come to Gary, which many of them did.88

This celebration of the first Black-­owned cable system is a fitting conclusion to this book that has prioritized equality as a critical analytic for understanding the cultural politics of cable television. These celebrants disputed the pluralist conclusions of the Kerner Commission and the Negro American conferences that alleviating race inequality required Black assimilation into white middle-­class norms. Instead, for the Gary celebrants, and others who supported Black cable ownership, confronting race inequality meant recognizing how race discrimination operated within and across economic and political institutions and through delegitimizing Black culture and experience. Just as civil rights leaders Kenneth Clark and Ralph Ellison confronted pluralist orientations to race assimilation through identifying Black culture and experience as integral to defining the rules of common life, the Turn-­on weekend staged the equality of African Americans, and other people of color, to participate in economic and cultural relations. Recuperating this moment in cable television history is important too for marking a pivotal period when Blue Skies support for cable deregulations contributed to a return to classical liberal perceptions about the societal value of supply and demand market dynamics. Indeed, it is these neoliberal policies that made Black cable ownership nearly impossible. The Carter administration’s FCC chairman Charles Ferris invoked this neoliberal thinking in stating that if “a company has the money to invest in a telecommunications service, let it, and leave it to the public to determine whether the service will survive.”89 Ferris shared a Blue Skies support for the corporate development of cable technologies. “The rapid and dramatic explosion in multichannel television systems and in

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pay TV—­both on cable and over-­the-­air—­is itself a big step,” Ferris pontificated, but “the future use of two-­way cable communications to provide information on call and the keen interest by major corporations in combining computer and communications technologies are even more exciting possibilities.”90 Though the FCC under Ferris supported programs to expand minority ownership in broadcast radio and television stations through offering tax breaks to distressed stations willing to sell to minority buyers, cable deregulations excluded African Americans from owning the more substantial communication infrastructure of cable that would define the future of media. When Ferris left office in 1981 there was only one operating Black-­owned cable system out of the over four thousand systems operating in the United States.91 As this deregulatory thinking continued under the Reagan administration, Black citizens continued to press for regulations to facilitate Black ownership of cable systems. As minority ownership of broadcast stations was less than 2 percent and even less in cable and other telecommunications industries, in 1983 Congresswoman Cardiss Collins introduced the Minority Telecommunications Development Act to create tax incentives, subsidies, and equal employment provisions for cable and other telecommunications media to facilitate minority ownership and employment. Calling out an FCC which professed to support diversity in media, Collins stated at a June hearing on her bill, “I have chosen to correct the FCC’s contradictory nature which professes to increase minority participation, on one hand, while trying to market a deregulatory package that has a minority ownership ribbon tied around an empty box.”92 A dozen other organizations representing communities of color supported Collins’s bill and its critique of the contradictions of neoliberal rationales for deregulation. However, supporting these deregulatory rationales was Robert L. Johnson, president of Black Entertainment Television, the cable network that Johnson founded three years earlier in partnership with the country’s largest multisystem cable operator. As a member of the National Cable Television Association’s Board of Directors, Johnson supported the cable industry’s recent negotiation with the League of Cities to create national standards including limiting the authority of municipalities to set cable rates, charge fees, and deny franchise renewals. In his statement to congressional hearings on the matter, Johnson concluded that “I am convinced the compromise legislation would, upon its passage into law, become a springboard of opportunity for minority entry into cable system ownership and related businesses.”93 In 1984 Congress passed into law the cable legislation Johnson and the cable industry supported. But this legislation, the first cable legislation passed by Congress, was not a springboard of opportunity for minority ownership but a codification of deregulatory thinking that would make minority ownership even more difficult. Collins’s bill never reached the floor for a vote and its policy



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proposals did not make it into the 1984 legislation. The 1984 legislation granted multisystem cable operators speech rights similar to print media despite their monopoly status in nearly every market. These multisystem operators had the editorial power to decide what programs and services circulated on their wires, and often held ownership stakes in those networks, as did the multisystem operator that funded BET’s launch.94 For two decades the economics of multisystem cable ownership as platforms for the circulation of branded cable networks created no space for more than one “niche” network devoted to Black culture.95 In recent years, cable operators’ gatekeeping authority has become a significant matter of concern as they have become the leading providers of landline broadband Internet service in the United States. In thinking about broadband Internet policies, and more broadly, about the politics of new technologies as media converge through the Internet, we can learn much from the political struggles of people of color for economic and representational enfranchisement in cable television’s early history. These struggles disputed pluralist hierarchical logics and challenged institutional racism in industry and government. A coalition of organizations representing people of color has continued to focus on media ownership as a means to challenge disenfranchisement. In the Epilogue I consider these ongoing campaigns for Black economic enfranchisement that challenge neoliberal assumptions about the potential “neutrality” of Internet commerce and culture. Also, I use the method of equality to complicate metaphors of “connectivity” to define democracy in the Internet age.

Epilogue Neutrality, Connectivity, or Equality When Media Converge

In this book I have posed questions about equality and inequality to engage with the cultural politics of early cable television. These questions exposed connections between television policy and American pluralism, the prevalent postwar orientation to democracy that rationalized hierarchies of class, gender, and race. Situating television policy within the contexts of pluralism revealed the ways in which public interest norms such as competition, community building, localism, civic participation, and diversity were intertwined with hierarchical assumptions about the capacity of people to make aesthetic judgments and participate in defining the socioeconomic relations of television. Questions of equality too prioritized locating the moments when low-­income residents, women, and people of color disputed these hierarchical assumptions and claimed an equality to participate in defining the public interest in television. With attention to these disputes over qualification to participate, I found in cable television history not a progressive or revolutionary development in television culture that was stalled by restrictive regulations, as goes the scholarly zeitgeist, but a period of heightened contestation that prompts us to think differently about what constitutes the democratic politics of new technologies. Just as the emergence of cable television constituted a transitional period in television culture, today we find ourselves in another period of rapid transformation as cable television channels proliferate, broadband Internet services make television and other audiovisual programming available “on-­ demand,” and social media enable new ways of participating in television culture. I propose here that posing questions about equality and inequality as a method to engage with our current moment when media converge through

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the Internet can prompt us to think differently about what constitutes media democracy. Two areas of scholarly and popular discourse in particular engage in questions of democracy and media convergence. The first concerns perspectives about broadband Internet service that have coalesced around a set of values for guiding policymaking called “net neutrality.” These values dictate that ISPs should treat all data that circulates over the Internet equally to prevent discrimination against any particular Internet user, website, content form, search platform, or application. I consider two perspectives regarding net neutrality. The first comes from legal scholars who consider communications technologies as essential to promoting creativity and innovation and who offer normative guidelines for safeguarding this function. The other perspective comes from organizations representing people of color that questions this net neutrality thinking and instead offers a framework for thinking about “net equality.”1 The second area of scholarly and popular discourse concerns the potential of Internet technologies and social media platforms to enable new ways for people to connect with each other, to expand participation in defining the meaning, value, and aesthetic qualities of media culture, and to energize civic participation. For this, I engage with two influential approaches to thinking about media and participation. The “civic cultures” approach values forms of participation that encourage citizens to cultivate civic connectedness through accepting the values of openness, respect, and reciprocity and building trust in political leaders, experts, and the institutions of government. The “spreadable media” approach instead focuses on how passionate engagements in media entertainment have cultivated moral and ethical norms for sharing and circulating media that can foster collaborative engagements between fans and media producers and potentially influence media production and policy. Finally, scholars have characterized the cultural politics of our time as a neoliberal return to classical economic principles for directing state actions and guiding citizen conduct. I conclude with thoughts on how the net neutrality, civic cultures, and spreadable media approaches engage with neoliberal thinking and how the method of equality can reorient our understanding of democratic politics in neoliberal times.

“Net Neutrality” Thinking as Logic of Inequality In 2015 the FCC changed the regulatory classification of Internet service from an “information service” to a “telecommunications service,” which authorized the agency to treat broadband Internet providers as Title II public utilities similar to telephone service. The FCC did so in response to a court that challenged the

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FCC’s authority to establish net neutrality rules for wireline broadband Internet in 2010. I do not focus on the rules that the FCC has enacted under its new Title II authority or on the debates over the outcome of those rules. Instead I use the method of equality to expose the ways in which net neutrality thinking comprises a logic of inequality that disqualifies citizens from participating in determining the rules of Internet governance. I do not attempt to cover the range of thinking that has informed the diversity of proponents of net neutrality but instead focus on an influential conceptual foundation for net neutrality rules that builds off of legal scholarship and identifies the centrality of information technologies for innovation, economic progress, and democracy. An influential contributor to this scholarship comes from Columbia University Law professor Tim Wu, who coined the term “network neutrality” to describe a normative principle for regulating broadband Internet service to maximize competition and innovation. In 2003 Wu wrote that net neutrality principles were “no different than the challenge of promoting fair evolutionary competition in any privately owned environment, whether a telephone network, operating system, or even a retail store,” to preserve a “Darwinian competition among every conceivable use of the Internet so that only the best survive.”2 In his 2010 book The Master Switch, he further elaborates his theory of innovation and applies it to reinterpret the history of media.3 Wu’s ideas certainly cannot encapsulate the range of thinking that exists among net neutrality proponents. Yet in his elaboration of a conceptual framework for supporting net neutrality principles in media regulation and reinterpretation of history through this framework, his work offers a significant discourse for understanding net neutrality thinking and its impact on thinking about the past.4 In using the method of equality to assess his work I draw attention to the parallels in his thinking with pluralist assumptions about the unequal capacity of persons to participate in judging aesthetic value and determining economic and social relations, assumptions that legitimated class, race, and gender privilege. Wu’s inspiration for his conceptual theory of competition and innovation comes from Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, a contemporary of, and source of influence to, the postwar pluralists in the American behavioral sciences. Wu develops his framework for net neutrality, and for understanding media history more broadly, from Schumpeter’s theory of “creative destruction.” For Schumpeter, capitalist innovation drives economic growth and progress. This innovation comes from competitors who challenge existing industrial practices by introducing new commodity forms, new technologies, new supply sources, and new types of organization. Innovation is not an incremental process but one of creative destruction that destroys old economic structures and creates new ones.5 The source of these innovations comes from those possessing “unusual talents and ambitions” who are less concerned with profits than with

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ambitious visions that include consideration for the greater good of humanity. However, this power of innovation is forestalled or usurped when corporations and governments conspire to favor established industries over innovative challengers. Schumpeter differentiates innovation from the “production process” of established industries. Production constitutes an unchanging habitual process of making and consuming whose “meaning is always the satisfaction of wants” and where the “real leader” in this process “is the consumer.”6 Conceived as such, consumers are also complicit in forestalling the innovator who attempts to break from this habitual production process. For Schumpeter, history progresses through this “cycle” of innovation and cooptation. Following Schumpeter’s framework Wu identifies advertising-sponsored broadcast network radio and television as constituting the production process of an established industry. Here federal regulators favored commercial network interests over innovators, which supported a culture of “light amusement” whose “hold on the attention of Americans in their homes” constituted a “soma for the masses.” The innovative challengers to this established industry included radio technology pioneers such as Lee De Forest who encouraged radio hobbyists to explore “the untamed world of the dial,” an inspiration that Wu found to offer “hope for mankind by creating a virtual community” of the air. Wu lauded the social vision of radio scientist Alfred Goldsmith who saw in radio a potential for a “more cultured society” that would, as Wu put it, “ennoble the individual, freeing him from his baser unmediated impulses and thus enhancing the fellowship of mankind.” Wu too found innovative public spiritedness in the British public broadcasting pioneer John Reith who envisioned radio, Wu paraphrased, “as a means of moral uplift, of shaping character, and generally of presenting the finest in human achievement and aspiration.”7 Other challenges to the commercial network broadcasting industry came in the 1970s when former CBS News president Fred Friendly and progressive journalists such as Ralph Lee Smith saw in cable television a new revolutionary alternative. A receptive FCC agreed and lifted restrictions on cable television, Wu narrates, allowing industrial innovators such as Ted Turner to make the “imaginative leap” to use cable lines “not just to carry individual broadcast stations but as a platform for a national TV network.”8 Yet, much like broadcast television, Wu continues, advertising sponsorship of cable television programming would usurp cable television’s innovative potential. With “few exceptions (such as C-SPAN),” he laments, “cable was born commercial” with a “tendency toward pandering and crassness” that made the “down market” the “hallmark” of cable programming. Relentlessly “wedded to the idea of niche marketing,” including “catering” to “demographics of all kinds” such as “racial minorities (BET and Telemundo), perennial students (Discovery and History), news junkies (CNN), and people who didn’t realize they were obsessed with the weather,”

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cable television even fell short of broadcast television, “which at least in the early days included so-­called sustaining (or unsponsored) programming and . . . the government-­funded network, PBS.” If only cable had “developed a model to support itself on fees alone (just as HBO did, and continues to do),” Wu ponders, a more innovative television culture might have prevailed.9 Evident in Wu’s language and narrative are similarities with pluralist thinking regarding what constitutes valued programming and who possesses the qualification to define that value. They both share the perception that the mass audience was susceptible to the lure of commercial programming’s pandering to base impulses and crass tastes. For both, alternatives to commercial culture would come from enlightened professionals who had superior capacities to consider the broader public interest. As I have elaborated in this book, the cultural perceptions of Smith, Friendly, and others who supported sustaining programs, public television, and pay-­TV legitimated the forms of class, race, and gender privilege that have informed such aesthetic sensibilities. And as critical media scholars have elaborated, commentary that contrasts the superior status of HBO and other pay-­TV programming with programming on advertising-­sponsored networks participates in legitimating class, race, and gender privilege.10 This analysis of the similar logics of inequality that inform pluralist thinking and Wu’s Schumpeter-­inspired revisionist history can be extended through comparing Schumpeter’s and pluralists’ understandings of democracy. Wu says very little about democracy except to assume its existence and worry about its complacency. “Living in a contemporary democracy,” Wu warned, “can lull us into regarding concentrated power as a historical problem we have more or less solved.”11 Though expressing “discomfort” with Schumpeter’s critique of capitalism and prognostications of socialism, Wu had no compunction in distancing his views from Schumpeter’s thoughts about democracy. Indeed, there are continuities in Schumpeter’s disregard for the people’s capacity to tear themselves free from the habits of consuming mass-­produced products and their capacity to participate in a democratic process. At mid-­century Schumpeter elaborated a theory of democracy that questioned what he called “the classical doctrine of democracy” where the people “decide issues” of “common good” and elect representatives to carry out the will of the people. Schumpeter believed that in practice democracies do not work this way and that the classical doctrine is an idealized end that cannot explain empirically how democracies really work. Drawing from the empirical social sciences, and in particular, the “crowd psychology” of French social psychologist Gustave Le Bon, Schumpeter concluded that to expect most people to act as rational and independent individuals is “all together unrealistic.” Instead of exhibiting the “ability to observe and interpret correctly the facts that are directly accessible to everyone and to sift critically the information about

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the facts that are not,” the people exhibit “an indeterminate bundle of vague impulses loosely playing about given slogans and mistaken impressions.”12 This was particularly the case with mass media because, according to Schumpeter, “newspaper readers, radio audiences, members of a party even if not physically gathered together are terribly easy to work up into a psychological crowd and into a state of frenzy in which attempt at rational argument only spurs the animal spirit.” He believed that “the decisions of daily life that lie within the little field which the individual citizen’s mind encompasses” have left the citizen unprepared to participate in deciding issues of public interest. Preoccupied with “the things that directly concern himself, his family, his business dealings, his hobbies, his friends and enemies, his township or ward, his class, church, trade union, or any other social group of which he is an active member,” have left the citizen with a “reduced power of discerning facts, a reduced preparedness to act upon them, a reduced sense of responsibility.” Just like the people’s will to consume is “manufactured” through “commercial advertising,” “human nature in politics” means that the “citizen’s preconceived ideas” about the common good are “themselves manufactured” so that the people “neither raise nor decide issues but that the issues that shape their fate are normally raised and decided for them.”13 In positing the limited capacity of the people to decide issues of the common good, Schumpeter argues that democratic theory should reverse the role of the electorate and the role of elected leaders so as to “make the deciding of issues by the electorate secondary to the election of the men who are to do the deciding.” This more practical theory of democracy means that “the people have the opportunity of accepting or refusing the men who are to rule them” within conditions of “free competition among would-­be leaders for the vote of the electorate.” Another condition for the success of democracy is the cultivation of the “professional politician” that requires “the existence of a social stratum” that is “itself a product of a severely selective process.” The criteria for this selective process may also pertain to the perceived “fitness” of the person to participate in electing the professional politician, which may include “disqualifications on grounds of economic status, religion, and sex” or “racial considerations.” The people too are expected to “respect the division of labor between themselves and the politicians,” to “accept elected officials decisions,” “refrain from instructing him about what he is to do,” accept “the right amount . . . of traditionalism,” and show “their allegiance to the country” and “to the structural principles of the existing society.”14 Readers will recognize in Schumpeter’s democratic method close parallels with American pluralist thinking about democracy. They both share the perspective that defining democracy requires observing social relations in liberal democracies and then legitimating the governmental structures and

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hierarchical relations that exist in these societies as essential norms for the maintenance of liberal democracy. Considered as essential to democracy, these theories call on citizens to accept and even pledge their allegiance to these governing norms. Wu’s framework for governing information technologies reveals similar logics. He believes that a “constitutional approach to the information economy” that is guided by the “countervailing power” of “the Separations Principle” would best prevent established media, regulators, and consumers from impeding innovation. The value of separations in the public sector works through dividing government into the branches of executive, legislative, and judicial authority, separating federal and state level government authority and separating church and state.15 Applying these separation principles to information technologies entails, Wu elaborates, maintaining a “salutary distance between each of the major functions or layers in the information economy” including “those who develop information, those who own the network infrastructure on which it travels, and those who control the tools or venues of access.” The separation principle constitutes the “norms” that should keep governments from intervening in the market and prompt responsible industry leaders to follow these norms through “self-­regulation.” These norms too require “the ordinary citizen” to aspire for an “information morality” that includes giving up “a specific kind of consumer gratification that size and centralization make possible: reliable, universal telephone service (the Bell system), radio shows backed by advertising (the networks), big-­budget movies (the Hollywood studios and the media conglomerates), a dazzling device that seems to put the world in the palm of your hand (Apple and its collaborators).”16 Instead of understanding democracy as a set of norms that asks ordinary citizens to respect governmental structures and refrain from interfering in the innovative process through aspiring to specified consumptive norms, organizations representing people of color have long disputed the ways in which such understandings have denied people of color economic opportunities in the information technology industries. For these organizations, the struggle for economic justice has meant challenging the racist practices that exist within governmental structures and market relations and disputing beliefs that information technology and the innovation process can be neutral of class, race, and gender discriminations. An analysis of these organizations’ opposition to net neutrality thinking exposes the limitations of such thinking in addressing race inequality.

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Net Equality Thinking The Minority Media and Telecommunications Council is an advocacy organization representing a coalition of civil rights groups, elected officials, and professional organizations who advocate for economic opportunities for people of color in the telecommunications industry. The MMTC grew out of civil rights campaigns in the late 1960s and early 1970s to create opportunities for people of color to own broadcast stations and cable systems and enforce the Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) laws that Congress adopted in 1968. Recall from chapter 5 that the Booker T. Washington Foundation funded the Cablecommunications Resource Center in 1973 to develop opportunities for minority ownership in cable systems. These organizations disputed federal officials and social scientists who believed that cable television’s Blue Skies promise to address the race rebellions resided in its communications capacity to integrate people of color into the mainstream of American society. But communities of color experienced racial discrimination within these mainstream institutions of government and industry and advocated instead for ownership and employment opportunities in the growing telecommunications industries. These efforts among civil rights organizations included forming the National Black Media Coalition in 1973 to hold the FCC accountable for a 1973 U.S. Court of Appeals decision that required the FCC to consider race as a factor in awarding broadcast licenses. The coalition’s general counsel David Honig co-­founded the MMTC in 1986 to conduct research, raise capital, and lobby the government and industry to open opportunities for people of color across the media and telecommunications industries.17 Appeals to federal lawmakers, administrators, and the courts for favorable policies proved difficult throughout the 1990s as neoliberal ideologies and color-­blind jurisprudence rolled back the modest policies gained in the 1970s. For example, in 1995 Congress repealed the FCC’s 1978 Tax Certificate Policy, which gave tax relief to broadcasters who sold their properties to minorities.18 That same year the Supreme Court revised the minority ownership reasoning of the 1973 Appellate Court decision by requiring a stringent level of evidence for identifying and addressing racial discrimination. This meant that the Supreme Court was less likely to recognize the constitutionality of government programs tailored to assist minority media ownership than it would “race-­neutral” remedies such as aid to small businesses.19 With little support for economic opportunity from the federal government in the late 1990s, Honig and the MMTC began to work with the two largest nationwide owners of radio stations who had to divest ownership of some of their radio stations when they began to acquire television stations in the same markets. Though the MMTC opposed the FCC’s loosening of ownership rules

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that facilitated the concentration of ownership in these two large station holders, they were able to broker deals so that the radio stations these large station-­ owners sold would go to people of color.20 Consistent with this focus on confronting the structural barriers to economic opportunity for people of color in media, whether through lobbying for government support or working with major industry stakeholders, the MMTC has supported a flexible, non-­ideological framework for broadband policy that conceives of broadband access as “extremely complex and unique to each user group.” The MMTC has supported the “light touch” policies that have encouraged huge investments in broadband infrastructures that have extended wireline broadband to 94 percent of the U.S. population and wireless broadband to 99.8 percent.21 Mobile wireless broadband access has been particularly important to disenfranchised populations. According to a 2013 study, 74 percent of African Americans were cell phone Internet users, 68 percent were Latinas/os, and 59 percent were Anglo Americans. And the low-­ income and less formally educated went online using their cell phones at higher rates than the wealthier and more educated.22 Though Internet broadband has become widely accessible, barriers to its adoption among communities of color have persisted. Drawing from several studies, the MMTC identified these barriers for people of color to include “low levels of computer ownership,” “affordability concerns,” and few “minority-­oriented and, especially, minority-­owned online content and services.” To address these adoption barriers for communities of color the MMTC has called for “targeted outreach, education, and training services in minority communities” to build digital literacy skills and “awareness of the many welfare-­enhancing tools and services” available online. These actions would require increasing federal government support and technology industry attention toward the “chronic employment disparities” that exist for people of color in the high-­tech industries and the effects this has had on the growing gap in wealth disparities that have seen, according to a 2011 study, the median wealth of white Americans soar to twenty times that of African Americans and eighteen times that of Latinas/os. To address these employment gaps and wealth disparities the MMTC has advocated for government and industry support for minorities in the areas of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), “to make minority employment data more transparent, raise awareness of effective minority hiring practices in the private sector, increase access to capital and other critical resources needed for minority entrepreneurs to thrive in this space, and improve broadband adoption rates in minority communities.” Also, the MMTC recommended bolstering the E-rate programs that have sought to bring universal broadband access to schools and libraries in “poor and minority communities.” Further, the MMTC wants to see more attention

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to facilitating “telemedicine and mobile health innovation” for communities of color who “collectively are at a higher risk of developing costly chronic diseases,” which would require reforming “physician licensure and credentialing,” “insurance reimbursement mechanisms,” and “heath data privacy rules.” And because those with low income use mobile broadband Internet at higher rates than the wealthy, the MMTC recommends replacing the average 17 percent tax on mobile phone service with a more progressive tax allocation, and targeting tax revenues to support universal access and adoption.23 Maintaining this attention to these structural barriers to broadband Internet adoption for people of color and the low income has been difficult, the MMTC argues, since the late 1990s and early 2000s when Tim Wu and other defenders of an ethos of openness in networked computing called for net neutrality rules. The MMTC believed that attention to equal data flow over the Internet could restrict policies that address conditions of unequal adoption. For example, net neutrality rules that bar ISPs from charging commercial distributors of high-­data video could lead to higher broadband costs for users with smaller data needs, including people of color whose primary activities, according to a 2010 study, comprise “email, social media, and access to multimedia content (e.g., photos, music, etc.).” This suggests the “need for service and price differentiation for late adopters and non-­Internet users to match usage expectations and their discretionary income.”24 The MMTC situated these concerns about regressive taxes and pricing within a history of structural patterns of unequal access to life resources where “minority and low income communities already suffer disproportionately from lower levels of investment in public goods, such as transportation, the electric grid, and schools.”25 Addressing these historical structures of inequality would require prioritizing certain forms of Internet data flow such as telemedicine, a form of service prioritization that net neutrality rules would restrict unless given exemption. The MMTC believes the existing Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 provides more flexibility and authority to address issues of unequal broadband Internet adoption. The provision gives the FCC authority to take action against ISPs that discriminate against users and to ensure that people of color are afforded entrepreneurial opportunities. Also, this authority would allow the FCC to create, as the MMTC proposed, an “Open Internet Ombudsperson . . . whose duty will be to act as a watchdog to protect and promote the interests of edge providers, especially smaller entities,” to establish a “consumer-­friendly complaint process such as that established under Title VII of the 1965 Civil Rights Act,” and to “ban redlining” practices to prevent companies from prioritizing wealthy neighborhoods when installing faster broadband infrastructures.26

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Thus, these policy conflicts between those advocating for equal data flow through net neutrality principles and those promoting equal broadband Internet adoption for the historically disenfranchised spotlight broader differences in thinking about communications technologies. Tim Wu’s influential conceptual justification for net neutrality elaborates that information technologies comprise the lifeblood of innovation and economic growth which requires constitution-­inspired normative principles to ensure an open and competitive environment. These conceptions assume that this net neutral environment is a race neutral one.27 But for many organizations representing historically marginalized people of color, race neutrality has never existed within constitutional states or market relations and, therefore, challenging race inequality cannot be reduced to normative constitutional principles that articulate to race-­neutral and Internet-­centric theories of social relations. The MMTC’s opposition to net neutrality derives from a long history of economic disenfranchisement among people of color and represents a significant dispute of assumptions that competitive market relations are race, class, and gender neutral. Of course not everyone who supports net neutrality and Title II classification for broadband Internet service believes that net neutrality would initiate a progressive leap in addressing class, gender, and race inequality, including some organizations representing people of color that supported net neutrality.28 The point is that whether broadband Internet service is regulated under Title II classification or not it will take net equality thinking not net neutrality thinking to address ongoing race, class, and gender disenfranchisements.

Democracy as Civic and Social Connectivity Another area of thinking about democracy in television and new media has focused on the ways in which media convergence has enabled users to become more active participants in media culture. These perspectives consider television and popular culture as significant cultural spaces through which people connect and engage with each other. Infrastructures that make television and other audiovisual programs available on-­demand and social media sites that facilitate user participation in sharing, circulating, and commenting on popular culture entail new possibilities to democratize media culture. Within this realm, one area of scholarship has focused on how established media industries and new media upstarts have responded to these developments in communications technologies and how this has entailed changes in the ways in which media are made, circulated, and consumed.29 I will focus here on scholarship that focuses on user experience and participation, and in particular, the civic cultures approach and the fan communities approach.

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The civic cultures approach draws from civic republican traditions that prioritize the bonds that connect citizens to each other and the importance of civic virtue as an ethic to guide citizen conduct. The second approach comes from modeling ideals of participation on the ways in which fan communities have engaged with entertainment media. Each approach identifies collectivity, connectivity, sharing, and consensus as important user experiences for facilitating democratic participation. Instead, the method of equality conceptualizes democratic politics as a moment of dissenus when the excluded verify their equality to participate and dispute assumed norms that exclude forms of participation and particular participants. The central premise of Peter Dahlgren’s influential civic cultures approach is that a democracy requires a constitutional government of checks and balances and “social and cultural requirements” that facilitate civic engagement. As he summarizes, the “key assumption” of civic cultures “is that for a functioning democracy, there are certain conditions that reside at the level of lived experiences, cultural resources, and subjective dispositions that need to be met.” This concept that civic culture is “a precondition for the political” comes from civic republican traditions. Dahlgren elaborates: In participating in democracy, republicanism sees people becoming connected to each other, and developing as individuals. Thus, republicanism underscores not just the formal, legal dimension, as does liberalism, but also an ethical one. Republicanism asserts that democracy requires civic virtues from its citizens, and cultivating these virtues turns citizens into better people by developing abilities that would otherwise remain unfulfilled.30

Cultivating civic virtue begins in the social space of “civil society” that “can serve as a training ground that ‘grooms’ citizens, with involvement in nonpolitical associations and networks preparing people for civic political engagement and participation.” The democratic potential of television and new media, he argues, resides in their capacity to facilitate such civic cultural grooming. Dahlgren’s framework for normatively assessing the value of media for this civic cultural grooming poses these questions. Do the media cultivate in citizens an interest in knowledge about their worlds, a passion for democratic values such as openness, respect, and reciprocity, and a participatory identity? Do media foster a trust in each other and in political leaders, facilitate communicative spaces to do so, and encourage citizens to learn the practices of political engagement?31 Instead of posing these questions about the necessary conditions, or ways of life, that are considered to be prerequisites for sustaining democracy, the method of equality asks how these assumptions about the need for citizens to acquire participatory skills and dispositions constitute hierarchical logics about

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people’s capacity to participate in defining issues of common concern. Take for example Dahlgren’s paradoxical positioning of those of middle-­or lower-­class status. Regarding the “underclass,” he believes that the reason why they tend to “participate less than other groups in parliamentarian politics” is because they lack the “social prerequisites” for civic participation including “secure employment with adequate wages” and confidence in their “communicative competence to participate.” This participatory apathy has extended “into the middle classes” as neoliberal policies have shrunk social welfare nets and increased economic insecurity, placing strains on families who are too busy making ends meet and attending to family obligations to participate in civic matters. Despite these structural inequalities, he believes that television and new media can encourage “citizens” to “interact with each other” and “with power holders of various kinds” to build “critical trust.” This trust is particularly important toward those with “expert knowledge” because of “the fundamental fact that the distribution of knowledge in society can never be ‘equal.’” Thus, the civic cultures approach paradoxically positions the underclass and the middle classes as follows. Though these classes experience the disenfranchisement that is constituted through structural economic relations, their location within these socioeconomic relations renders them incapable to participate in changing these relations without instruction from those from other classes who possess the knowledge and disposition required to civically participate.32 Dahlgren makes similar paradoxical assumptions about the lower classes in assessing television and new media’s role in promoting civic culture. In television he does so through contrasting audience engagement in public service traditions with those in popular commercial television. Best exemplifying television’s civic role, he writes, has been the national public service broadcast television which “has done a great deal to resocialize private life toward a shared public culture” and to create “a sense of a universal ‘we’ toward mankind.” Though popular commercial television lacks this public service mission, its orientation toward “putting pleasure more in the forefront” through “personalization and dramatization” can offer “a resource for political citizenship.” The accessibility of popular commercial television, he recognizes, makes “us feel welcome and offers us a sense of belonging” as well as makes available “different regimes of knowing that speak, in different ways, to different groups, in particular those with less social power.”33 However, these different regimes of knowing in popular commercial television that engage those with lower status are more limited than public service traditions for cultivating civic participation. This is because the “social bonds displayed” in commercial television “lean toward romance, male bonding such as sports or action/military, social friendships, and so on,” which tend to “show very few examples—­in fiction or nonfiction—­of the ‘thin trust’ that typifies civic

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social bonds or cooperation that makes a political impact.” Though Dahlgren finds civic potential in the interactive capacities of the Internet, he harbors similar concerns about how the people use this capacity because their “use of the net in daily life for political purposes is far overshadowed by other uses, such as general social contacts, entertainment, chatting, shopping, gaming, nonpolitical information, not to mention pornography.”34 In questioning the people for succumbing to the lure of popular commercial pleasures, from sports and romance to gaming and porn, and failing to aspire for more civic-minded forms of media engagement, Dahlgren’s civic culture model mirrors aspects of pluralist thinking about cable television during its early decades of development. Indeed, he concludes his book with this quote from Robert Dahl, America’s most prominent theorists of pluralism: “One of the imperative needs of democratic countries is to improve citizens’ capacities to engage intelligently in political life. . . . Older institutions will need to be enhanced by new means for civic education, political participation, information, and deliberation that draw creatively on the array of techniques and technologies available in the twenty-­first century.”35 The assumption of Dahl and other pluralists, as I have shown in this book, has been that educated professionals are better qualified to define the aesthetic values of television programming that are best suited to fostering a democratic culture, which often excluded popular commercial genres of romance and action. Pluralist too legitimated these preferences with reference to the importance of building a sense of community and belonging through fostering communications between civic leaders and the so-­called masses. Dahlgren’s civic cultures approach similarly warns that citizen engagements in popular commercial television and everyday use of social media can deflect the civic necessity of taking interest in, and respecting, the knowledge of experts and of trusting political leaders and working toward consensus. The method of equality questions this framing of democracy as a practice that can only happen through mindedness. Instead, I have shown in this acquiring and cultivating civic-­ book how democratic politics occurred when those whom pluralists deemed to be most lacking in civic qualification, including women, people of color, and those with low income and low social status, disputed pluralist logics of hierarchical order. Other approaches to thinking about democracy as a participatory practice that fosters a sense of connectivity and collective belonging have been less wedded to the centrality of civic-­mindedness as a prerequisite for democratic participation. Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green have developed a conceptual framework for understanding democracy through reference to “entertainment fandom” because “fan groups have often been innovators in using participatory platforms to organize and respond to media texts.” In

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studying how and why these fan communities share or “circulate” media, these authors have developed the concept of “spreadable media” to understand “the ways the activities of connected individuals are currently, or could potentially, help shape the communication environment around them.” The stakes of this understanding have become more urgent in our contemporary moment, the authors argue, as “new platforms create openings for social, cultural, economic, legal, and political change and opportunities for diversity and democratization for which it is worth fighting.”36 These authors contrast spreadable media practices with the “stickiness model” that has guided commercial development of these new media platforms. Commercial media developers have focused on drawing, or sticking, users to centralized, branded content and websites for as long as possible in order to monetize these users’ presence “by offering merchandise through some kind of e-commerce catalog, charging for access to information (through some kind of subscription or service fee), or selling the eyeballs of site visitors to some outside party, most often advertisers.” Spreadable media, by contrast, emphasize the ways in which users talk about, share, and circulate media through a diversity of more decentralized practices and how this more passionate and collaborative form of media engagement can benefit commercial media producers through extending and promoting brands, franchises, or other media content.37 In contrasting the spreadable practices of fan communities with the profit-­ oriented sticky models of commercial providers the authors promote a different way of thinking about media economy. The authors critique the “neoliberal rhetoric” of commercial providers who conceive of users as individual consumers in a commercial marketplace and of “academics” who “focus too often on the value or sovereignty of the individual.” Instead of an economy of market exchange, the authors find in spreadable media practices a “moral economy” and a “gift economy” that comprise media valuation. A moral economy upon conditions describes the social norms, customs, and generally agreed-­ that establish a consensus among social actors about how to conduct business or how to establish informal rules for community participation. Violations of these agreed-upon norms incite parties to push back against these violations. For example, this moral economy impacts the relationship between copyright holders and content users, the former calling out unauthorized peer-­to-­peer file sharing while the latter protest when the former exerts too much control over content circulation. Questions about labor and financial remuneration are less important than the recognition, reputation, pride, status, and prestige that accrue to cultural producers and fan communities.38 The gift economy describes similar social practices in non-­market relations where the exchange of things and ideas entails a sense of reciprocity to add to

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collective understanding, such as those that motivated early cyber theorists to share and collaborate in the making of Internet technologies. This reciprocity in the gift economy can work in different ways, whether through “the reassertion of traditional values and nostalgia, the strengthening of social ties, the acceptance of mutual obligations, or the comfort of operating within familiar social patterns.” Content that is amenable to spreading through the moral and gift economies include humor, parody, unfinished or mysterious texts, and content that lends itself to controversy or rumor.39 In taking seriously the ways in which fan communities have created participatory cultures through engagements with entertainment media, the spreadable media framework is useful for complicating the civic cultures model. While Dahlgren argues that civic culture can be cultivated in popular culture but that it is often overshadowed by commercial media’s drive toward entertainment, the spreadable media approach elaborates the different ways in which fan engagements in entertainment culture can model the ways in which participation enhances forms of civic participation. For example, Jenkins, Ford, and Green recount how fans of the Avatar animated series organized boycotts to put pressure on the creators of the motion picture Avatar to cast people of color in leading roles.40 Also, these authors are careful not to assume that participatory opportunities are equally available to everyone. They recognize that there has existed a “systematic bias” toward class, race, and gender in contributions to the participation that is found on websites such as Wikipedia. They also recognize that economic barriers stratify access to digital devices and to the educational and cultural resources required to use them. The authors accept that we live in a capitalist system and believe that vital participatory cultures have developed in and through commercial entertainment media. Though, the authors say, “We do not and may never live in a society where every member is able to fully participate, where the lowest of the low has the same communicative capacity as the most powerful elites,” addressing these inequalities requires commitments to extending these resources to the lowest of low so they can participate. Once obtained, these resources will enable non-­participants to develop “shared norms” with others in collaborative challenges to corporate “business models, terms of service, or the commercialization of content.”41 However, the method of equality complicates this connection between spreadable media and democratic politics. Instead of beginning with the participatory practices that derive through forms of economic and cultural privilege and then advocating for extending economic, technical, or cultural resources to non-­participants, the method of equality locates democracy as the moments when non-­participants, or rather, those who are considered to lack qualification to participate, dispute the hierarchical grounds upon which participation

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is constituted. These grounds in the spreadable media approach are the social norms of the moral economy that legitimate acceptable, consensual practices within a community and the values of the gift economy that create reputation, status, prestige, and recognition among community members. Thus, the method of equality requires asking how the grounds of the moral and gift economies within fan communities constitute hierarchical grounds for participation. This requires a focus not on the contexts that facilitate consensus norms but on the moments of dissensus that identify the wrong of exclusion from the symbolic community of the moral economy. Consider the example of race in fantasy fandom. In her article on the genre, Helen Young asks how norms of whiteness police questions about race in fan discourse surrounding the fantasy fiction of George R. R. Martin and, in particular, his franchise Game of Thrones. In researching the fan discourse on Westeros​.org, a fan website devoted to Martin’s fantasy fiction, Young uses Eduardo Bonilla-­ Silva’s framework for understanding how these discourses normalize white privilege. Bonilla-­Silva finds that white normativity is constituted through beliefs that race is no longer significant in affecting life chances and thus when race is evoked it is minimized. Young found this minimization when fans of the HBO series Game of Thrones posed questions about the absence of Asian cast members, but did so apologetically in recognition of the accepted norms of the fan community that downplayed the significance of the “Eurocentricity embedded in Martin’s imagined world.” Young also found “redefinition,” another of Bonilla-­Silva’s references to white normalization, when fans redefined race in terms of “nationalism,” “regionalism,” “xenophobia,” and “more of a cultural thing than a racial thing.” The fan discourse too exemplified what Bonilla-­Silva calls “abstract liberalism” to claim a right to associate with whom one likes. Young found this when fans disagreed with the series creators’ decision to cast a Black actor in a role described as white in the novel, complaining that they capitulated to pressures to be “politically correct.” In this example, a moral economy of white normalization policed, rather than extended, participation in fantasy fiction fan forums.42 Consider too the moral economy of “trash talk” in voice-­ activated multiplayer online role-­playing games. Much has been written about racist and sexist stereotypes in game characters. Lisa Nakamura extends this analysis to examine how the gaming convention of trash talk works to exclude players of color. In the popular Street Fighter gaming site Eventhubs​.com, which is ostensibly dedicated to “help build a better community, encouraging players of all talent levels to share information to make the scene more competitive and widespread,” Nakamura found a defense of trash talk against complaints about racist and sexist trash talking. In a response to a Black female gamer known as “BurnYourBra,” who distinguished between trash talk as a convention of gameplay and racist and sexist talk, gaming fans on Eventhubs​.com said such comments should not be taken personally

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and that in a “postracial” world they lack meaning beyond the confines of the game. Such talk has motivated avid gamers of color to avoid multiplayer games, Nakamura writes, while others have participated in alternative forums such as Fatuglyorslutty​ .com, Racialicious​.com, and The Border House, which offer “safe spaces” for these conversations and help publicize racism and sexism in game culture.43 The spreadable media concept argues that such alternative sites demonstrate the participatory force that entertainment media generate. I agree with this. But the concept of the moral economy is not adequate to explain when gamers stop playing these online games to avoid racial harassment or resort to alternative gaming sites to escape the postracial consensus that defines the moral economy of some gaming communities. Here, the moral economy approach is an example of what Jessie Daniels has identified as a broader tendency in fan studies and Internet studies to consider race as “marked as outside the central theoretical concerns of the field” where “minority participants” are “asked to perform the spectacle of the Other about the experience of people of color online and off.” Instead, Daniels calls for a “strong theoretical framework that acknowledges the persistence of racism online while simultaneously recognizing the deep roots of racial inequality in existing social structures that shape technoculture.”44 Theorizing the connections between racism online and the persistence of structures of racial discrimination in our media convergence era can be extended to, and integrated with, considering the persistence and deepening of class inequality. Civic culture and spreadable media models theorize class, or rather the lower classes, as existing outside of these models’ normative frameworks because their socioeconomic condition prevents them from participating. In the civic culture model, the “underclass” lacks the “social prerequisites” of secure employment, adequate wages, and communicative competence to participate. The spreadable media model argues that the “lowest of the low” may never have the “same communicative capacity as the most powerful elites.” In each case the excluded are considered to lack the capacity to participate in changing the structural economic conditions necessary for their participatory inclusion. Also, in valorizing participatory forms that are collaborative and consensus building within existing structures of power, these two approaches downplay forms of participation that express dissensus with existing structures of class inequality. The civic culture model downplays these forms of participation that challenge structural economic inequalities through prioritizing bringing lower classes into dialogue with “power holders of various kinds” to build “civic trust.” The spreadable media model does so in prioritizing collaboration and co-­creation between companies and audiences. The method of equality resists such models of participation that disqualify those with low income or class status from defining the conditions of participation and that posit democratic politics as a process of consensus building

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among class strata. As Benjamin Arditi has argued, moments of democratic politics are polemical, not consensual or reconcilable, in that they entail a “process of de-­classification” from societal orders that assign unequal capacities to participate in defining the conditions of common life.45 Consider a recent vote to unionize among bus drivers that shuttle Facebook employees around the company’s sprawling headquarters in Menlo Park, California. The eighty-­seven bus drivers protested having to work sixteen-­hour days and sleep in their cars between shifts for wages of between $17 and $25 per hour while the average Facebook software engineer earned more than $122,000 a year. The eighty-­seven drivers joined the local chapter of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which has eleven thousand members but only a reported 162 members on Facebook. According to the Teamsters, Facebook refused to accept their petition to unionize.46 I do not cite this example to imply that these union members did not make use of social media to mobilize this protest or to imply that none were fans of entertainment media and participants in spreading media. I do so to foreground the significance of understanding democratic politics as a polemical dispute of a given hierarchical order. The given order here is that offered in the much repeated mission of Facebook “to make the world more open and connected,” a vision that has characterized and fueled perceptions that social media technologies represent a decisive moment of potential change in transforming hierarchical social relations through expanding participation and connectivity. In voting to unionize, these bus drivers not only demanded a part in determining their working conditions. They also disputed their symbolic absence in this connected world vision, an absence that existed in the civic culture and spreadable media models, which classify the laboring classes as unconnected and outside of the modus operandi of social change. Furthermore, and to conclude, attention to dissensus as a staging of equality in our current moment requires thinking about democratic politics in relation to neoliberalism, which many have characterized as defining our current symbolic order.

Neoliberalism and Democratic Politics Neoliberalism is broadly understood to describe the ideology that has guided a shift in thinking about the role of the state since mid-­century when a postwar consensus considered the state to have a significant role in regulating markets and redistributing resources to safeguard the health, safety, and security of citizens. Neoliberalism is a return to classical liberal ontologies of social relations that conceives of persons as autonomous individuals and the state as limited to protecting individual life, liberty, and the competitive pursuit of property in capitalist markets. There is a social good to so-­called “free” market relations

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within neoliberal thinking as an efficient, competitive system for distributing resources through capitalist supply-­and-­demand mechanisms. In addition to prescriptions for structuring government, scholars have referenced neoliberalism as a guiding discourse for life conduct that promotes thinking about oneself as a private individual and life actions as market calculations.47 As an alternative to neoliberalism, critics of neoliberalism have invoked the norms of mid-century liberalism, including state-­sponsored programs for health and welfare services and rules to ensure media express a plurality of voices. But in doing so there is a slippage that conflates liberal policies that prescribe government structures and ways of life with democratic politics. Recall from the introduction that critics of neoliberal media policies have invoked the normative ideals of postwar pluralism, including ensuring that a plurality of voices are heard to foster stability and consensus, as a means to challenge our current neoliberal media policies.48 But as I have elaborated in this book, these pluralist norms were constituted through commitments to hierarchical relations within groups and a privileged role of elite group leaders that legitimated class, gender, and race inequalities. Consider another prominent call to return to postwar liberal pluralism as a prescription for challenging neoliberalism. In his eloquent chronicle of neoliberalism’s rise, David Harvey argues that postwar classical liberal economists and a class of powerful business owners and stockholders promoted the idea that human dignity and freedom were best guaranteed by free markets, free trade, and a government limited to its function of enforcing property rights. Harvey argues that this neoliberal movement grew outside of, and opposed to, a form of liberalism “best represented” in Robert Dahl and Charles Lindblom’s 1953 book elaborating the pluralist characteristics of “polyarchal democracy.” Harvey believed this form of “embedded liberalism” characterized “the right blend of state, market, and democratic institutions to guarantee peace, inclusion, well-­being, and stability.”49 Yet in identifying pluralism as a norm of governance Harvey is not attendant to the pluralist hierarchical rationales that legitimated gender, race, and class privilege. Further, as I have shown in this book, motives for supporting neoliberalism included not only classical liberal economists and a powerful business class, but also vital center liberals, federal administrators, and social scientists who believed cable deregulations would restore pluralist relations through breaking up mass culture into more diversified niche cultures. Instead of conflating democracy with governmental norms, an analytic focus on equality emphasizes the dissensual practices that redefine the commons and what belongs to it, including claims of equality to define economic relations. In this regard, recognizing the disputes of pluralist hierarchical order has particular significance for thinking about democracy in neoliberal times. As an ideology of market fundamentalism, neoliberalism incessantly removes economic relations

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from belonging to the commons and the legitimate participation of the demos or all people. But when low income and rural residents opposed pay-­TV and the FCC’s localism rationales, and when people of color advocated for cable ownership, they did so through claiming an equality to participate in determining the economic relations of television. Instead of relying on normative governing structures or prescriptions for living civic lives to define democratic politics, the method of equality gives attention to the ways in which governing rationales, whether critical or supportive of neoliberal thinking, assume that persons are not equally qualified to participate in making decisions about economic relations and other rules for common life. Logics of inequality inform Wu’s neoliberal belief that competitive market relations can yield the social goods of innovation and economic development as long as the unqualified masses do not interfere in the competitive innovation process. The civic culture and spreadable media approaches critique neoliberal thinking in ways that include logics of inequality. Dahlgren called neoliberalism a form of “uncivic economism” that “hinders governments’ capacities to act in the interests of all their citizens” while “corporate values such as winning, efficiency, calculability, and profitability are supplanting democratic values in ways that erode civic vitality.” Yet the lower and middle classes lacked the civic cultural qualifications to direct government actions.50 The spreadable media approach critiqued neoliberalism as a commercial process that treated users as individual consumers and as a scholarly discourse that valued individual sovereignty. Entertainment fandom countered neoliberalism through enabling forms of collective sociality that could lead to civic-­minded actions. But the moral economy of spreadable media practices excluded those who did not conform to the consensus rules of participation and excluded those who lacked the economic and cultural resources to connect. Instead of defining democratic politics as a structure of government, whether of the neoliberal, constitutional, or social welfare state, or as a way of life, whether as privately oriented individuals or publicly oriented collectives, the method of equality places attention on the exclusions that are often obfuscated in these normative prescriptions for living together. In this book I have critiqued these normative rationales in pluralist thinking about broadcast and cable television’s concurrent development and identified moments when the historically excluded and marginalized claimed an equality to participate in determining the economic conditions for developing these communication technologies. Attention to these past moments as dissensual practices that challenged a pluralist order steeped in hierarchical classifications can direct our attention to the dynamics of inequality and equality as media converge in our current neoliberal times.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION: AMERICAN PLURALISM, TELEVISION POLICY, AND THE METHOD OF EQUALITY

1. U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Television Inquiry, Part III: Subscription Television, 84th Cong., 2nd sess., April 23–­­27, and July 17, 1956, 1279, 1330. Mary Wood further elaborated her thoughts on television, work, and living in her book, Just Lucky, I Guess (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1967). 2. Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Harry Field, The People Look at Radio (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1946), vii–­viii, 69–­70. 3. For Lazarsfeld’s FCC testimony see Paul F. Lazarsfeld, “A Researcher Looks at Television,” Public Opinion Quarterly 24, no. 1 (Spring 1960): 25–­31. 4. Ibid. 5. Patrick R. Parsons, Blue Skies: A History of Cable Television (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), ix; Megan Mullen, The Rise of Cable Programming in the United States: Revolution or Evolution? (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003). 6. For a concise summary of pluralist theory see David Ciepley, Liberalism in the Shadow of Totalitarianism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 206–­212. 7. George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994). 8. Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: The Free Press, 1994). 9. For this narrative of pluralist development I am indebted to John G. Gunnell, “The Rise and Fall of the Democratic Dogma and the Emergence of Empirical Democratic Theory,” in Modern Pluralism: Anglo-­American Debates Since 1880, ed. Mark Bevir (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012), 129–­153. 10. Charles Edward Merriam, New Aspects of Politics (1939; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925), viii, xi. 11. For an assessment of Merriam’s contribution to New Deal planning see Patrick D. Reagan, Designing a New America: The Origins of New Deal Planning, 1890–­1943 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 53–­81. 12. Merriam, New Aspects of Politics, xiv, 12, 197. Informing Merriam’s new theory of politics was his failed campaign for Mayor of Chicago in 1911 where he sought support from professionals, business owners, and middle-­class suburban residents but lost to the urban ethnic boss Fred A. Busse. See Michael P. McCarthy, “Prelude to Armageddon: Charles E. Merriam and the Chicago Mayoral Election of 1911,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 67, no. 5 (November 1974): 505–­518.

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NOTES TO PAGES 5–15

13. Merriam, New Aspects of Politics, 20. For the nativist context to Merriam’s theory of politics see Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 281–­282. 14. Charles E. Merriam, “Civic Education in the United States,” Journal of General Education 1, no. 4 (1947): 262, 265. For a discussion of Merriam’s behavioral approach to civic education see Raymond Seidelman, Disenchanted Realists: Political Science and the American Crisis, 1884–­1984 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), 121–­123. 15. Harold D. Lasswell, Psychopathology and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 106, 115, 124, 173, 194, 195, 197. 16. Pendleton Herring, The Politics of Democracy: American Parties in Action (New York: W. W. Norton, 1940), 25, 26, 40, 43, 55, 169, 287, 326–­327, 330­–­331,392, 419. 17. David B. Truman, The Governmental Process: Political Interests and Public Opinion (1951; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), x, 43, 194–­195, 505. 18. Ibid., 27, 30. For a critique of the “corporate liberal” ethos that rationalized the containment of rank-­and-­file participation in labor disputes see George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994). 19. Truman, The Governmental Process, 129, 184, 265, 448–­449, 511, 512, 514, 522–­523. 20. Robert A. Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 4, 22. 21. Ibid., 81. 22. Ibid., 81, 133. 23. Robert A. Dahl, Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961), 67–­71, 75–­78, 133. 24. Ibid., 306, 312, 318. 25. Ibid., 11, 231, 319–­321. 26. G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America? (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-­Hall, 1967). 27. Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 4–­5, 14, 29, 31–­35, 382, 387–­400, 475, 486–­488, 490, 498–­499. 28. C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956). Pagination from the Oxford paperback edition, 1959, 4, 72, 243–­246. 29. Ibid., 311, 312, 314, 318, 319. 30. Rancière does not distinguish between politics and democratic politics because for him politics can only be democratic politics. However, because our common understanding and meaning of politics is much broader to include the institutions of representative government and the dynamics to influence others I refer to Rancière’s understanding of politics as democratic politics. 31. Jacques Rancière, Althusser’s Lesson (New York: Continuum, 2011). 32. Jacques Rancière, The Nights of Labor: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-­Century France, trans. John Drury (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989). Also see Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. Kristin Ross (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991). 33. For the significance of historicizing Rancière’s writings on democracy within the emergence of neoliberalism see Samuel A. Chambers, “The Politics of the Police: From Neoliberalism to Anarchism, and Back to Democracy,” in Reading Rancière, eds. Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp (New York: Continuum, 2011). 34. Jacques Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, trans. Liz Heron (New York: Verso, 2007), 6–­7. 35. Ibid., 33, 39.



NOTES TO PAGES 15–24

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36. Ibid., 40. 37. Quoted in Joseph J. Tanke, Jacques Rancière: An Introduction (London: Continuum, 2011), 28. 38. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 26. 39. Jacques Rancière, “Afterword,” in Jacques Rancière: History, Politics, Aesthetics, ed. Gabriel Rockhill and Philip Watts (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 277. 40. Rancière, Disagreement, 8. 41. Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2010), 50, 53, 58. 42. Max Blechman, Anita Chari, and Fafeeq Hasan, “Democracy, Dissensus, and the Aesthetics of Class Struggle: An Exchange with Jacques Rancière,” Historical Materialism 13, no. 4 (2005): 293. 43. Tanke, Jacques Rancière, 50–­51. 44. For an extensive discussion of the meaning of subjectivation in Rancière see Samuel A. Chambers, The Lessons of Rancière (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 88–­122. 45. Jacques Rancière, “The Thinking of Dissensus: Politics and Aesthetics,” in Reading Rancière, ed. Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp (New York: Continuum, 2011), 4. 46. For a critique of the elitist sentiments and governing rationales that informed educational and public television see Laurie Ouellette, Viewers Like You: How Public TV Failed the People (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). For a critique of the Cold War political culture that informed non-­commercial television in the 1950s see Anna McCarthy, The Citizen Machine: Governing by Television in 1950s America (New York: The New Press, 2010). 47. Des Freedman, The Politics of Media Policy (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), 27–­29, 53, 79. 48. Ibid., 24. 49. Stuart Hall, “The Rediscovery of ‘Ideology’: Return of the Repressed in Media Studies,” in Culture, Society, and the Media, eds. Michael Gurevitch, Tony Bennett, James Curran, and Janet Woollacott (New York: Routledge, 1982), 56. 50. Ibid., 61–­84. 51. McChesney links Baran and Sweezy to other Marxists in this period including Bertholt Brecht, American sociologist C. Wright Mills, members of the Frankfurt School (Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Eric Fromm), and cultural Marxists in the United Kingdom (Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson). See Robert W. McChesney, Blowing the Roof off the Twenty-­First Century: Media, Politics, and the Struggle for Post-­Capitalist Democracy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2014), 20–­21, 198, 208. 52. Des Freedman, The Contradictions of Media Power (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 27, 146. 53. Thomas Streeter, Selling the Air: A Critique of the Policy of Commercial Broadcasting in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 31, 314–­316. 54. Ibid., 36. 55. Ibid., 39, 321–­323, italics in original. Also see Thomas Streeter, “Beyond Freedom of Speech and the Public Interest: The Relevance of Critical Legal Studies to Communications Policy,” Journal of Communication 40, no. 2 (1990): 43–­63. 56. For Rancière’s critique of Bourdieu see Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 165–­202. 57. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).

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NOTES TO PAGES 24–31

58. Tony Bennett, “Habitus Clivè: Aesthetics and Politics in the Work of Pierre Bourdieu,” New Literary History 38, no. 1 (Winter 2007): 201–­228. 59. Ouellette, Viewers Like You. 60. Toby Miller, The Well-­Tempered Self: Citizenship, Culture, and the Postmodern Subject (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1993), xiii, xiv. 61. McCarthy, The Citizen Machine. 62. Ouellette, Viewers Like You. 63. For an elaboration of these conceptual difficulties see Nancy Fraser, “Michel Foucault: A ‘Young Conservative’?” Ethics 96 (1985): 165–­183. 64. Samuel A. Chambers, The Lessons of Rancière (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 101. 65. Derrick Bell, Race, Racism, and American Law (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973); Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (June 1993): 1707–­1791. 66. For an introduction to Critical Race Theory see Richard Delgado, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 2012). For a collection of influential essays in Critical Race Theory see Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, eds., Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013). 67. Allison Perlman, “Feminist in the Wasteland,” Feminist Media Studies 7, no. 4 (2007): 413–­431. 68. Streeter, Selling the Air, 117–­118, 127. 69. Jacques Rancière, The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge, Trans. Hassan Melehy, Forward Hayden White (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). 70. Mullen, The Rise of Cable Programming, 20, 196. 71. Amanda D. Lotz, The Television Will be Revolutionized (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 7, 11–­12. 72. Lynn Spigel, TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 15. 73. Michael Curtin and Jane Shattuc, The American Television Industry (London: British Film Institute, 2009), 11–­13, 20, 119–­120. 74. Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine, Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status (New York: Routledge, 2012). 75. Sarah Banet-­Weiser, Kids Rule! Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 76. Toby Miller, Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitanism, Consumerism, and Television in a Neoliberal Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007). 77. Katynka Z. Martinez, “Monolingualism, Biculturalism, and Cable TV: HBO Latino and the Promise of the Multiplex,” in Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting, ed. Sarah Banet-­Weiser, Cynthia Chris, and Anthony Freitas (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 194–­215. 78. Bretta E. Smith-­Shomade, Pimpin’ Ain’t Easy: Selling Black Entertainment Television (New York: Routledge, 2008). 79. For the globalization of the Discovery Channel see Cynthia Chris, “Discovery’s Wild Discovery: The Growth and Globalization of TV’s Animal Genres,” in Cable Visions, ed. Banet-­Weiser et. al., 137–­157. For children’s programming see Marsha Kinder, “Ranging with Power on the Fox Kids Network; or, Where on Earth Is Children’s Educational Television?” in Kid’s Media Culture, ed. Marsha Kinder (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 177–­203. For an analysis of the intersection of wrestling television’s



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195

global market imperatives and Latina/o reception in the United States see Ellen Seiter, “Worldwide Wrestling Entertainment’s Global Reach: Latino Fans and Wrestlers,” Cable Visions, ed. Banet-­Weiser et. al., 338–­357. For an assessment of the cultural logics of branded cable networks within international markets see John McMurria, “Long Format TV: Globalization and Network Branding in a Multi-­Channel Era,” in Quality Popular Television: Cult TV, the Industry and Fan, ed. Mark Jancovich and James Lyons (London: British Film Institute, 2008), 65–­87. 80. Michael Curtin, Jennifer Holt, and Kevin Sanson, eds., Distribution Revolution: Conversations about the Digital Future of Film and Television (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). 81. The discourse on television’s new golden age is vast. For a book defining the new golden age see Amy Damico and Sara E. Quay, 21st Century TV Drama: Exploring the New Golden Age (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2016). For an example of the new golden age talk in the press see David Carr, “Barely Keeping Up in TV’s New Golden Age,” New York Times, March 9, 2014, http://​www​.nytimes​.com/​2014/​03/​10/​business/​media/​ fenced​-­­in​-­­by​-­­televisions​-­­excess​-­­of​-­­excellence​.html?​_r​=​0. 82. I engage this literature on social media’s transformation of television culture in the Epilogue. CHAPTER 1  BROADCAST POLICY, TELEVISION SPECTRUM, AND THE PLURALIST LOGICS OF INEQUALITY

1. Patrick Parsons, Blue Skies: A History of Cable Television (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), 35, 37, 47–­49. 2. U.S. Federal Communications Commission, Sixth Report and Order (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, April 11, 1952), paragraph 15. 3. Ibid., paragraphs 14, 79. 4. U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, FCC Policy on Television Freeze and Other Communication Matters, 82nd Cong., 1st sess., July 18, 1951, 25. 5. John Michael Kittross, Television Frequency Allocation Policy in the United States (New York: Arno Press, 1979), 297. 6. Robert Lewis Shayon, “Educational Television Suffers a Second Defeat,” Saturday Review, March 17, 1956. Reprinted in Television’s Impact on American Culture, ed. William Y. Elliott (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1956), 373. 7. Quoted in Susan L. Brinson, Personal and Public Interests: Frieda B. Hennock and the Federal Communications Commission (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), 102. 8. Erwin G. Krasnow, Lawrence D. Longley, and Herbert A. Terry, The Politics of Broadcast Regulation, 3rd ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982), 176–­191. 9. William F. Boddy, “Launching Television: RCA, the FCC and the Battle for Frequency Allocations, 1940–­1947,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 9, no. 1 (1989): 45–­57. 10. For ongoing commitments to localism in communications policy see Philip M. Napoli, “The Localism Principle in Communications Policymaking and Policy Analysis: Ambiguity, Inconsistency, and Empirical Neglect,” Policy Studies Journal 29, no. 3 (August 2001): 372–­387. The literature on the value of competition in public interest principles in U.S. broadcast history is vast. For an assessment and critique of this literature see Thomas Streeter, “Policy Discourse and Broadcast Practice: The FCC, the U.S. Broadcast Networks, and the Discourse of the Marketplace,” Media, Culture, and Society 5, no. 3 (July 1983): 247–­262.

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NOTES TO PAGES 36–41

11. Charles Edward Merriam, New Aspects of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925); Harold D. Lasswell, Psychopathology and Politics (1930; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). 12. Pendleton Herring, The Politics of Democracy: American Parties in Action (New York: W. W. Norton, 1940); David B. Truman, The Governmental Process: Political Interests and Public Opinion (1951; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962); Robert A. Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956). 13. Truman, The Governmental Process, 514. 14. Victor Pickard, America’s Battle for Media Democracy: The Triumph of Corporate Libertarianism and the Future of Media Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 4–­5, 78, 206. 15. Christopher H. Sterling, “Breaking Chains: NBC and the FCC Network Inquiry, 1938–­43,” in NBC: America’s Network, ed. Michele Hilmes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 86–­87. 16. Douglas B. Craig, Fireside Politics: Radio and Political Culture in the United States, 1920–­1940 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2000), 97–­102. 17. U.S. Federal Communications Commission, Report on Chain Broadcasting (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1941). Quotes are from the report’s reprinting in United States, Federal Radio Commission and Federal Communications Commission, Special Reports on American Broadcasting, 1932–­1947 (New York: Arno Press, 1974), 52, 116, 138. 18. U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce, To Amend the Communications Act of 1934, 78th Cong., 1st sess., November 3–­­5, 9, 11, 12, 15–­19, 22–­24, 29–­30 and December 1–­­4, 6–­10, 14–­16, 1943, 135. 19. Indeed, even prior to the new rules many network affiliated stations chose not to carry sustaining programs. For example, in the fall of 1938 NBC’s affiliated station in Chicago aired only twenty-­seven of the network’s fifty-­two sustaining programs. See Mark Jonathan Heistad, “Radio without Sponsors: Public Service Programming in Network Sustaining Time, 1928–­1952” (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 1998), 248–­250. 20. U.S. Congress, Senate Committee, To Amend the Communications Act of 1934, 136. 21. For an extensive study of classical music in radio see Louis E. Carlat, “Sound Values: Radio Broadcasts of Symphonic Music and American Culture, 1922–­1939” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1995). 22. U.S. Federal Radio Commission and Federal Communications Commission, Special Reports on American Broadcasting, 328. 23. Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 146. 24. Ibid., 101–­146; 221–­224. 25. Carlat, “Sound Values,” 144, 148–­153. 26. For an account of the music appreciation movement and the significance of nineteenth-­ century composers see Thomas W. Miller, “The Influence of Progressivism on Music Education, 1917–­1947,” Journal of Research in Music Education 14, no. 1 (Spring 1966): 3–­16. 27. S. J. Woolf, “Damrosch Gauges Our Musical Growth,” New York Times, April 7, 1935, SM 4, 21. 28. Quoted in Joseph Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini: How He Became an American Culture-­God and Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 218. 29. Quoted in David Goodman, Radio’s Civic Ambition: American Broadcasting and Democracy in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 141–­142.



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30. Ibid., 159–­161. Downes is quoted in Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini, 261. 31. Jennifer M. Proffitt, “War, Peace, and Free Radio: The Women’s National Radio Committee’s Efforts to Promote Democracy, 1939–­1946,” Journal of Radio and Audio Media 17, no. 1 (2010): 11. 32. Edward A. Suchman, “Invitation to Music: A Study of the Creation of New Music Listeners by the Radio,” in Radio Research 1941, ed. Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Frank N. Stanton (New York: Arno Press, 1979), 140, 152, 160–­171, 176–­177, 179, 185–­188. 33. Goodman, Radio’s Civic Ambition, 199–­202. 34. For the heightened discourse on radio and propaganda in the interwar period see Craig, Fireside Politics, 228–­233. Harry A. Overstreet and Bonaro W. Overstreet, Town Meeting Comes to Town (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1938), 6, 30–­31, 247. 35. For AAAE’S intention to involve the mostly male university administrators and professors in adult education to counteract the National Education Association’s position that adult education should develop under the auspices of the mostly female public school teachers see Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, The Politics of Knowledge: The Carnegie Corporation, Philanthropy, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 106–­107. For the influence of John Dewey’s educational philosophies on the development of discussion pedagogy and the American forum movement see William M. Keith, Democracy as Discussion: Civic Education and the American Forum Movement (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007). For evidence of the cultural elitism in the AAAE in the words of its director see Morse Adams Cartwright, Ten Years of Adult Education: A Report on a Decade of Progress in the American Movement (New York: Macmillan, 1935). 36. Quoted in Goodman, Radio’s Civic Ambition, 210. 37. George V. Denny, “Bring Back the Town Meeting?,” in Capitalizing Intelligence: Eight Essays on Adult Education, ed. Warren C. Seyfert (Worcester, MA: Heffernan Press, 1937), 102, 127. 38. Quoted in Goodman, Radio’s Civic Ambition, 298. 39. Quoted in ibid., 72, 73. 40. Lyman Bryson, “Living On an Adult Level,” in Capitalizing Intelligence: Eight Essays on Adult Education, ed. Warren C. Seyfert (Worcester, MA: Heffernan Press, 1937), 17–­19, 30. 41. For the relationship between etiquettes of eating and social class and gender see Marjorie L. DeVault, Feeding the Family: The Social Organization of Caring as Gendered Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 42. William Buxton, “From Radio Research to Communications Intelligence: Rockefeller Philanthropy, Communication Specialists, and the American Policy Community,” in Communication Researchers and Policy-­making, ed. Sandra Braman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 305. 43. Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Radio and the Printed Page (1940; New York: Arno Press, 1971), 9–­10. 44. This disregard for investigating news in favor of “serious” discussion programs and classical music is significant given the wide listener interest in news. For evidence of this in a study of rural listeners in Iowa in 1938, of fourteen program genres, farm men and women ranked “news broadcasts” first, “talks, comment” twelfth, and “classical music” fourteenth for the men and thirteenth for the women. See H. B. Summers, Iowa Rural Radio Listener Survey (Manhattan, KS: Kansas State College, 1938), 12. 45. Lazarsfeld, Radio and the Printed Page, 11, 14, 33. 46. Quoted in Goodman, Radio’s Civic Ambition, 234. 47. Lazarsfeld, Radio and the Printed Page, 51–­54, 64–­94.

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NOTES TO PAGES 45–50

48. Michael Socolow, “To Network a Nation: CBS, NBC, and the Development of National Network Radio in the United States, 1925–­1950” (Ph.D. diss., Georgetown University, 2001), 264–­270. 49. Paul Porter, “Postwar Radio Horizons,” Hollywood Quarterly 1, no. 2 (January 1946): 211–­213. 50. Clifford Durr speech before the New York Federation of Women’s Clubs titled “Radio and Women’s Responsibilities,” October 27, 1944, Box 13, Folder 4, Alabama Dept. of Archives and History, Montgomery, Alabama. 51. Clifford Durr, in Education on the Air: Seventeenth Yearbook of the Institute for Education by Radio, ed. O. Joe Olson (Columbus: Ohio State University, 1947), 78–­79. 52. John A. Salmond, The Conscience of a Lawyer: Clifford J. Durr and American Civil Liberties, 1899–­1975 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990), 85–­87. 53. U.S. Federal Communications Commission, Public Service Responsibilities of Broadcast Licenses (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946), 13, 14, 18–­32, 44. 54. Charles A. Siepmann, Radio’s Second Chance (Boston: Little, Brown, 1946), 51–­52, 58–­59. 55. U.S. Congress, Senate Committee, To Amend the Communications Act of 1934, 131. 56. Ibid., 133–­135. 57. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 3. 58. Jennifer Hyland Wang, “Convenient Fictions: The Construction of the Daytime Broadcast Audience, 1927–­1960” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 2006), 36, 402, 405–­406, 448, 532. 59. U.S. Congress, Senate Committee, To Amend the Communications Act of 1934, 134. 60. Kathy M. Newman, Radio Active: Advertising and Consumer Activism, 1935–­1947 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 109–­138. 61. Jason Loviglio, Radio’s Intimate Public: Network Broadcasting and Mass-­ Mediated Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 70–­101. 62. Michele Hilmes, Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922–­1952 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 154–­164. 63. A search for WBAL in the Baltimore Afro-­American yields only a handful of references, which were either articles or announcements about Black performers who were heard on the station or lists of Black performers who were scheduled to air. Evident in these listings was the fringe time slots that the station gave to African American performers. For example, WBAL scheduled the prominent gospel group Fairfield Four daily at 6:30 a.m., 12:15 p.m., and 12:15 a.m. See Afro-­American, WBAL schedule, April 7, 1945. For how advertisers did not consider Black listeners as a target market for radio programming until the late 1940s, see Kathy M. Newman, “The Forgotten Fifteen Million: Black Radio, Radicalism, and the Construction of the ‘Negro Market,’” in Communities of the Air: Radio Century, Radio Culture, ed. Susan Merrill Squier (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 109–­133. 64. U.S. Federal Communications Commission, Public Service Responsibilities, 15, 17, 55. For a study of listener group members in 1941 that found “there are relatively few farmers, laborers, or factory workers” and that “‘white collar’ vocations predominate,” see Frank Ernest Hill and W. E. Williams, Radio’s Listening Groups: The United States and Great Britain (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), 67. Also see Donald L. Guimary, Citizens’ Groups and Broadcasting (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1975), 118–­124. 65. Commission on Freedom of the Press, A Free and Responsible Press (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947), vi. 66. Quoted in Llewellyn White, The American Radio (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947), viii–­xi.



NOTES TO PAGES 51–55

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67. Ibid., 2–­4. 68. Ibid., 111, 118, 213, 217. 69. Ibid., 218, 219, 220–­221. 70. William Boddy, Fifties Television: The Industry and Its Critics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 51. 71. U.S. Federal Communications Commission, Sixth Report and Order, paragraph 15. 72. Truman’s strategy for agency appointments was to appoint an energetic leader as chair and ensure that at least a majority of commissioners were sympathetic with the administration’s objectives. See U.S. Congress, House Committee on Commerce, Appointments to the Regulatory Agencies: The Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission, 1949–­1974 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976), 18–­19. For Coy’s work with the WPA on the Federal Writers Project see George T. Blakey, Creating a Hoosier Self-­Portrait: The Federal Writers’ Project in Indiana, 1935–­1942 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 36–­46. 73. Wayne Coy speech given to the National Association of Broadcasters, May 18, 1948, Speech and Articles Container 24, Box 23–­24, Papers of (Albert) Wayne Coy, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, NY. For a discussion of the regulatory context to FM frequency allocations see Christopher H. Sterling and Michael C. Keith, Sounds of Change: A History of FM Broadcasting in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 67–­99. 74. Coy article prepared for the Musical Courier, March 3, 1948, Speech and Articles Container 24, Box 23–­24, Papers of (Albert) Wayne Coy. 75. Coy Commencement Address to College of Music of Cincinnati, June 3, 1948, Speech and Articles Container 24, Box 23–­24, Papers of (Albert) Wayne Coy. For classical music on early FM radio see Sterling and Keith, Sounds of Change, 20–­91. 76. Coy sent these comments in a written submission to Clara Logan, president of the Southern California Association for Better Radio and Television, for inclusion in a panel session on radio listener councils at the Institute for Education by Radio’s annual conference in 1950. See Joe Olson, ed., Education on the Air: Twentienth Yearbook of the Institute for Education by Radio (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1950), 361–­363. 77. For an account of the FCC hearings on color television standards see Kittross, Television Frequency Allocation Policy, 260–­280. 78. U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Nomination of E. M. Webster to Federal Communications Commission, 81st Cong., 1st sess., July 6, 13, and 14, 1949, 30. 79. Coy speech before the National Newspaper Promotion Association, April 30, 1951, Speech and Articles Container 24, Box 25, Papers of (Albert) Wayne Coy. Folder: National News Promotion Association; for the FCC’s report on color television see U.S. Federal Communications Commission, First Report of Commission (Color Television Issue) (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1950). 80. “First Sponsored TV in Color Praised by WTOP Audience,” Washington Post, June 26, 1951, 1. 81. Wayne Oliver, “Color Television Has Its First Star,” Washington Post, May 17, 1951, 19. 82. “Coy Warns Radio on Crime and Smut,” New York Times, March 15, 1950, 54. 83. For example, in Senate Committee hearings regarding the new chain broadcasting rules, committee chair Wheeler called on CBS Vice President William Paley and the radio industry to “cut out gangster plays, dime-­novel dirt, and other filth of that kind which . . . tends to break down the morals and to make criminals of the boys and girls

200

NOTES TO PAGES 56–59

of this Nation.” Wheeler continued that “instead of taking the view that there exists a group of listeners who may be morons, and who like perverted trash, you should give programs of a higher caliber.” When a senator asked Wheeler if he would want to “cut off” Gang Busters, a popular true crime drama, Wheeler had never heard of it, but said “its name sounds bad to me,” and admitted “I do not listen to any of them.” See U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce, To Authorize a Study of the Radio Rules and Regulations of Federal Communications Commission (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1941), 411. 84. Erin A. Smith, Hard-­B oiled: Working-­Class Readers and Pulp Magazines (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), 105, 132. 85. Elena Razlagova, “True Crime Radio and Listener Disenchantment with Network Broadcasting, 1935–­1946,” American Quarterly 58, no. 1 (March 2006): 143. Though surveys showed Gang Busters was popular with low-­income viewers, Razlagova found that listeners with knowledge of the actual crimes criticized the program for constructing stereotypical representations of famers, Mexican Americans, and Native Americans. For a perspective on hard-­boiled crime fiction as a reaction against the managerial ethos of the New Deal period see Sean McCann, Gumshoe America: Hard-­B oiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). 86. For the ways in which New Deal–­created government agencies’ focus on securing contracts encouraged labor leaders to subordinate rank-­and-­file members in decision-­ making see David Montgomery, Workers’ Control in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 165–­166. For how wartime government contracts further disenfranchised workers from decision-­making see George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 20–­21. 87. Brinson, Personal and Public Interests, 40–­41, 117–­118. 88. Frieda Hennock in ed. O. Joe Olson, Education on the Air: Nineteenth Yearbook of the Institute for Education by Radio, (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1949), 47–­49, 67, 393. 89. U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Limit Power of Radio Stations, 80th Cong., 2nd sess., April 5–­­9, 12–­4, 19, and 23, 1948, 918. 90. Iowa State University, Highlights of the TV Educational Workshop (Ames: Iowa State College, 1952), section XXIX, 2. 91. Ibid., sections IX and XV, 3–­4. 92. John Walker Powell, Channels of Learning: The Story of Educational Television (Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1962), 45. 93. Brinson, Personal and Public Interests, 129. 94. Ibid., 35. 95. According to one account, the veteran NAEB broadcasters “tended to look on the new NAEB as a sort of gentlemen’s club” and were less interested in the NAEB’s new members’ growing attention to educational television, a more costly medium that university broadcasters were unlikely to develop for some time. See Powell, Channels of Learning, 33–­34. 96. Robert B. Hudson, “Allerton House, 1949, 1950,” Hollywood Quarterly 5, no. 3 (Spring 1951): 237–­250. 97. Ibid. 98. Powell, Channels of Learning, 36. 99. Frieda Hennock, “TV—­ Problem Child or Teacher’s Pet?” New York State Education (March 1951): 398.



NOTES TO PAGES 59–65

201

100. Frieda Hennock, “Radio and Television in Education,” in Education on the Air: Twenty-­ First Yearbook of the Institute for Education by Radio, ed. O. Joe Olson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1951), 447. 101. Frieda Hennock in Olson, ed., Education on the Air: Twentieth Yearbook, 26. 102. H. A. Overstreet, The Mature Mind (New York: W. W. Norton, 1949), 286. For Hennock’s praise of Overstreet see Olson, ed., Education on the Air: Twentieth Yearbook, 10. 103. Hennock in Olson, ed., Education on the Air: Twentieth Yearbook, 1950, 10; Overstreet, The Mature Mind, 213. CHAPTER 2  CONTESTING (IN)EQUALITY AT THE MARGINS OF TELEVISION RECEPTION

1. By the late 1950s what were previously called community antenna television systems were increasingly referred to as cable television. For consistency, I will use the term “cable television.” According to the FCC, in 1959 some 560 cable television systems brought television to over a half million subscribers. See U.S. Congress, Senate Subcommittee on Communications of the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, VHF Booster and Community Antenna, Part 1, 86th Cong., 1st sess., June 30, July 1, 7, 9, 14, and 16, 1959, 24. 2. U.S. Congress, Senate Subcommittee on Communications of the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, VHF Booster and Community Antenna, Part 2, 86th Cong., 1st sess., October 27–­­30, December 15 and 16, 1959, 1292. 3. Ibid., 881, 885. 4. Within congressional hearings UHF broadcasters spoke of the high cost of their transmitters, the poor quality of their signals over uneven terrain, the reluctance of television manufactures to build UHF compatible receivers, and the added expenses for viewers to equip their sets with UHF tuners. For example, by 1961, only 5.5 percent of all new television sets were UHF compatible. See Erwin G. Krasnow, Lawrence D. Longley, and Herbert A. Terry, The Politics of Broadcast Regulation, 3rd ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982), 177. 5. U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, FCC Policy on Television Freeze and Other Communication Matters, 82nd Cong., 1st sess., July 18, 1951, 25. 6. John M. Kittross, Television Frequency Allocation Policy in the United States (New York: Arno Press, 1979), 297. Broadcast network practices further compounded the economic difficulties of UHF and VHF television stations in small cities and remote areas. Network feeds required wired lines and/or microwave relay systems which were extended first to major metropolitan centers, leaving many smaller cities and rural areas in the Midwest, West, and South off the network grids. See Jonathan Sterne, “Television Under Construction: American Television and the Problem of Distribution, 1926–­62,” Media, Culture, and Society 21, no. 4 (1999): 503–­530. Further, national advertising sponsors did not pay to reach viewers in smaller cities. Indeed, CBS had a policy not to affiliate in markets with less than forty thousand viewers. See U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Television Inquiry, Part VI, Review of Allocations Problems, Special Problems of TV Service to Small Communities, 85th Cong., 2nd sess., May 27–­­29, June 3, 4, 24–­26, and July 1, 1958, 3583. 7. In 1954 the Senate Subcommittee on Communications of the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce held hearings on the “Status of UHF and Multiple Ownership of TV Stations.” Between 1956 and 1960 the Senate Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce held a series of eight hearings on television which were largely

202

NOTES TO PAGES 65–70

devoted to the allocations problems. The committee’s Communications Subcommittee held two sets of hearings in 1959 on cable television and other antenna systems that were extending the reach of existing television stations. In the House the Antitrust Subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary held extensive hearings in 1956 on monopoly problems in television broadcasting, including consideration of the UHF problem. Subcommittees within the Select Committee on Small Business held hearings in 1956 and 1961 addressing the UHF problem and prospects for small business opportunities in television. 8. U.S. Congress, Senate Subcommittee on Communications, VHF Booster and Community Antenna, Part 2, 86th Cong., 1st sess. (1959). 9. U.S. Congress, Senate Subcommittee on Communications of the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Status of UHF and Multiple Ownership of TV Stations, 83rd Cong., 2nd sess., May 19–­­21, June 15–­­18, and 22, 1954, 492, 494, 502. 10. Sarah Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 29. 11. Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in American Culture (1929; New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1956), 3. 12. Igo, The Averaged American, 58, 60, 83. 13. W. Lloyd Warner, Democracy in Jonesville: A Study of Quality and Inequality (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949); James West, Plainville, USA (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946); Arthur J. Vidich and Joseph Bensman, Small Town in Mass Society: Class, Power, and Religion in a Rural Community (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968). W. Lloyd Warner published multiple volumes on “Yankee City,” which I discuss later. 14. Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1937). 15. Igo, The Averaged American, 40, 58, 60. 16. Ibid., 41, 59–­63. 17. Ibid., 67, 80. 18. Warner developed this approach from his fieldwork of Australian aborigines under the sponsorship of English anthropologist A. R. Radcliffe-­ Brown, who drew from French sociologist Emile Durkheim to conceptualize social relations as a functioning structural whole. In search of the functional social structure that bound a population of three thousand aborigines, Warner cataloged seventy-­one social statuses that functioned to create “social solidarity” in the community. See John S. Gilkeson, Anthropologists and the Rediscovery of America, 1886–­1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 91–­96. 19. W. Lloyd Warner, The Social Life of a Modern Community (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1941), 11. 20. W. Lloyd Warner and Paul S. Lunt, The Status System of a Modern Community (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1942), 3, 16. 21. Warner, The Social Life of a Modern Community, 17, 28. 22. Warner, Democracy in Jonesville, 297. 23. Ibid., 67–­68, 297. 24. Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960), 109. For a reflection on how the lower middle classes revolted against Warner’s depictions of them see Mildred Warner, W. Lloyd Warner, Social Anthropologist (New York City: Public Center for Cultural Resources, 1988), 160.



NOTES TO PAGES 70–78

203

25. W. Lloyd Warner and Josiah Orne Low, The Social System of a Modern Factory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1947), 109. 26. W. Lloyd Warner, American Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 171. 27. For a discussion of Warner’s concept of caste see Ruth Rosner Kornhauser, “The Warner Approach to Social Stratification,” in Class, Status and Power: A Reader in Social Stratification, ed. Reinhard Bendix and Seymour Martin Lipset (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1953), 236–­240. 28. W. Lloyd Warner, Robert J. Havighurst, and Martin B. Loeb, Who Shall Be Educated?: The Challenge of Unequal Opportunities (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1944), 143, 145, 147, 157, 158, 159. 29. Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement, Vol. 6 (New York: International Publishers, 1982), 195–­196; “Jasper McLevy Is Dead at 84; Socialist Mayor of Bridgeport,” New York Times, November 20, 1962, 33. 30. U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Television Inquiry, Part II: UHF-­VHF Allocations Problem, 94th Cong., 2nd sess., February 27–­­29, March 2, 14–­16, 26–­28, May 14, 15, June 11, and July 17 and 18, 1956, 129, 432–­433, 570–­571. 31. U.S. Congress, Senate Subcommittee on Communications, Status of UHF, 1087. 32. Ibid., 447. 33. Steven D. Classen, Watching Jim Crow: The Struggle Over Mississippi TV, 1955–­1969 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 31–­51. For the importance of the civil rights movement in establishing the stature of television network news divisions in the mid-­1950s see Sasha Torres, Black, White and in Color: Television and Black Civil Rights (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 15–­21. 34. U.S. Congress, Senate Subcommittee on Communications, Status of UHF, 1087. 35. For an assessment of the literature on neoliberalism see Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015). 36. U.S. Congress, Senate Committee, Television Inquiry, Part VI, 1150. 37. Ibid., 3767–­3768. 38. U.S. Congress, Senate Subcommittee on Communications, VHF Booster and Community Antenna Legislation, Part 2, 866–­887. 39. Ibid., 877, 903–­904, 959, 1189. 40. Ibid., 897–­898, 954–­955. 41. U.S. Congress, Senate Committee, Television Inquiry, Part VI, 3537, 3631–­3633, 3777–­ 3778; U.S. Congress, Senate Communications Subcommittee, VHF Booster and Community Antenna Legislation, Part 2, 939. 42. U.S. Congress, Senate Communications Subcommittee, VHF Booster and Community Antenna Legislation, Part 2, 948. 43. U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce, To Amend the Communications Act of 1934, 78th Cong., 1st sess., November 3–­­5, 9, 11, 12, 15–­19, 22–­24, 29–­30 and December 1–­­4, 6–­10, 14–­16, 1943, 62. 44. George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 61. 45. Richard T. Ruetten, “Burton K. Wheeler of Montana: A Progressive between the Wars” (Ph.D. diss., University of Oregon, 1961). 46. Stations reported that retail advertisers on television included hardware, jewelry, furniture, bakeries, florists, grocery, beauticians, gasoline stations, utility service, plumbing, banking, new and used car dealers, auto repair shops, and appliance dealers. The 1955/1956 and 1961 studies were cited in U.S. Congress, House Subcommittee

204

NOTES TO PAGES 78–80

No. 6 of the Select Committee on Small Business, Advertising Opportunities for Small Business in Television and Radio, 87th Cong., 1st sess., December 6 and 7, 1961, 92–­99. 47. In 1958 there were a reported 545 cable television systems, 56 of which were located in communities with an operating television station. Of these 56, 25 did not carry the local station in their own market. See U.S. Congress, Senate Committee, Review of Allocations, 3733. There is evidence to suggest that cable television systems owned by area residents were more likely to carry area stations. For example, of the twelve cable television systems within the signal radius of two NBC-­affiliated UHF stations in western Massachusetts, only two of them carried these local stations. According to the station’s owner, “we have had outright refusals from three of the largest cable operations in our area, and they happen to be owned all by the same outfit, and all out of town. . . . The others, the two that have carried us, are wholly owned by local people. So there seems to be a difference in attitude in community antenna operations depending on their ownership.” See U.S. Congress, Senate Committee, Television Inquiry, Part VI, Review of Allocations Problems, 3730, 3733. 48. U.S. Congress, Senate Subcommittee on Communications, VHF Booster and Community Antenna, Part 1, 330–­335. 49. Ibid. 50. U.S. Congress, Senate Subcommittee on Communications, VHF Booster and Community Antenna, Part 2, 930. 51. Cited in Mansel G. Blackford, A History of Small Business in America, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 111. 52. Joseph C. Palamountain, The Politics of Distribution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955), 162–­163. 53. U.S. Congress, Senate Committee, Television Inquiry, Part VI, Review of Allocations Problems, 3537. About a dozen cable television systems in small towns in the mountainous western region of Montana imported signals from three to five network affiliated stations, including from Great Falls, Billings, and Butte, Montana, a network-­affiliated station in Idaho Falls, Idaho, and three network affiliated stations in Spokane, Washington. For a listing of cable systems and their stations see U.S. Congress, Senate Committee, Television Inquiry, Part VI, Review of Allocations Problems, 3580. 54. Ibid., 3542. 55. U.S. Congress, House Subcommittee No. 6, Advertising Opportunities for Small Business, 203–­204. According to one UHF owner in West Virginia, the Small Business Administration saw UHF stations as risky business ventures that were not qualified to receive loans. See U.S. Congress, Senate Subcommittee on Communications, Status of UHF, 436. 56. Blackford, A History of Small Business in America, 109–­112. 57. Jean C. Halterman, “The Use of Television as a Local Advertising Medium” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University), 103–­105. For a discussion of the importance of radio advertising for connecting retail personnel with customers in the 1940s see C. H. Sandage, Radio Advertising for Retailers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), 77–­84. For a 1939 study which found that low-­income groups preferred small radio stations with local retail sponsors more than higher income groups see Alvin Meyrowitz and Marjorie Fiske, “The Relative Preference of Low-­Income Groups for Small Stations,” Journal of Applied Psychology 23, no. 1 (February 1939): 158–­162. 58. C. Wright Mills, “The Middle Classes in Middle-­Sized Cities,” in Power, Politics, and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills, ed. Irving Louis Horowitz (New York: Ballantine Books, 1963), 288.



NOTES TO PAGES 80–83

205

59. L. Harmon Zeigler, The Politics of Small Business (Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1961), 65. For example, during the war when more than a half million small retail, service, and construction businesses closed their doors while corporations with ten thousand or more employees increased their proportion of total employment from 13 percent in 1939 to 31 percent by 1944, many wage earners who felt increasingly alienated with these large companies expressed a desire to own a small business. See Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight, 61, 240. 60. This survey of high-­income and low-­income residents in Chicago found that low-­ income families were “much more” likely than those with high incomes to buy television sets in “neighborhood stores” rather than in discount downtown stores despite the higher costs. See Davee, Koehnlein & Keating, A Study of Relative Viewing Habits, Program Preferences, and Beneficial and Harmful Effects of Television on High and Low Income Families (Chicago, 1950), 7. 61. Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Harry Field, The People Look at Radio (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1946); Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Radio Listening in America: The People Look at Radio—­Again (New York: Prentice-­Hall, 1948); Gary A. Steiner, The People Look at Television: A Study of Audience Attitudes (New York: Knopf, 1963). 62. Steiner, The People Look at Television, 415, 419. 63. Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Radio and the Printed Page (1940; New York: Arno Press, 1971), 10–­11, 200–­257. 64. Lynn Boyd Hinds, Broadcasting the Local News: The Early Years of Pittsburgh’s KDKA-­TV (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995). 65. James Thomas Gordon, “A History of Local Television News Presentation” (M.A. thesis, Ohio State University, 1987), 27–­28, 168. 66. U.S. Congress, Senate Subcommittee on Communications, Status of UHF, 407–­408. 67. For an account of the ways television station ownership and changes in network affiliation negatively impacted relationships with local news sponsors see Arthur L. Olszyk, Live . . . at the Scene: Local TV News in Milwaukee, 1944–­1980 (Milwaukee, WI: A. L. Olszyk, 1993). 68. For an account of the FCC’s administrative record on rebroadcast antennas see U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Ad Hoc Advisory Committee on Allocations, Allocation of TV Channels (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1958). 69. U.S. Federal Communications Commission, Sixth Report and Order (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, April 11, 1952), paragraph 224. In 1952 the FCC banned VHF boosters to preserve the integrity of their spectrum allocation plan. By 1958 the FCC had not authorized their use despite the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia stating that the FCC could not prohibit boosters without an alternative plan for bringing television service to these isolated areas. In 1956 the FCC authorized the use of “translators,” which converted VHF signals to the highest portion of the UHF spectrum so that when they were rebroadcast they would not interfere with existing VHF broadcast stations. However, these UHF translators were five times more expensive to build than just rebroadcasting through a VHF booster. They also created the same problems UHF stations experienced, including trouble bending UHF signals around hills and down into valleys and requiring residents to purchase UHF tuners. The FCC reported in 1958 that approximately 125 UHF translators served one hundred communities. See U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, the Ad Hoc Advisory Committee on Allocations, Allocation of TV Channels.

206

NOTES TO PAGES 83–88

70. U.S. Congress, Senate Subcommittee on Communications, VHF Booster and Community Antenna, Part 1, 151, 166. 71. Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 39–­45. 72. President’s National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty, Rural Poverty in the United States (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968), 10. 73. John L. Shover, First Majority, Last Minority: The Transforming of Rural Life in America (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1976). 74. U.S. Congress, Senate Subcommittee on Communications, VHF Booster and Community Antenna Legislation, Part 2, 984–­989. 75. Ibid., 971–­972. 76. U.S. Congress, Senate Subcommittee on Communications, VHF Booster and Community Antenna Legislation, Part 2, 977, 989–­991. 77. Ibid., 1024. 78. For an account of the historical development of the recreation movement see Martin H. Neumeyer and Esther S. Neumeyer, Leisure and Recreation: A Study of Leisure and Recreation in their Sociological Aspects (New York: Ronald Press, 1958). 79. Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 50–­51. 80. Carmen Luke, Constructing the Child Viewer: A History of the American Discourse on Television and Children, 1950–­1980 (New York: Praeger, 1990), 92–­107. 81. For the widely publicized and debated hearings on television violence and juvenile delinquency in the late 1950s and early 1960s see William Boddy, “Senator Dodd Goes to Hollywood: Investigating Video Violence,” in The Revolution Wasn’t Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict, ed. Lynn Spigel and Michael Curtin (New York: Routledge, 1997), 161–­183. 82. U.S. Congress, Senate Subcommittee on Communications, VHF Booster and Community Antenna Legislation, Part 2, 125. CHAPTER 3  PAY-­T V ORDERS

1. For a detailed report of the Hartford trial see Joint Comments of Zenith Radio Corporation and Teco, Inc. in Support of Petition for Nation-­Wide Authorization of Subscription Television, before the Federal Communications Commission, Docket No. 11279, March 10, 1965. Reprinted in U.S. Congress, House Subcommittee on Communications and Power of the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Subscription Television, 90th Cong., 1st sess., October 9–­­13, and 16, 1967, 241–­336. 2. For histories of pay-­TV see: Herbert H. Howard and S. L. Carroll, Subscription Television: History, Current Status, and Economic Projection (Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 1980); Richard A. Gershon, “Pay Cable Television: A Regulatory History,” Communications and the Law 12, no. 2 (June 1990): 13–­26; Megan Mullen, “The Pre-­history of Pay Cable Television: An Overview and Analysis,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 19, no. 1 (1999): 39–­56. For a discussion of the First Amendment and cable television see Cass R. Sunstein, Free Markets and Social Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 3. For variations on this policy history see: Michelle Hilmes, Hollywood and Broadcasting: From Radio to Cable (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 129–­130; Michele Hilmes, “Cable, Satellite, and Digital Technologies,” in The New Media Book, ed. Dan Harries (London: British Film Institute, 2002), 4–­5; Christopher H. Sterling and



NOTES TO PAGES 89–94

207

John M. Kittross, Stay Tuned: A Concise History of American Broadcasting, 2nd ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1990), 520; Gershon, “Pay Cable Television: A Regulatory History”; Mullen, “The Pre-­ history of Pay Cable Television”; Patrick R. Parsons and Robert M. Frieden, The Cable and Satellite Television Industries (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1998). For a more skeptical account about the impact of broadcasters and theater owners on public opinion about pay-­TV in California see David H. Ostroff, “A History of STV, Inc. and the 1964 California Vote Against Pay Television,” Journal of Broadcasting 27, no. 4 (Fall 1983): 371–­386. 4. Norman Jacobs, ed., Culture for the Millions?: Mass Media in Modern Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964). 5. Paul F. Lazarsfeld, “Mass Culture Today,” in Culture for the Millions?, ed. Jacobs, xi. Italics in original. 6. Edward Shils, “Mass Society and Its Culture,” in Culture for the Millions?, ed. Jacobs, 28–­42. This rationale for aesthetic valuation that identified high culture with high innate capacity and high socioeconomic status extended well beyond Shils’s stark intellectual snobbery. See the following studies of mass culture and television in the late 1950s: Leo Bogart, The Age of Television: A Study of Viewing Habits and the Impact of Television on American Life, 2nd ed. (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1958), 21, 24, 26–­33; Wilbur Schramm, Responsibility in Mass Communication (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), 298. 7. Shils, “Mass Society and Its Culture,” 24, 25. 8. Bernard Rosenberg, “Mass Culture in America,” in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, ed. Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1957), 5. 9. Rolf B. Meyersohn, “Social Research in Television,” in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, ed. Rosenberg and White, 354. 10. Dwight Macdonald, “A Theory of Mass Culture,” in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, ed. Rosenberg and White, 63–­64. 11. Quoted in Paul R. Gorman, Left Intellectuals and Popular Culture in Twentieth-­Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 162. 12. Macdonald, “A Theory of Mass Culture,” 70. 13. Rosenberg, “Mass Culture in America,” in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, ed. Rosenberg and White, 9. 14. Macdonald, “A Theory of Mass Culture,” 62–­63. 15. David M. White, “Mass Culture in America: Another Point of View,” in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, ed. Rosenberg and White, 18–­20. 16. Gilbert Seldes, “The Public Arts,” in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, ed. Rosenberg and White, 558, 561. 17. Shils, “Mass Society and Its Culture,” 26. 18. This quotation is from CBS testimony citing a Zenith press release. See U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Television Inquiry, Part III: Subscription Television, 84th Cong., 2nd sess., April 23–­­27, and July 17, 1956, 1320. 19. U.S. Congress, Senate Committee, Television Inquiry, Part III: Subscription Television, 1072. 20. Ibid., 1065, 1082, 1096–­1098. 21. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Subscription Television, 85th Cong., 2nd sess., January 14–­­17, 21, 22, and 23, 1958, 483. 22. U.S. Congress, House Subcommittee on Communications and Power of the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Subscription Television—­1969, 91st Cong., 1st sess., November 18, 19–­21, 24 and December 9, 10, 11, and 12, 1969, 234. Evidence of support

208

NOTES TO PAGES 94–96

for pay-­TV among performing arts organizations in the 1969 hearing include testimony from the president of the New York Philharmonic Symphony Society who spoke on behalf of seventy-­five orchestra leaders who had recently met to discuss the financial crises in the arts and to voice support for pay-­TV. See U.S. Congress, House Subcommittee on Communications and Power, Subscription Television—­1969, 216–­219. 23. According to DiMaggio and Useem, between 1966 and 1978 “the annual budget of the National Endowment for the Arts, the federal government’s primary funding agency, has risen from $2.5 million to over $149 million. State contributions to the arts have grown from $1.7 million to over $55 million annually.” See Paul DiMaggio and Michael Useem, “Cultural Democracy in a Period of Cultural Expansion: The Social Composition of Arts Audiences in the United States,” Social Problems 26, no. 2 (1978): 180. Regarding audience demographics, DiMaggio and Useem found that “more than three quarters” were “managerial or professional, while blue-­collar never exceeded 5 percent.” Paul Dimaggio and Michael Useem, “Social Class and Arts Consumption: The Origins of Class Differences in Exposure to Arts in America,” Theory and Society 5, no. 2 (March 1978): 147. 24. DiMaggio and Useem, “Social Class and Arts Consumption,” 151. 25. Quoted in ibid., 153. 26. DiMaggio and Useem, “Cultural Democracy in a Period of Cultural Expansion,” 193. 27. U.S. Congress, Senate Committee, Television Inquiry, Part III: Subscription Television, 1231, 1264–­1265, 1316. 28. Ibid., 1322. 29. Ibid., 1288, 1324; Jack Gould, “Television Today: A Critic’s Appraisal,” New York Times Magazine, April 8, 1955, 12, 38. 30. U.S. Congress, Senate Committee, Television Inquiry, Part III: Subscription Television, 1292. Indeed, Salant submitted to the hearings an appendix which listed the “highlights” from the three network’s 1955–­1956 season, including Broadway plays, special long-­ format dramatic series, motion pictures (the list included mostly British productions such as Richard III and The Red Shoes), public affairs and informational programs, cultural programs (classical music and ballet), pottery and art programs, and sporting events. Absent from the list were any of the most popular staples of current broadcast schedules, including variety shows, westerns, crimes series, soap operas, and game shows. See ibid., 1308–­1313. 31. Pat Weaver, “‘Enlightenment through Exposure’: Television’s Role as a Mature Instrument for the Public Good,” TV Magazine, January 1952, 11. 32. Pamela Wilson, “NBC Television’s ‘Operation Frontal Lobes’: Cultural Hegemony and Fifties Program Planning,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, 15, no. 1 (1995): 83–­105. 33. Quoted in Ostroff, “A History of STV, Inc.,” 375. 34. Sylvester L. Weaver, “The Case for Pay-­TV,” Los Angeles Times, April 19, 1965, V1. 35. The program included listing European films, documentaries, and San Francisco Giants baseball games, but the guide gave predominant attention to performing arts programming. For this premier issue of Subscriber’s Choice programming guide see Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts Library, clippings files, MWEZx, n.c., 23.652, no. 14. 36. The pay-­TV operation built coaxial cable connections in a neighborhood of roughly ten thousand residences in the Sunset District of San Francisco and close to twenty thousand in the Santa Monica area of Los Angeles to offer subscribers three channels



NOTES TO PAGES 96–103

209

from which to buy individual programs priced from twenty-­five cents to two dollars. See Ostroff, “A History of STV, Inc.” 37. Sylvester Weaver speech to the Economics Club in Chicago, October 1, 1964, Wisconsin Historical Society, Sylvester L. Weaver Jr. Papers, 1922–­1989, box 28. 38. Ostroff, “A History of STV, Inc.,” 377–­379. 39. “Pay-­TV Suspends Show Production: Relies on Films and Sports Pending Study of Viewers,” New York Times, August 25, 1964, 28. 40. Sylvester Weaver speech to Central Washington State College, Ellensburg, Washington, April 16, 1968, Wisconsin Historical Society, Sylvester L. Weaver Jr. Papers, 1922–­1989, box 28. 41. Sloan Commission on Cable Communications, On the Cable: The Television of Abundance (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1971,) ix, 5–­6, 10, 68. 42. Ibid., 68–­70. 43. Richard Adler and Walter S. Baer, The Electronic Box Office: Humanities and Arts on the Cable (New York: Praeger, 1974), 49, 51–­53, 72, 91, 131. 44. DiMaggio and Useem, “Cultural Democracy in a Period of Cultural Expansion,” 180–­191. 45. Thomas P. Southwick, Distant Signals: How Cable TV Changed the World of Telecommunications (Overland Park, KS: Primedia Intertec, 1998), 92–­93. 46. Kirsten Beck, ed., The Proceedings of a Conference on Cable Television and the Performing Arts, June 5–­­7, 1981 (New York: New York University School of the Arts, 1981), 3–­4. 47. Ibid., 33, 56. 48. U.S. Congress, Senate Committee, Television Inquiry, Part III: Subscription Television, 1049–­1051. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid. 51. Steven M. Gillon, Politics and Vision: The ADA and American Liberalism, 1947–­1985 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), viii–­ix. 52. Quoted in ibid., 21. 53. Ibid., 124–­125. 54. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “Our Country and Our Culture,” Partisan Review 19, no. 5 (1952): 592. 55. The ADA sites its history of promoting common carrier regulations in U.S. Congress, House Subcommittee on Communications and Power, Subscription Television, 642–­645. 56. Official Report of Proceedings before the Federal Communications Commission, Washington, DC, March 25, 1971, Docket No. 18397-­A, Vol. 13, 1692, 1694, 1695, 1698, Record Group 173, National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. While it is hard to know the extent of the ADA’s direct influence within regulatory circles, the ADA was a constant presence in congressional hearings on television, and in 1970, one prominent report which recommended reversing the FCC’s virtual ban on cable in big cities cited Sydney Dean as its primary source of research and inspiration. See Ralph Lee Smith, The Wired Nation: Cable TV, the Electronic Communications Highway (New York: Harper & Row, 1972). 57. Official Report of Proceedings before the Federal Communications Commission, Washington, DC, March 25, 1971, Docket No. 18397-­A, Vol. 13, 1702, Record Group 173, National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 58. Ibid., 1875, 1876, 1879. 59. Official Report of Proceedings before the Federal Communications Commission, Washington, DC, March 22, 1971, Docket No. 18397-­A, Vol. 12, 1275, 1276, Record Group 173, National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

210

NOTES TO PAGES 103–108

60. U.S. Cabinet Committee on Cable Communications, Cable: Report to the President (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1974), 1, chapter IV, 5. 61. Quoted in Kaye L. O’Riordan, “An Examination of the Application of Common Carrier Regulation to Entities Providing New Telecommunications Services,” Case Western Reserve Law Review 29, no. 577 (1978–­1979): 5. For a history of FCC decisions on common carrier status for cable television see Patrick Parsons, Cable Television and the First Amendment (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1987), 134–­136. 62. U.S. Congress, House Subcommittee on Communications and Power, Subscription Television, 490–­491. 63. For census figures see ibid., 169. For receiver prices see Sterling and Kittross, Stay Tuned, 290. 64. U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Television Inquiry, Part VI, Review of Allocations Problems, Special Problems of TV Service to Small Communities, 85th Cong., 2nd sess., May 27–­­29, June 3, 4, 24–­26, and July 1, 1958, 1424–­1425. For the Progressive Era history of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs see Kristin Kate White, “Training a Nation: The General Federation of Women’s Clubs’ Rhetorical Education and American Citizenship, 1890–­1930” (Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 2010). 65. U.S. Congress, House Subcommittee on Communications and Power, Subscription Television, 476. 66. Ibid., 528–­529. 67. Official Report of Proceedings before the Federal Communications Commission, Washington, DC, October 24, 1974, Docket No. 19554, Vol. 11. Box 1212, 1427–­1429, Record Group 173, National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 68. U.S. Congress, Senate Committee, Television Inquiry, Part III: Subscription Television, 1201–­1203, 1357–­1368. 69. U.S. Congress, House Subcommittee on Communications and Power, Subscription Television—­1969, 139–­143. For more on the transformation of SAG see Lary May, “Movie Star Politics: The Screen Actors’ Guild, Cultural Conversion, and the Hollywood Red Scare,” in Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War, ed. Lary May (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 125–­153. For a detailed account of the CSU strike and lockout see Gerald Horne, Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930–­1950: Moguls, Mobsters, Stars, Reds, and Trade Unionists (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001). 70. Official Report of Proceedings before the Federal Communications Commission, Washington, DC, October 24, 1974, Docket No. 19554, Vol. 11. Box 1212, 1242, 1253, Record Group 173, National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 71. U.S. Congress, House Subcommittee on Communications and Power, Subscription Television—­1969, 200–­201. At this 1969 congressional hearing the following unions expressed their opposition to pay-­TV: East Coast Council of Motion Picture Production Unions; New York local of the International Union of Electrical Workers; The Greater Boston Labor Council; New England Machines and Aerospace Workers; United Transportation Union; District 50 of the United Mine Workers; Local 600 of the United Auto Workers. See ibid., 160–­172, 200–­201, 256, 346–­347, 462–­464. 72. The senior groups which testified at the hearings in support of pay-­TV represented seniors “of adequate means,” according to a “professional senior consultant.” See House Subcommittee on Communications and Power, Subscription Television—­1969, 352. 73. Ibid., 219–­222, 292. 74. Ibid., 189–­192. 75. Ibid., 477–­486.



NOTES TO PAGES 109–114

211

76. Official Report of Proceedings before the Federal Communications Commission, Washington, DC, November 6, 1973, Docket No. 19554, Vol. 4, 666–­678, Record Group 173, National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 77. U.S. Congress, House Subcommittee on Communications and Power, Subscription Television, 257–­259, 346, 363–­365. 78. For a history of sports legislation regarding antitrust exemption and sports blackouts see John Wilson, Playing by the Rules: Sport, Society, and the State (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1994). CHAPTER 4  LOCAL ORIGINATION, PUBLIC ACCESS, AND THE HIERARCHICAL LOGICS OF CIVIC CULTURE

1. U.S. Federal Communications Commission, Second Report and Order, adopted March 4, 1966, reprinted in Federal Communications Commission Reports, Vol. 2, 2nd ser. (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1966), 775. 2. U.S. Federal Communications Commission, Notice of Proposed Rulemaking and Notice of Inquiry, reprinted in Federal Communications Commission Reports, Vol. 15, 2nd ser. (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1966), 418. 3. Federal Communications Commission, Cable Television Report and Order: and Reconsideration of Cable Television Report and Order (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1972). 4. Don R. LeDuc, Cable Television and the FCC: A Crisis in Media Control (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1973), 156–­160. 5. Laura R. Linder, Public Access Television: America’s Electronic Soapbox (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999). 6. Patrick R. Parsons, Blue Skies: A History of Cable Television (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008); Megan Mullen, The Rise of Cable Programming in the United States: Revolution or Evolution? (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003). 7. Indeed, rich histories of public access cable programming are few and remain to be written. For an overview of the programming on Paper Tiger Television, a public access collective in New York City, see DeeDee Halleck, Handheld Visions: The Impossible Possibilities of Community Media (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 114–­127. For an overview of cable access programming through the 1990s see Linder, Public Access Television. For the diversity of early public access cable television in New York City see Carol Anshien, Public Access Celebration, July 6, 7, 8, 1972: A Report on Public Access in New York (New York: Public Access Report, 1973). For an ethnographic study of public access cable television in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, see Donna L. King and Christopher Mele, “Making Public Access Television: Community Participation, Media Literacy, and the Public Sphere,” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 4, no. 4 (1999): 603–­623. 8. Parsons, Blue Skies, 157–­161. 9. National Community Television Association, The 8th Annual Exhibit and Symposium (New York: International Recording Guild, 1959), A1. 10. Ibid., E31–­32. 11. Parsons, Blue Skies, 164–­169. 12. For example, in their influential study of voting, Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee concluded that stable societies “need some people who are active in a certain respect, others in the middle, and still others passive” to maintain consensus and continuity in the political culture. See Bernard R. Berelson, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, and William N.

212

NOTES TO PAGES 115–121

McPhee, Voting: A Study of Opinion Formation in a Presidential Campaign (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), 314. Also see: Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1959); Donald John Devine, The Political Culture of the United States: The Influence of Member Values on Regime Maintenance (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972). 13. Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), 4–­5, 14, 35. 14. Ibid., 29, 31, 387–­400. 15. Ibid., 31–­32, 34, 335–­382, 475, 486–­488, 490, 498–­499. 16. U.S. Federal Communications Commission, Second Report and Order, 775. 17. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Regulation of Community Antenna Television, 98th Cong., 2nd sess., March 22–­­24, April 5–­­7, 1966, 43. 18. Parsons, Blue Skies, 218–­219. 19. National Community Television Association, The 15th Annual Convention: Miami Beach, Florida, June 26 to 29, 1966 (Washington, DC: National Community Television Association, 1966), D44–­D52. Ford’s call to arms for local programming was far more than a contrived tactic to fend off cable regulation. Prior to assuming the presidency of the NCTA, Ford had long supported the FCC’s localism goals as the FCC’s Broadcast Bureau Hearing’s division chief in 1953, as a commissioner from 1957 to 1965, and as chairman in 1961 when he spearheaded the commission’s efforts to help struggling UHF stations. See Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade Commission, Appointments to Regulatory Agencies: (1949–­1974), Committee on Commerce, 94th Cong., 2nd sess. (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976), 95–­98. 20. Wally Briscoe, “Opportunity to Serve,” 16; and Charles Wigutow, “CATV Origination Up to Now,” 45; both in TV and Communications, October 1966. 21. U.S. Federal Communications Commission, Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, reprinted in Federal Communications Commission Reports, Vol. 25, 2nd ser. (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1970), 48–­49. 22. Ibid. 23. Federal Communications Commission, Cable Television Report and Order: And Reconsideration, 24–­28, 50–­51. 24. The literature that is critical of CAP is long. For a selection of critiques see: Jill Quadagno, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Allen J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009); William S. Clayson, Freedom Is Not Enough: The War on Poverty and the Civil Rights Movement in Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010). 25. Economic Opportunity Act, Public Law 88–­452, August 20, 1964, 516–­518. 26. Daniel P. Moynihan, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: Community Action in the War on Poverty (New York: The Free Press, 1969), 6, 9, 23. 27. Robert A. Nisbet, The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), 14, 23, 49–­50. 28. Moynihan, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding, 16. 29. Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd (1956; New York: Vintage Books, 1962), 162, 220, 221, 228, 229, 231–­233, 236. 30. Ibid., italics in original. 31. Moynihan, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding, xvii, 97, 112, 129–­132.



NOTES TO PAGES 121–128

213

32. Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade Commission, Appointments to Regulatory Agencies, 254–­258. 33. Nicholas Johnson, “CATV: Promise and Peril,” Saturday Review, November 11, 1967, 87. 34. Nicholas Johnson, “The Public Interest and Public Broadcasting: Looking at Communications as a Whole,” Washington University Law Quarterly 480 (1967): 483–­484. 35. Nicholas Johnson, How to Talk Back to Your Television Set (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), 15, 37. 36. For a critique of the media effects tradition in media violence studies see J. C. Tulloch and M. I. Tulloch, “Understanding TV Violence: A Multifaceted Cultural Analysis,” in Nation, Culture, and Text: Australian Cultural and Media Studies, ed. Graeme Turner (London: Routledge, 1993). 37. William Boddy, “Senator Dodd Goes to Hollywood: Investigating Video Violence,” in The Revolution Wasn’t Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict, ed. Lynn Spigel and Michael Curtin (New York: Routledge, 1997), 179. 38. Johnson, How to Talk Back, 183–­185. 39. Ibid., 190–­192, 211–­212. 40. Nicolas Johnson, Test Patterns for Living (New York: Bantam Books, 1972), xvii. For the connection between the counterculture and digital utopianism see Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 41. Johnson, Test Patterns for Living, 145. 42. Ibid., 67, 75, 77, 81, 87, 91–­93, 99, 123. 43. Ibid., 22–­23, 31, 51. 44. U.S. Congress, Senate Subcommittee on Communications of the Committee on Commerce, Community Antenna Television Problems, 92nd Cong., 1st sess., June 15, 1971, 83, 85. 45. Ibid., 93. 46. Charles Tate, ed. Cable Television in the Cities: Community Control, Public Access, and Minority Ownership (Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 1971), 17. 47. Ibid., 87. 48. Ibid., 89 (emphasis in original). 49. Comments of BEST, Black Efforts for Soul in Television, on the Commission’s Proposals for CATV Public Dividend Plan before the Federal Communications Commission, October 22, 1970, Docket No. 18397-­A, Vol. 3, p. 5, Group 173, National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 50. Johnson, “The Public Interest and Public Broadcasting,” 482–­483. 51. Comments of BEST, 5. 52. Bishetta Dionne Merritt, “A Historical-­ Critical Study of the Pressure Group in Broadcasting—­Black Efforts for Soul in Television” (Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 1974), 103. 53. Comments of BEST, 10, 12. 54. Official Report of Proceedings before the Federal Communications Commission, Washington, DC, March 11, 1971, Docket No. 18397-­A, Vol. 10, pp. 10, 18, Record Group 173, National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 55. Ibid., 48, 53. 56. Ralph Engelman, Public Radio and Television in America: A Political History (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1996), 219–­235. 57. The FCC cited the task force’s recommendation to set aside channels for public use in U.S., Federal Communications Commission, Notice of Proposed Rulemaking and Notice of Inquiry, 418.

214

NOTES TO PAGES 128–135

58. New York Mayor’s Advisory Task Force on CATV and Telecommunications, A Report on Cable Television and Telecommunications in New York City (New York: Mayor’s Advisory Task Force, 1968), 2. 59. Fred W. Friendly, Due to Circumstances Beyond My Control (New York: Random House, 1967), 266, 268, 272. 60. Ibid., 274, 295–­296. 61. Ralph Engelman, Friendlyvision: Fred Friendly and the Rise and Fall of Television Journalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 5, 234, 252. 62. Ibid., 239–­240. 63. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Public Television Act of 1967, 90th Cong., 1st sess., July 11–­­14, 17–­21, 1967, 408. 64. Fred Friendly Papers, 1917–­2004, box 196, Folder 1, Columbia University Libraries, Archival Collections. 65. Ibid. 66. These were the only task force meetings devoted to cable television. The task force held other hearings regarding the problems of TV reception during the building of the World Trade Center. 67. Ibid. 68. New York Mayor’s Advisory Task Force, A Report on Cable Television, 8. 69. Ibid., 1–­6, 58, 63, 70–­72. 70. Ibid., 48. 71. Robert E. Dallos, “Advisers Propose More CATV in City,” New York Times, September 19, 1968. 72. Fred Ferretti, “City Delays Its Decision on CATV Policy,” New York Times, July 24, 1970. 73. “Statement of Fred Friendly to the Board of Estimate, July 23, 1970,” Fred Friendly Papers, 1917–­2004, box 196, Folder 9, Columbia University Libraries, Archival Collections. 74. Thomas Freebairn, “Public Access in New York City: An Interview with Theadora Sklover,” Yale Review of Law and Social Action 2, no. 3 (1972): 227–­237; Linda Wolfe, “Theodora Sklover Dreamed Grandly,” New York Magazine, October 12, 1992, 47–­48, 52–­55. 75. Theadora Sklover, “CATV,” Radical Software 1, no. 1 (1970): 1–­2. 76. Freebairn, “Public Access in New York City,” 230. 77. MITRE Corporation, Symposium on Urban Cable Television, Vol. 2 (McLean, VA: MITRE Corporation, 1972), 202–­203. 78. Ibid., 202–­205, 209–­210, 229. 79. Ibid., 206–­208. 80. Ibid., 211. 81. For an analysis of George Stoney’s work in Canada and the founding of AMC see Ralph Engelman, Public Radio and Television in America: A Political History (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996), 219–­245. 82. MITRE Corporation, Symposium on Urban Cable Television, 185, 212. 83. Ibid., 238–­239, 242. 84. Ibid., 202–­210, 229. 85. Monroe Rifkin, interview by Jim Keller, May 13, 1998, Hauser Oral and Video History Project, The Cable Center, Denver, Colorado, http://​cablecenter​.org/​r​-­­listings/​monroe​ -­­rifkin​.html. 86. Alternate Media Center and American Television and Communications Corporation, A Story About People (New York: Alternate Media Center and American Television and Communications Corporation, 1972).



NOTES TO PAGES 136–143

215

87. Mitchell L. Moss, Two-­Way Cable Television: An Evaluation of Community Uses in Reading, Pennsylvania, Summary (New York: NYU-­Reading Consortium, 1978), i–­v, 1–­25. 88. Ibid., 27. CHAPTER 5  BLUE SKIES, BLACK CULTURES

1. Ralph Lee Smith, “The Wired Nation,” The Nation, May 18, 1970, 582, 586, 606. 2. Ibid. 3. Ralph Lee Smith, The Wired Nation: Cable TV: The Electronic Communications Highway (New York: Harper & Row, 1972). 4. Megan Mullen, The Rise of Cable Programming in the United States: Revolution or Evolution? (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 1; Sarah Banet-­Weiser, Cynthia Chris, and Anthony Freitas, eds., Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 11–­12. 5. Though often called “riots,” I use the term “race rebellions” to foreground the contexts of racism and economic marginalization that precipitated these violent protests. 6. Daedalus 94, no. 4 (1965); Daedalus 5, no. 1 (1966). 7. Quote from the back cover of the paperback edition. See Talcott Parsons and Kenneth B. Clark, eds., The Negro American (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967). 8. Lyndon B. Johnson, “Foreword,” in The Negro American, ed. Parsons and Clark, vi. 9. Talcott Parsons, “Why ‘Freedom Now,’ Not Yesterday?” in The Negro American, ed. Parsons and Clark, xix–­xxviii. 10. Talcott Parsons, “Notes from the Academy: Transcript of the American Academy Conference on the Negro American—­May 14–­­15, 1965,” Daedalus, 5, no. 1 (1966): 352. 11. Parsons, “Why ‘Freedom Now,’ Not Yesterday?,” xxvii, xxv. 12. Kenneth B. Clark, “Introduction: The Dilemma of Power,” in The Negro American, ed. Parsons and Clark, xv. For a discussion of Clark’s perceptions about power, and his framing of racism in America as “internal colonialism,” see Damon Freeman, “Kenneth B. Clark and the Problem of Power,” Patterns of Prejudice 42, nos. 4–­5 (2008): 413–­437. 13. Ellison was probably referring to Moynihan’s work on the Negro family and Glazer and Moynihan’s collaborative work. For Moynihan’s influential 1965 U.S. Labor Department report that largely blamed Black poverty on the “deteriorating Negro family,” see Daniel P. Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1965). For how this report represented a “broad consensus on the American left, subscribed to by liberals, social democrats, and grassroots antipoverty activists alike,” see Marisa Chappell, The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty, and Politics in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 2. For Glazer and Moynihan’s most influential collaborative work see Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970). 14. Parsons, “Notes from the Academy,” 408, 435, 436, 438. 15. Tom Wicker, introduction to Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York: Bantam Books, 1968), vi. 16. National Advisory Commission, Report, 6, 284, 286, 288. 17. Statement of Kenneth Clark, Civil Rights during the Johnson Administration, 1963–­1969, Part V: Records of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, Reel 3, Commission Meetings, Box 3, Commission Meetings, September 13, 1967, Lyndon Baynes Johnson Presidential Library.

216

NOTES TO PAGES 143–150

18. Smith, “The Wired Nation,” 602. Electronic Industries Association, Industrial Electronic Division, Ad Hoc Committee, “The IED/EIA Response to the Federal Communications Commission Docket 18397, Part V,” The Future of Broadband Communications, October 29, 1969 (Washington, DC: Electronic Industries Association, Industrial Electronics Division, 1969), 3. 19. Electronics Industries Association, The Future of Broadband Communications, 1–­2, 3, 4, 5, 10–­11, 12–­13, 23. 20. Ibid. 21. H. S. Dordick, L. G. Chesler, S. I. Firstman, and R. Bretz, Telecommunications in Urban Development (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1969), iii, v, vi. 22. Ibid., v, 7, 80–­81, 84–­85, 123, 125. 23. U.S. Federal Communications Commission, Notice of Proposed Rule Making and of Inquiry, reprinted in Federal Communications Commission Reports, Vol. 23, 2nd ser., 833–­839 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1970). 24. U.S. Congress, Senate Subcommittee on Communications of the Committee on Commerce, Community Antenna Television Problems, 92nd Cong., 1st sess., June 15, 1971, 42. 25. U.S. Federal Communications Commission, Cable Television Report and Order: and Reconsideration of Cable Television Report and Order (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1972), paragraph 100. When existing cable operators complained about the cost of retrofitting their systems for non-­voice, two-­way capacity in 1975 the FCC required only new systems to build this two-­way capacity. See Broadcasting, July, 14, 1975. 26. Cable Television Information Center, Survey of Two-­ Way Cable Television Testbeds (Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 1974). 27. Cable Television Information Center, Social Services and Cable TV (Washington, DC: Cable Television Information Center, 1976), Introduction, Chapter III (1–­3). The other two grants went to New York University for interactive experiments with senior citizens in Reading, Pennsylvania, and Michigan State University for a system designed to train firefighters in Rockford, Illinois. 28. Betsy Wakefield Teter, ed., Textile Town: Spartanburg County, South Carolina (Spartanburg, SC: Hub City Writers Project, 2002). 29. William A. Lucas, Karen A. Heald, and Judith S. Bazemore, The Spartanburg Interactive Cable Experiments in Home Education (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1979). 30. Sue E. Berryman, Tora K. Bikson, and Judith S. Bazemore, Cable, Two-­Way Video, and Educational Programming: the Case of Daycare (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1978), v–­viii. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., vi. 33. Ibid., 51–­69. 34. Ibid., 50. 35. Ibid., vi, 18–­26, 31, 74–­77. 36. Ibid. 37. Dean J. Kotlowski, Nixon’s Civil Rights: Politics, Principle, and Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 129, 131, 135, 136, 148. 38. “Cable TV Resource Center Starts in D.C.,” Afro-­American, March 24, 1973, 9. 39. “Booker T. Washington Foundation Names Tate President and CEO,” Washington Informer (Washington, DC), October 21, 1987, 4. 40. Charles Tate, A Survey of the Conceptual Origins of Black Economic Development and a Review of Residual and Contemporary Forms (Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 1969), 11. 41. Ibid., 30.



NOTES TO PAGES 150–157

217

42. Ibid., 24. 43. For an analysis of this model and its failure in Cleveland see Nishani Frazier, “A McDonald’s That Reflects the Soul of a People: Hugh Area Development Corporation and Community Development in Cleveland,” in The Business of Black Power: Community Development, Capitalism, and Corporate Responsibility in Postwar America, ed. Laura Warren Hill and Julia Rabig (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2012), 68–­94. 44. Tate, A Survey of the Conceptual Origins of Black Economic Development, 25–­34. 45. Ibid. 46. “Insiders’ Watts,” Newsweek, May 1, 1967. 47. Jack Jones, “Creativity Blooms at New Watts Center,” Los Angeles Times, January 4, 1971, B1. 48. MITRE Corporation, Symposium on Urban Cable Television, Vol. 2 (McLean, VA: MITRE Corporation, 1972), 315. 49. Robert Warren, ed., The Wired City of Los Angeles: Papers and Discussions from a Seminar on Urban Cable Television (Los Angeles: Center for Urban Affairs, University of Southern California, 1972), 80. 50. Watts Communications Bureau, “An Application to the City of Los Angeles for a Franchise to Install and Operate a Community Antenna Television System in the Los Angeles Basin,” August 18, 1971, City Council File 71–­2558, Los Angeles City Archives and Records Center, Los Angeles, CA, Appendix D. 51. Warren, The Wired City, 81. 52. Watts Communications Bureau, “An Application to the City of Los Angeles,” 1. 53. Ibid., Appendix D. 54. “Cable Group Expects 2 L.A. Franchises,” Baltimore Afro-­American, November 24, 1973, 6; Molly Hennessy-­Fiske, “Ujima Village, a Onetime Urban Oasis, Closes Down,” Los Angeles Times, April 17, 2009, http://​articles​.latimes​.com/​2009/​apr/​17/​local/​me​ -­­outthere17. 55. MITRE Corporation, Symposium on Urban Cable Television, 316; “Cable Group Expects 2 L.A. Franchises,” 6. Also expressing frustration with the City of Los Angeles franchising process was another Black-­owned cable venture called Holoband Telecommunications. In 1974 Theodore Eagans, an administrator at the Cable Television Information Center in Washington, DC, led a group including former state assemblyman Frank Hollamand, South Central youth development organizer Marilyn McKnight, and other Black investors outside the Los Angeles area. But the city of Los Angeles delayed the franchising process so long that, as Eagan recalled, investors “just lost interest.” See Nick Brown, “Time Is Running Out for Black Cable TV,” Los Angeles Sentinel, August 7, 1980, A3. 56. “Minority Ownership Quadruples Strength,” Cablelines, March 1974, 9. 57. Clinton E. Galloway, Anatomy of a Hustle: Cable Comes to South Central L.A. (Carlsbad, CA: Phoenix Publishing, 2012). 58. Glenn Bunting, “Bishop Brookins’ Ties to Cable Franchise Detailed,” Los Angeles Times, March 25, 2990, A1A. 59. Kenneth Miller, “Cable TV Franchise Awarded,” Los Angeles Sentinel, September 15, 1983, A1. 60. For another account about the Galloway’s difficulty see Thomas W. Hazlett, “Pain and Cable,” Reason 23, no. 2 (1991): 24–­29. 61. Bonnie Macaulay, “Cable TV: Prime Time All the Time?,” Dayton USA 8, no. 3 (1972), 22–­25, 38; Jim Bland, “Single Cable TV Net Urged,” Dayton Journal Herald, June 10, 1971.

218

NOTES TO PAGES 157–163

62. L. L. Johnson, W. S. Baer, R. Bretz, D. Camph, N. E. Feldman, E. E. Park, R. K. Yin, Cable Communications in the Dayton Miami Valley: Basic Report (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1972), section 1, p. 21, section 9, pp. 1, 2, 24. 63. For more on RAND and its work in cable television see Jennifer S. Light, From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2003). 64. Johnson et al., Cable Communications in the Dayton Miami Valley, section 4, p. 38, section 5, pp. 1, 17–­22, section 6 p. 2, section 10, 8–­9. 65. Warren, ed., The Wired City of Los Angeles, 40, 92, 95–­96. 66. For more on the Model Cities Program in Dayton see Marshall Kaplan, Gans, and Kahn, The Model Cities Program: The Planning Process in Atlanta, Seattle, and Dayton (New York: Praeger, 1970), 66–­98. 67. Jeff Scott, “Blacks Say Views Not Sought on Cable TV Documents,” Dayton Daily News, July 25, 1972, second section, 23. 68. “Blacks and the Cable,” Dayton Journal Herald, February 21, 1973. 69. Jeff Scott, “Promises Stand, CATV Firm Says,” Dayton Daily News, November 15, 1972. 70. Marc B. Nathanson, “Cypress News Release: Dayton Black Leaders Agree on Joint Ownership of Model Cable TV System with Cypress Communications Corporation,” May 4, 1972 (in author’s possession); Patrick R. Parsons, Blue Skies: A History of Cable Television (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), 279. 71. “Cypress Applies for Franchise,” Wall Street Journal, July 7, 1971, 12. Burt Harris, interview by Robert Allen, February 5, 1990, Hauser Oral and Video History Project, The Cable Center, Denver, Colorado, http://​cablecenter​.org/​h​-­­listings/​burt​-­­harris​.html. 72. Jeff Scott, “Business Basis of Black-­White TV Deal,” Dayton Daily News, May 7, 1972. 73. Ibid. 74. William Hershey, “2 Cable TV Firms to Ask Time to Raise Financing,” Dayton Daily News, January 2, 1974. 75. Scott Herron, “City Official Denies Cable TV Race Bias,” Dayton Journal Herald, October 7, 1980. 76. Marion Hayes Hull, “Economic Potential for Minorities—­Obstacles and Opportunities,” in The Cable/Broadband Communications Book, 1977–­1978, ed. Mary Louise Hollowell (Washington, DC: Communications Press, 1977), 80. 77. Pamela Douglas, “Gary, Ind., Hosts 1st Black Cable TV,” Chicago Defender, March 24, 1973, 24. 78. “Second Cable TV Franchise Ok’d,” Gary Post-­Tribune, October 11, 1972; “Cable TV Firm Says Order Void,” Gary Post-­Tribune, September 28, 1973. 79. “Cable TV Work Accord Indicated,” Gary Post-­Tribune, June 10, 1974; John Lewis, “Where Blacks Stand Out Today on Television Ownership,” Baltimore Afro-­American, January 19, 1974, 1. 80. Ed Zuckerman, “GCG Loan Plea Sparks Brouhaha in Washington,” Gary Post-­Tribune, March 14, 1976. 81. Gary Communications Group Press Kit, Calumet Regional Archives, Indiana University Northwest Library, Gary, IN. 82. Ntongela Masilela, “The Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers,” in Black American Cinema, ed. Manthia Diawara (New York: Routledge, 1993), 107–­117. 83. For a discussion of the Third Cinema Movement see Jim Pines and Paul Willemen, eds., Questions of Third Cinema (London: BFI Publishing, 1989). 84. For an excellent study of the rise and fall of Black public affairs programming see Devorah Heitner, Black Power TV (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013).



NOTES TO PAGES 165–172

219

85. Adam Green, Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 10, 13–­15. 86. Gary Communications Group Press Kit, Calumet Regional Archives, Indiana University Northwest Library, Gary, IN. 87. Ibid. 88. Ibid.; “Local Cable TV 1st Show on Sunday,” Gary Post-­Tribune, March 30, 1974. The latter mentions that while the GCG had aired specials and local sports on its local cable channel, it wasn’t until March 1974 that it debuted a regularly scheduled program, which was a weekly news program hosted by local author and historian Dharathula “Dolly” Millender. The first program engaged in a discussion of the recent National Black Political Convention in Little Rock, Arkansas. 89. Parsons, Blue Skies, 363. 90. Charles D. Ferris, “The FCC Takes a Hard Look at Television,” Today’s Education 69, no. 3 (1980): 67. 91. “The National Urban League Conference ’81: Race and the Media in the 80s,” Portland [OR] Skanner, July 29, 1981, 1. 92. U.S. Congress, House Subcommittee on Telecommunications, Consumer Protection, and Finance of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, Parity for Minorities in the Media, 98th Cong., 1st sess., June 6, 1983, 1, 3. 93. U.S. Congress, House Subcommittee on Telecommunications, Consumer Protection, and Finance of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, Minority Participation in the Media, 98th Cong., 1st sess., September 19 and 23, 1983, 247–­249. 94. David Waterman and Andrew A. Weiss, Vertical Integration in Cable Television (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). 95. Beretta E. Smith-­ Shomade, Pimpin’ Ain’t Easy: Selling Black Entertainment Television (New York: Routledge, 2007). The second cable network to focus on Black-­oriented programming was TV One, which began on January 19, 2004. EPILOGUE: NEUTRALITY, CONNECTIVITY, OR EQUALITY WHEN MEDIA CONVERGE

1. This is the term used by the incoming CEO of the MMTC, Kim Keenan, in response to President Barak Obama’s supporting net neutrality. See Marcella Gadson, “Statement of MMTC on the President’s Open Internet Announcement,” November 10, 2014, http://​mmtconline​.org/​wp​-­­content/​uploads/​2014/​11/​MMTC​-­­Statement​-­­President​-­­Net​ -­­Neutrality​-­­1110142​.pdf. 2. Tim Wu, “Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination,” Journal of Telecommunication and High Tech Law 2 (2003): 142. 3. Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010). 4. Wu’s work can also be viewed within an influential trajectory of thinking about the centrality of the Internet to freedom and innovation from Yochai Benkler’s theory of communications layers (physical infrastructure layer, software layer, and content layer), to Lawrence Lessig’s theory of creative commons. Wu studied under Lessig. See Yochai Benkler, “From Consumers to Users: Shifting the Deeper Structures of Regulation,” Federal Communications Law Journal 52 (2000): 561–­579; Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World (New York: Vintage, 2002). 5. Ibid., 27­–­29.

220

NOTES TO PAGES 173–179

6. Joseph A. Schumpeter, The Theory of Economic Development, (New Brunswick: NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1983), 10, 21. Italics in original. 7. Wu, The Master Switch, 38, 39, 40, 41, 139, 155. 8. Ibid., 208. 9. Ibid., 212, 215. 10. For a critique of HBO’s prestige status and examination of its attempts to reach Latina/o viewers see Katynka Z. Martinez, “Monolingualism, Biculturalism, and Cable TV: HBO Latino and the Promise of the Multiplex,” in Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting, ed. Sarah Banet-­Weiser, Cynthia Chris, and Anthony Freitas (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 194–­214. For a critique of the aesthetic valuation of premium cable programming and its place in legitimating class and gender hierarchies see Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine, Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status (New York: Routledge, 2012). 11. Wu, The Master Switch, 299–­300. 12. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, with a new introduction by Tom Bottomore (1950; New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 4, 253. 13. Ibid., 257, 258, 260, 263. 14. Ibid., 244, 269, 284–­285, 290, 294–­295. 15. Wu, The Master Switch, 304 (emphasis in original). 16. Ibid., 304, 305, 315. 17. For the decision of U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia see TV 9, Inc. v. FCC, 1973. For Honig’s account of FCC policies on minority ownership and the emergence of civil rights media organizations see David Honig, “The FCC and Its Fluctuating Commitment to Minority Ownership of Broadcast Facilities,” Howard Law Journal 27 (1985): 859–­877. In 2015 MMTC was renamed Multicultural Telecom and Internet Council. 18. Kofi Asiedu Ofori and Mark Lloyd, “The Value of the Tax Certificate,” Federal Communications Law Journal 51 (1999): 693–­711. 19. Patricia J. Williams, “Metro Broadcasting, Inc. v. FCC: Regrouping in Singular Times,” in Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, ed. Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas (New York: New Press, 1995), 191–­200; Robert Horwitz, “On Media Concentration and the Diversity Question.” The Information Society 21 (2005): 181–­204. 20. Bill McConnell, “The Greening of the MMTC,” Broadcasting & Cable 132, no. 37 (2002): 26. 21. David Honig and Nicol Turner-­Lee, Refocussing Broadband Policy: The New Opportunity Agenda for People of Color (Washington, DC: Minority Media and Telecommunications Council, 2013), 3, 9, italics in original, http://mmtconline.org/wp-content/ uploads/2013/11/Refocusing-Broadband-Policy-112113.pdf. 22. Maeve Duggan and Aaron Smith, Cell Internet Use 2013 (Washington, DC: Pew Internet & American Life Project, 2013), http://​www​.pewInternet​.org/​Reports/​2013/​Cell​ -­­Internet/​Summary​-­­of​-­­Findings​.aspx. 23. Honig and Turner, Refocussing Broadband Policy, 5, 16, 17, 18, 20. 24. Ibid., 14. 25. Comments of the National Minority Organizations before the Federal Communications Commission, GN Docket No. 14–­28, 10–­127, July 18, 2014, 9, http://​mmtconline​ .org/​ w p​ -c ­­ ontent/​ u ploads/​ 2 014/​0 7/​ N atl​ -­­M inority​-­­O rgs​-­­O pen​ -­­I nternet​-­­C omments​ -­­071814​.pdf. 26. Ibid.; for Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 see Telecommunications Act Pub. L. No. 104–­104, § 706(a), 110 Stat. 56, 153.



NOTES TO PAGES 180–188

221

27. For an example of this race-­neutral conception of innovation see Barbara van Schewick, Internet Architecture and Innovation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012). For a critique of van Schewick’s race neutrality see John McMurria, “From Net Neutrality to Net Equality,” International Journal of Communication 10 (2016): 1–18. For a critique of race-­neutral thinking in media ownership debates see John McMurria, “Citizenship and Media Ownership,” in International Encyclopedia of Media Studies, Vol. 2, ed. Vicki Mayer (Malden, MA: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2012), 126–­148. 28. For example, organizations representing people of color that supported net neutrality include the National Hispanic Media Coalition, colorofchange​.org, and Black Agenda Report. For an assessment of the points of connection and division among organizations representing people of color see McMurria, “From Net Neutrality to Net Equality.” 29. For recent scholarship on new media distribution see Michael Curtin, Jennifer Holt, and Kevin Sanson, eds., Distribution Revolution: Conversations about the Digital Future of Film and Television (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). For work focused on transformations in business strategies, content forms, and user practices see Jennifer Holt and Kevin Sanson, eds., Connected Viewing: Selling, Streaming, and Sharing Media in the Digital Era (New York: Routledge, 2014). 30. Peter Dahlgren, Media and Political Engagement: Citizens, Communication, and Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 66. 31. Ibid., 104, 108–­122. 32. Ibid., 16–­17, 76–­77, 124. 33. Ibid., 126, 138, 142. 34. Ibid., 132, 145–­146, 171. 35. Quoted at ibid., 201. 36. Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in Networked Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2013), xiii–­xiv, 29. 37. Ibid., 2, 5–­8, 27. 38. Ibid., xiii, 52–­65, 197–­218. 39. Ibid., 65, 203. 40. Ibid., 171. 41. Ibid., 54, 188, 193–­194. 42. Helen Young, “Race in Online Fantasy Fandom: Whiteness on Westeros​.org,” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 28, no. 5 (2014): 737–­747. 43. Lisa Nakamura, “’It’s a Nigger in Here! Kill the Nigger!: User-­Generated Media Campaigns against Racism, Sexism, and Homophobia in Digital Games,” in The International Encyclopedia of Media Studies, Vol. 6: Media Studies Futures, ed. Kelly Gates (London: Blackwell Publishing, 2013), 3, 4. For a critique of the Eurocentric design features of online role-­playing games see Tanner Higgin, “Blackless Fantasy: The Disappearance of Race in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-­Playing Games,” Games and Culture 3, no. 1 (2009): 3–­26. For an analysis of the ways in which women of color have negotiated racism and sexism in Xbox Live see Koshonna L. Gray, “Intersecting Oppressions and Online Communities: Examining the Experiences of Women of Color in Xbox Live,” Information, Communication, and Society 15, no. 3 (April 2012): 411–­428. 44. Jessie Daniels, “Race and Racism in Internet Studies: A Review and Critique,” New Media and Society 15, no. 5 (2012): 708, 711. 45. Benjamin Arditi, “Disagreement without Reconciliation: Democracy, Equality and the Public Realm,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 12, no. 2 (June 2009): 176.

222

NOTES TO PAGES 188–190

46. Nicky Wolf, “Facebook Bus Drivers Join Teamsters to Protest against Working Conditions,” The Guardian, November 20, 2014. 47. For an assessment of neoliberalism and cultural politics see Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003). For an analysis of the ways in which reality TV solicits neoliberal ways of life, including to take responsibility for oneself and aspire for a commodity-­driven lifestyle, see Laurie Ouellette and James Hay, Better Living Through Reality TV: Television and Post-­Welfare Citizenship (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008). 48. Des Freedman, The Politics of Media Policy (Cambridge: Polity, 2008). 49. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 10. 50. Dahlgren, Media and Political Engagement, 20–­21.

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Warner, W. Lloyd, Robert J. Havighurst, and Martin B. Loeb. Who Shall Be Educated?: The Challenge of Unequal Opportunities. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1944. Warner, W. Lloyd, and Josiah Orne Low. The Social System of a Modern Factory. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1947. Warner, W. Lloyd, and Paul S. Lunt. The Status System of a Modern Community. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1942. Warren, Robert, ed. The Wired City of Los Angeles: Papers and Discussions from a Seminar on Urban Cable Television. Los Angeles, CA: Center for Urban Affairs, University of Southern California, 1972. Waterman, David, and Andrew A. Weiss. Vertical Integration in Cable Television. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997. West, James. Plainville, USA. New York: Columbia University Press, 1946. Westbrook, Robert B. John Dewey and American Democracy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. White, David M. “Mass Culture in America: Another Point of View.” In Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, edited by Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, 13–­21. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1957. White, Kristin Kate. “Training a Nation: The General Federation of Women’s Clubs’ Rhetorical Education and American Citizenship, 1890–­1930.” Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 2010. White, Llewellyn. The American Radio. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947. Wicker, Tom. “Introduction.” In Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, v–­xi. New York: Bantam Books, 1968. Williams, Patricia J. “Metro Broadcasting, Inc. v. FCC: Regrouping in Singular Times.” In Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, edited by Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas, 191–­200. New York: New Press, 1995. Wilson, John. Playing by the Rules: Sport, Society, and the State. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1994. Wilson, Pamela. “NBC Television’s ‘Operation Frontol Lobes’: Cultural Hegemony and Fifties Program Planning.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio & Television 15, no. 1 (1995): 83–­105. Wood, Mary. Just Lucky, I Guess. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1967. Wu, Tim. “Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination.” Journal of Telecommunication and High Tech Law 2 (2003): 141–­179. Young, Helen. “Race in Online Fantasy Fandom: Whiteness on Westeros​.org.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 28, no. 5 (2014): 737–­747. Zeigler, L. Harmon. The Politics of Small Business. Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1961.

INDEX

The letter i following a page number denotes an image. ABC network, 81, 99 adult education, 42–­48, 197n35 advertising (commercials) and sponsors: aesthetic judgments and, 2; corporations and, 23, 24–­25; FCC and, 80–­81; hierarchical judgments and, 174; innovation and, 173; local expression versus cable and, 66, 77–­92, 203n46, 205n60, 205nn60,67; local radio and, 204n57; masses, so-­called, and, 92; network broadcasts and, 201n6; news and, 81–­82; pay versus broadcast TV and, 99, 107–­108; public service versus, 37; scientific studies and, 81; soap operas and, 46, 48; studies of, 45–­47; VHF and, 35. See also commercialism; commercially sponsored programming; pay-­TV versus free broadcast television; sustaining versus commercially sponsored programming aesthetic judgments: advertising and, 2; Black-­owned cable and, 33; cable programming and, 220n10; color TV and, 54–­55; consumer choice and, 29–­32; crime shows and, 55–­56; entitlement claims and, 17–­18; FCC and, 2, 52, 60–­61; masses, so-­called, and, 17, 89–­90; net neutrality and, 172; pay versus free TV and, 88, 95; the public interest and public service programming and, 38; Ranciére on, 16; rural populations and, 84; soap operas and, 16, 24, 30, 31, 36, 59, 60; social science and, 1–­3, 23–­24, 42, 89–­91. See also cultural and educational hierarchies; entertainment; leisure-­time entitlement; music, classical; performing arts affiliates, see network-­affiliated broadcast stations African Americans: ADA and, 104; Blue Skies period and, 138–­139; branded cable networks and, 31; case studies of, 152–­169; cell phone/Internet users, 178; discussion programs and, 219n88; FCC and, 18–­19, 28, 49–­50, 144–­145; in Flint, Michigan,

133; local contexts and, 49, 113; method of equality and, 26–­28; Nixon and, 141–­142, 148–­149; performing arts and, 99; pluralism and, 20, 139–­141, 144, 149–­50; RAND report and, 144, 148; science and, 91, 138–­143; socioeconomic factors and, 110, 150–­151; Spartanburg experiment and, 146; stability/instability and, 8, 25–­26; two-­way cable and, 144–­145; UHF station owners and, 71–­72; wealth disparities and, 178; working-­class culture and politics and, 4, 141. See also Black cable ownership; civil rights activists; civil rights legislation; jazz; Johnson, Lyndon; marginalized (disenfranchised) people; music, Black commercial; race and ethnic exclusions (racism) Agard, Walter R., 59 Alabama Educational Television Commission, 127 alienation, 18, 112, 117–­127, 134, 138, 151 Allentown, Pennsylvania, 67 Allerton House Seminar, 58–­59 Almond, Gabriel, 11, 114–­115; The Civic Culture (with Verba), 112, 114–­115 Alternate Media Center (AMC), 134–­135, 136 Althusser, Louis, 13–­14 American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 138, 139–­143. See also Daedalus American Cable Systems (ACS), 155, 156 American forum movement, 197n35 Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), 19, 100, 101–­102, 104, 209nn55,56 American Television Communications, 159 American Television Corporation, 135 American way of life, 73, 74 America’s Town Meeting of the Air (NBC), 42–­43 AM/FM radio, 53, 199n76 Anderson, Chris, 29 Anderson, Herbert C., 73 Anderson, William, 71

237

2 3 8 I ndex

antenna systems, 3, 17, 34, 82, 201n1, 202n7, 204n47, 205n68. See also booster systems anthropology, 202n18 anti-­siphoning rules, 87 Apocalypse (cable program), 133 Apple Computer, 176 Arditi, Benjamin, 188 Armendaris, Alex, 167 Arrow Electronics and Construction, 162 Asians, 99, 186 assimilation/acculturation/integration and white, middle-­class normativity: Black economic development and, 18, 26, 138, 148–­152, 177; civic culture and, 115; community studies and, 70; democratic enfranchisement and, 20; Ebony magazine and, 164–­165; fantasy fandom and, 186; Gary, Indiana, cable and, 167; pluralism and, 13, 19–­20, 142, 149, 153; qualification to participate and, 10–­11; social science and, 6, 141–­142, 144. See also class privilege; cultural and educational hierarchies; hierarchical judgments; masses, so-­called, mass culture and mass media; race and ethnic exclusions (racism); Spartanburg, South Carolina, experiment balance-­wheel system, 37, 38–­52, 46, 52 Baltimore, Maryland, 49–­50, 198n63 Bandura, Albert, 122 Baran, Paul, 21–­22, 193n51; Monopoly Capital (with Sweezy), 21–­22 Bartlesville, Oklahoma, cable pay-­TV trials, 87 Bedford-­Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, 124–­125 behavioral science, see social and behavioral sciences Bell, Derrick, Race, Racism, and American Law, 26 Bell telephone system, 176 Bennett, Tony, 24 Bennet-­Weiser, Sarah, 30 Bentley, Arthur, 7, 8 Berelson, Bernard R., Voting: A Study of Opinion Formation in a Presidential Campaign (with Lazarsfeld and McPhee), 211n12 Black Agenda Report, 221n28 Black cable ownership: civic culture versus, 118; civil rights activists and, 18, 26, 112, 118, 124–­125, 134, 136, 138, 139, 148, 149–­152, 159, 167; Dayton, Ohio, case study and, 152, 156–­161; democracy and, 33; determination of economic relations and, 190; economic development and, 153; entitlement claims and, 113; Gary, Indiana, case study and, 161–­167, 219n88; Los Angeles case study and, 152–­156, 217n55; public access cable versus, 19, 125–­126; taxes and, 177. See also property relations; race neutrality Black capitalism, 148–­149, 150–­151 Black Church, 163

Black Efforts for Soul in Television (BEST), 124–­125, 126–­127 Black Entertainment Television (BET), 31, 168, 169, 173 Black film festival, 163, 165–­166 Black Muslim model, 151 Black Power, 150 Black programming, 126, 133, 162–­64, 169, 198n63, 218n84, 219n88 Black Talk (cable program), 133 Bliss, Roy E., 73 Blue Book (The Public Service Responsibilities of Broadcasters) (FCC), 37, 45, 47, 49–­50 Blue Skies period, 136, 137–­169, 177 Boddy, William, 122; “Senator Dodd Goes to Hollywood,” 206n81 Bonilla-­Silva, Eduardo, 186 Booker T. Washington Foundation, 149, 177 booster systems, 17–­18, 66, 78–­79, 82–­86, 83f, 205n69. See also microwave systems Bourdieu, Pierre, 21, 23–­24, 30, 193n56 Bradley, Tom, 155, 156 branded cable networks, 29, 30–­31, 169, 195n79 branded consumer products, 66, 80 branded Internet content, 184 Bravo, 99 Brecher, Edward, 46 Bridgeport, Connecticut, UHF, 71 Britain and United Kingdom, 11, 18–­19, 115, 173, 193n51 Broad, Eli, 155–­156 broadcast television, see cable versus broadcast television; commercially sponsored programming; local expression; masses, so-­called, mass culture and mass media; networks, national broadcast; public broadcast television; UHF (ultra-­high frequencies); VHF (very high frequencies) Brown, Les, 99–­100 Brown, Ronald, 102–­103 Brown, Wendy, Undoing the Demos, 203n35 Bryson, Lyman, 43–­44 Burch, Dean, 102, 145 Burns, Red, 131, 134–­136 Burrell, Berkeley, 167 Burstedt, Adrian, 84 Bushnell, Don, 153, 154 Busse, Fred A., 191n12 Cablecommunications Resource Center, 149, 157, 160, 177 cable operators, 33–­34, 126, 130–­131, 145, 216n25 cable ownership, 111, 131, 134. See also Black cable ownership cable television, 3, 201n1, 204n47. See also Blue Skies period; cable versus broadcast television; interactive (two-­way) cable; local expression; media history; microwave systems; pay-­TV versus free broadcast television; public access cable;

I ndex 2 3 9

qualifications for participation; rural access; urban cable “Cable Television and the Performing Arts” (L. Brown), 99–­100 cable versus broadcast television, 16, 28, 30, 31–­32, 61, 116–­117. See also booster systems; branded cable networks; entitlement claims; local expression; pay-­TV versus free broadcast television California, 95, 97. See also Los Angeles and other locales Cape Cod, Massachusetts, 211n7 capitalism, see Black capitalism; competition; consumer choice; corporations; free markets; Marxism; neoliberalism; property relations; small/independent/local businesses; supply-­and-­demand logics Carnegie Corporation, 43 Carnegie Foundation, 58–­59 Carr, David, “Barely Keeping Up in TV’s New Golden Age,” 195nn80, ­81 Carter, Jimmy, 167 CATV (cable antenna television), 201n1. See also cable television CBS network (radio), 199n83 CBS network (television), 38, 43–­44, 46, 55, 81, 89, 95, 99, 128, 129, 201n6. See also Friendly, Fred cell phone use, 178 censorship, 48, 49, 128 centralization, 176 chain broadcasting, 38–­39, 77 chain retailing, 79–­80 Chambers, Samuel A., 25, 192n33 Chappell, Marisa, The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty, and Politics in Modern America, 215n13 checks and balances, 9–­10, 16, 25, 181 children’s programming, 30, 49, 51, 98, 194n79 Chris, Cynthia, “Discovery’s Wild Discovery,” 194n79 citizens and citizenship: aesthetic judgments and, 45; commercial television and, 182; consumerism and, 30–­31; educated elites and, 10, 53, 81; governmentality and, 24–­25; information and, 115; pluralism and, 4, 20; policy and, 27, 37; science and, 36, 44; stability and, 7. See also Black cable ownership; civic culture; cultural studies; democracy; diversity; equality; interest groups; local expression; masses, so-­called, mass culture and mass media; neoliberalism; passivity; pay-­TV versus free broadcast television; pluralism; public interest and public service programming; qualifications for participation; senior citizens civic culture, 32–­33, 112–­119, 121, 125, 171, 180–­188, 182, 190 civil rights activists, 72, 94, 120–­121, 125–­127, 133, 138, 140–­141, 149, 177, 203n33. See also Black cable ownership; Clark, Kenneth; and other individual activists

civil rights legislation, 18, 94, 179 Clark, Kenneth, 26, 139–­143, 148, 167, 215n12 Classen, Steven, 72 classical music, see music, classical class privilege: aesthetic judgments and, 23–­24, 52, 220n10; community studies and, 68–­71; contemporary television and, 30; education and, 12–­13; FCC and, 49, 54; New Haven study and, 10–­11; participatory apathy and, 182; performing arts and, 94, 96–­97, 98; pluralism and, 19; qualification to participate and, 9, 11, 190; race rebellions and, 148; “spreadable media” and, 187. See also assimilation/acculturation/integration and white, middle-­class normativity; educated elites (experts) versus common people; soap operas; Spartanburg, South Carolina, experiment; working class Cleveland, Ohio, 150–­151, 217n43 Cleveland Radio Council, 54 Cold War fears (of authoritarianism, communism, fascism, and totalitarianism), 20, 25, 41, 43, 73, 75, 100, 101–­102, 119, 193n46 Collins, Cardiss, 168–­169 colorofchange.org, 221n28 color television, 54–­55, 60 Columbia University, 41–­42, 57, 129, 150 commercialism, 47, 99–­100, 134, 173–­174, 182, 184. See also advertising (commercials) and sponsors; sustaining versus commercially sponsored programming commercially sponsored programming: affiliates and, 66, 78, 201n6; alienation and, 112; audience taste and, 2; civic participation and, 182–­183; corporations and, 23, 24–­25, 80; delivery function versus, 102; education and, 122–­123, 128–­129; FCC and, 45–­46, 80–­81; hierarchical judgments and, 174; innovation and, 173; local expression versus cable and, 66, 77–­92, 134, 203n46, 205n60,67; performing arts and, 94–­95; radio and, 78, 80, 176, 204n57; scientific studies and, 81; studies of, 45–­47; sustaining versus, 37–­38, 39–­40, 45–­50, 174, 196n19. See also cultural and educational hierarchies; daytime programming; entertainment; free markets; masses, so-­called, mass culture and mass media; networks, national broadcast; news; pay-­TV versus free broadcast television; recreational entitlement; sports; VHF (very high frequencies); working class Commission on Cable Communications (Sloan Foundation), 97–­98 Commission on Freedom of the Press (1947), 37, 50–­51, 122 Committee Against Pay-­to-­See TV, 94 common carrier regulations, 102, 209n55 the commons, 17, 189–­90. See also the public interest and public service programming Communist Party, 13–­14

2 4 0 I ndex

community, 65–­72, 113, 117–­127, 136, 143–­144, 173. See also civic culture; fan communities; local contexts; local expression; local origination; “Wired Ghetto” project Community Action Program (CAP), 112, 117–­119, 120–­121, 134, 136, 212n34 community studies, 67–­72 Community Telecommunications (TCI), 155 competition, 35–­36, 53, 65, 72–­77, 98–­99, 101, 172–­173, 175, 180, 195n10. See also commercially sponsored programming; consumer choice; free markets; supply-­and-­demand logics computers, 143–­144, 168, 176, 178 Concentrated Employment Training Act (1973), 160 Conference of Mayors, 108–­109 conformity, 7, 102, 110, 120. See also standardization Congress of Senior Citizens, 107 consumer choice, 29–­32, 64–­65, 66, 68, 73, 74–­75, 93–­94, 97–­98, 106. See also chain retailing; commercially sponsored programming; competition; free markets; innovation; supply-­and-­demand logics contemporary media, 30–­31, 171, 178, 221n29. See also net neutrality contestations (disputes), see method of equality; race rebellions contradiction (Marxist concept), 22 Cooper, A. J., 108–­109 copyright protections, 126 corporations: African Americans and, 28, 151; Blue Skies period and, 167–­168; citizenship and, 24–­25; civic participation and, 185; communication/community and, 123–­123; community development, 103; democracy and, 190; equality and, 21; FCC and, 23, 39, 77; free markets and, 123–­124; hierarchical judgments and, 22–­23; innovation and, 173; liberal ethos and, 27, 192n18; local contexts and, 80, 111–­112; “long-­tail” theory and, 29; network ownership and, 39; power elites and, 11–­12, 19; public service programming versus, 37; workers and, 4, 119–­20, 205n59; World War II and, 205n59. See also networks, national broadcast counterculture, 33, 112, 118, 123, 213n40 Cox, Kenneth, 95 Cox Cable, 135 Coy, Wayne, 35, 52–­54, 54–­55, 56, 65, 199nn72,73 Craney, Edward, 62, 78 creative destruction, 172–­173 crime shows, 24, 51, 55–­56, 60, 109, 128, 200nn83,85, 208n30 critical political economy, 21–­23 Critical Race Theory (CRT), 21, 26, 194n66 Cromartie, J. E., 157 C-­SPAN, 173 cultural and educational hierarchies: American Association for Adult Education and, 197nn35,41; audience-­participation shows

and, 51–­52; Black cable ownership and, 148–­152; booster antennas and, 17–­18; civic culture and, 115–­116; Community Action Program and, 118–­119; FCC and, 56, 121, 122; interactive cable and, 146–­147, 153; jazz/ soap operas and, 40; masses, so-­called, and, 12–­13, 56–­59, 89–­92, 128–­129, 136, 207n6; news and, 50–­51; pay versus broadcast television and, 110; qualifications to participate and, 9; social science and, 5–­6, 21–­22, 70, 90–­92; two-­way cable and, 153. See also aesthetic judgments; assimilation/acculturation/integration and white, middle-­class normativity; educated elites (experts) versus common people; entertainment; information; performing arts; radio; soap operas cultural studies, 19–­27 Curtin, Michael, 29 cyberculture, 123, 213n40. See also net neutrality Daedalus: The Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 89, 139 Dahl, Robert, 9–­11, 15, 36, 183, 189; A Preface to Democratic Theory, 9 Dahlgren, Peter, 181–­184 Damico, Amy, 21st Century TV Drama (with Quay), 195nn80,81 Damrosch, Walter, 40–­41 Daniels, Jessie, 187 Davis, Ossie, 163, 165–­166 daycare providers, 145–­146 daytime programming, 88, 105. See also soap operas Dayton, Ohio, 149, 156–­161 Dean, Sidney W., 100–­101, 209n56 declassification, 13–­15, 30 De Forest, Lee, 173 Delgado, Richard, Critical Race Theory, 194n66 democracy: Black cable ownership and, 33; as civic and social connectivity, 180–­188; corporations and, 190; entitlement claims and, 31; folklore of, 12; Greek, 15–­16; hierarchical judgments and, 9–­10, 13, 16–­17, 60, 170, 181–­182; information and, 174–­175; media history and, 32; music and, 41–­42; neoliberalism and, 188–­190; pluralism and, 7, 16, 27, 175–­176; policy and, 3; politics and, 170, 192n30; polyarchal, 9–­10, 189; public access cable and, 111–­112; soap operas and, 47; social, 37. See also citizens and citizenship; civic culture; entitlement claims; freedom of the press; masses, so-­called, mass culture and mass media; pay-­TV versus free broadcast television; policy; qualifications for participation; separation of powers; stability/order demos, 15–­16 Denny, George, 42–­43 “Design Studies of Experimental Application of Two-­Way Cable Communications for

I ndex 2 4 1

Urban Social Service Delivery and Administration,” 145 Detroit, Michigan, 144 Dewey, John, 197n35 DiMaggio, Paul, 94, 208n23 discourse theory, 22 Discovery Channel, 173 discursive practices, 21 disenfranchisement, see assimilation/ acculturation/integration and white, middle-­class normativity; marginalized (disenfranchised) people dissensus, 187–­188, 189–­190 diversity, 18–­19, 69, 211n7 Doerling, G. L., 76 Douglas, A. William, 161–­162, 164i Downes, Olin, 41, 49 Dubinsky, David, 101 Dugans, Doyle, 133–­134 Duggan, Lisa, The Twilight of Equality, 222n47 Dullum, Henry, 76 Durr, Clifford, 45–­46 Eagans, Theodore, 217n55 Ebony (magazine), 164–­165 economic development, 26, 112, 148–­152, 153, 190 Economic Development Association (EDA), 162 economic factors, see Black cable ownership; capitalism; commercially sponsored programming; the commons; economic development; economic myths, classical; gift economy; small/independent/local businesses; socioeconomic factors economic myths, classical, 100–­104 economies of scale, 66, 176 Ed Sullivan Show, 95, 97 educated elites (experts) versus common people: civic culture and, 183; democracy and, 175; disputing of, 16–­17; educational TV and, 59, 193n46; FCC and, 50, 122; government intervention and, 27; Internet and, 182; local expression and, 115–­116; media history and, 174; Plato on, 15; public interest and, 2–­3, 45, 54, 60; social science and, 11–­14, 44, 60, 73; stability and, 8–­10, 51. See also cultural and educational hierarchies; hierarchical judgments; leaders, group; masses, so-­called, mass culture and mass media; public discussion programs; social and behavioral sciences; sustaining versus commercially sponsored programming education, 101, 178–­179. See also civic culture; educated elites (experts) versus common people; educational television educational television, 17–­19, 24–­25, 35, 56–­61, 65, 111, 126, 127, 144–­148, 193n46. See also interactive cable; National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB); public broadcast television Electronic Industries Association (EIA), 137, 143–­144

Ellison, Ralph, 26, 141, 148, 167, 215n13 entertainment, 12, 40, 42, 62–­63, 105–­106, 132, 171. See also leisure-­time entitlement; sports entitlement claims, 17–­18, 84, 86, 106, 113, 121. See also leisure-­time entitlement; method of equality equality: Black cable ownership and, 167; Black commercial music and, 164–­165; booster systems and, 86; civic culture/ community and, 113; consumerism versus, 65; contemporary media and, 170–­171, 172; corporations and, 21; dissensus and, 189–­190; FCC pay-­TV authorization and, 88; Greek democracy and, 15–­16; interest groups and, 6–­7; pay versus broadcast television and, 110–­111; performing arts and, 100; pluralism and, 9; power and, 9; qualification to participate and, 190; Ranciére on, 14–­15; social science and, 4–­5, 36, 65–­66, 68; trust of experts and, 182. See also equality/inequality, logics of; marginalized (disenfranchised) people; method of equality; net equality; qualifications for participation; race rebellions; Spartanburg, South Carolina, experiment equality/inequality, logics of, 15–­21, 28, 30, 32, 34–­61, 127, 136, 172, 174–­176. See also hierarchical judgments; method of equality; Ranciére, Jacques E-­rate programs, 178–­179 Erb, Ida B., 1, 2–­3, 16–­17 families, 2, 7, 11, 51, 115, 119, 182, 197n41, 215n13 fan communities, 180–­181, 183–­188, 221n43 farmers, 76–­77, 84–­85, 198n64; radio crime shows and, 200n85 Farrell, Robert, 155 fascism, see Cold War fears (of authoritarianism, communism, fascism, and totalitarianism) FCC (regulations and hearings): advertising and, 80–­81; aesthetic judgments and, 2, 52, 60–­61; African Americans and, 18–­19, 28, 144–­145; antenna systems and, 205n68; booster systems and, 66, 78–­79, 82, 83, 86; civil rights organizations and, 177; color TV and, 54; community and, 121; corporate broadcasters and, 23, 167–­168; culture/ education and, 56, 121, 122; educational television and, 17–­18, 56–­61, 58, 111; free markets and, 102–­103; innovation and, 173; interactive cable and, 145, 216n25; Internet and, 179; local contexts and, 17–­18, 34–­36, 49–­50, 62–­63, 82, 85–­86, 125, 126, 212n19; local expression and, 64–­65, 66, 72–­77, 79, 80–­82, 111–­113, 117–­118; local origination and, 49–­50, 111–­118, 132; logics of inequality and, 17–­18; media history and, 29; method of equality and, 28; minority ownership and, 168, 177–­178; neoliberalism and, 167–­168; net neutrality

2 4 2 I ndex

FCC (regulations and hearings) (continued) and, 171–­172; 1946 study by, 39; 1959 hearing of, 2; pay-­TV versus free broadcast television and, 18, 87–­88, 98, 99, 105–­107, 108, 109, 113–­114; pluralism and, 66; public access cable and, 112, 125, 127–­136, 128; public access versus public ownership and, 126, 127–­136; radio and, 37; rural access and, 62–­86; spectrum policy, 34–­61; sustaining versus commercially sponsored programming and, 45–­50; taxes and, 127, 177; urban cable and, 137–­138, 209n56; U.S. Congress investigations and, 38, 40; Wired Nation and, 137–­138. See also Coy, Wayne, and other commissioners; government (the state); The Public Service Responsibilities of Broadcasters; RAND Corporation; Report on Chain Broadcasting; UHF (ultra-­high frequencies); VHF (very high frequencies) Federal Aviation Agency, 83 Federal Communications Commission, see FCC Federal Forum Project, 42 Federal Writer’s Project, 199n73 Ferris, Charles, 167–­168 First Amendment, 2–­3 Fisher, Ray, 164i Flint, Michigan, 133–­134 Fly, Lawrence, 38, 40, 47, 48, 77 Food Network, 30–­31 Ford, Frederick, 116, 212n19 Ford, Sam, 183–­84 Ford Foundation, 125, 129, 152, 156 Foucault, Michel, 21, 22, 24–­25 France, 13–­15 Frasier, E. Franklin, 150 Frazier, Nishani, 217n43 Freedman, Des, 18–­19, 22 freedom of speech, 169 freedom of the press, 52, 101. See also censorship; news; public discussion programs free markets, 13, 14, 73–­74, 100, 102–­103, 107–­108, 110, 123–­124, 189. See also Blue Skies period; commercially sponsored programming; competition; consumer choice; economic factors; economic myths, classical; neoliberalism; pay-­TV versus free broadcast television; separation of powers Free Press (reform organization), 21 “free” TV, see pay-­TV versus free broadcast television Friendly, Fred, 113, 128–­129, 130–­131, 136, 173, 174 “The Future of Broadband Communications” (Electronic Industries Association), 143–­144 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 101, 123 Galloway, Carl and Clinton, 155 Gary, Indiana, 33, 139, 161–­167

Gary Communications Group (GCG), 161–­169, 164i, 165i, 166i, 219n88 gender privilege, 7–­8, 46–­49, 51, 52, 54, 90–­91, 105, 164i, 185, 197nn35,41, 220n10. See also aesthetic judgments; sexism; Spartanburg, South Carolina, experiment; sports; women Germany, 41, 115 gift economy, 184–­185, 186, 187 Gilded Age, 40 Gillon, Steven, 101–­102 Glazer, Nathan, 141; Beyond the Melting Pot (with Moynihan), 215n13 globalization, 31, 194n79, 195n79. See also Internet golden age of television, 128 Goldsmith, Alfred, 173 Goodman, Paul, 119–­120, 123; Growing Up Absurd, 119–­120 Gordon’s War (film), 166 government (the state), 7, 8, 12, 22, 27, 77, 99, 123, 173. See also FCC; Johnson, Lyndon, and other presidents; policy; U.S. Congress; U.S. Supreme Court governmentality, 24–­25 Gramsci, Antonio, 22 Greek democracy, 15–­16 Green, Adam, 164–­165 Green, Joshua, 183–­184 Gunnell, John G., 191n9 Hall, Stuart, 19–­20 Harrington, Michael, 85 Harris, Abram, 150 Harris, Cheryl, “Whiteness as Property,” 26 Hartford, Connecticut, pay-­TV broadcast trial, 87, 109 Harvey, David, 189 Hatcher, Richard, 161 HBO, 31, 87–­88, 99, 174, 186, 220n10 health, 31, 85, 109, 154, 157, 163, 179, 188 Heitner, Devorah, Black Power TV, 218n84 Hennock, Frieda, 35, 52, 56–­57, 58, 59–­60 Henry, William, 116 heretical histories, 27–­28 Heritage of the Negro (TV series), 166 Herring, Pendleton, 6–­7, 36; The Politics of Democracy, 6–­7 Heston, Charlton, 106 hierarchical judgments: civic culture and, 112, 113; community studies and, 69–­70; conceptual foundations of, 4–­11; contemporary, 30; corporations and, 22–­23; democracy and, 9–­10, 13, 16–­17, 60, 170, 181–­182; liberalism and, 176; local expression versus cable and, 111–­136; marginalized people and, 30; mass culture and, 89; pay versus free TV and, 88, 95–­97; performing arts and, 99; pluralism and, 189; radio and, 173; social sciences and, 4, 60, 65, 90–­92; stability and, 7–­8, 25–­26, 36–­37, 211n12; sustaining programs and, 174;

I ndex 2 4 3

visible/sayable and, 15. See also aesthetic judgments; cultural and educational hierarchies; declassification; educated elites (experts) versus common people; equality/inequality, logics of; masses, so-­called, mass culture and mass media; media history; neoliberalism; neutrality/ objectivity/truth; subjectivation (disputing hierarchical order) highbrow/middlebrow/lowbrow culture, 89–­91. See also assimilation/acculturation/integration and white, middle-­class normativity; cultural and educational hierarchies; equality/inequality, logics of; hierarchical judgments; masses, so-­called, mass culture and mass media Hilmes, Michele, 48 Hoffman, Hallock, 154 Hollamand, Frank, 217n55 Hollywood Quarterly (periodical), 45 Hollywood studios, 87–­88. See also movies Holoband Telecommunications, 217n55 Honig, David, 177, 220n17 Hooks, Benjamin, 167 Hough Model, 150–­151, 155 House Un-­American Activities Committee, 106 Hudson, Robert, 58–­59 Hull, Stewart, 57–­58 Hutchins, Robert, 50 Idaho, 76–­77, 84, 204n53 Igo, Sara, 68 immigrants, 5, 10, 40, 43, 48, 68–­69. See also assimilation/acculturation/integration and white, middle-­class normativity “I’m Not Listening Campaign,” 48 individualism, 102, 188. See also consumer choice information: aesthetic judgments and, 2; cable-­TV and, 137; citizenship and, 115; democracy and, 174–­175, 176; economic myths and, 100–­101; experts and, 135; fees for, 184; “free,” 105; hierarchical judgments and, 81; nonpolitical, 183; on-­line gaming and, 186; soap operas and quiz shows and, 45; two-­way cable and, 168; U.S. Congress and, 208n30; “Wired Nation” and, 143–­144. See also cultural and educational hierarchies; local expression; net neutrality; public interest and public service programming Innis, Roy, 151 innovation, 172–­174, 180, 183–­184, 190, 221n27 Institute for Education by Radio conference, 56, 59 integration, see assimilation/acculturation/integration and white, middle-­class normativity interactive (two-­way) cable, 135–­136, 139, 143–­148, 153, 154–­155, 156, 168, 216nn25,27 interest groups, 4, 6–­7, 13, 36–­37. See also leaders, group

Internet, 30, 31, 169, 170, 178–­179, 180–­188. See also cyberculture; globalization; net equality; net neutrality; social media Janklow, Morton, 125 jazz, 40, 54, 90 Jenkins, Henry, 183–­184 Johnny Gigs Out (film), 152 Johnson, Channing, 155, 156 Johnson, Lyndon, 32–­33, 117, 118, 119, 137, 139, 142, 148. See also National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders; Task Force on Communications Policy; Urban Institute; War on Poverty Johnson, Nicholas, 112, 117, 118, 121–­125, 126, 127, 136; How to Talk Back to Your TV Set, 121–­122; Test Patterns for Living, 122–123 Johnson, Robert L., 168 Kahn, Irving, 126, 131 Kahn, Marshall, and Kaplan, Gans, 218n66 Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgment, 23 Katz, Oscar, 56 Kaufman and Broad (KB), 155–­156 Kelly, Robin, 4 Kennedy, John F., 119 Kennedy, Robert F., 122 Kerner Commission (National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders), 138, 141–­142, 144, 156, 167 Kettering Foundation, 154, 156, 157, 159, 160–­161 Kinder, Marsha, “Ranging with Power on the Fox Kids Network,” 194n79 King, Martin Luther Jr., 122 Kohn, Raymond, 67 land-­grant college radio stations, 57–­58, 59 Lasswell, Harold, 6, 36, 50 Latinas/os, 31, 120–­121, 149, 167, 178, 195n79, 220n10. See also Spanish people Lazarsfeld, Paul, 1–­3, 16, 44–­45, 81, 89, 123; Voting: A Study of Opinion Formation in a Presidential Campaign (with Berelson and McPhee), 211n12 leaders, group, 4–­13, 17, 19, 36–­37, 67. See also civil rights activists; educated elites (experts) versus common people; interest groups League of Cities, 168 Le Bon, Gustave, 174–­175 Ledbetter, Theodore, 125–­127, 157, 164i Leftists, 89, 101. See also New Left leisure-­time entitlement, 17, 24, 40, 84, 86, 106. See also entertainment; sports Levine, Elana, 30 Levine, Lawrence, 40 liberalism, 6, 21, 22, 27, 73, 150–­151, 176, 188, 189. See also Americans for Democratic Action (ADA); democracy; neoliberalism; New Deal liberals; social and behavioral sciences; Tamiment Institute libertarians, 123

2 4 4 I ndex

Light, Jennifer S., From Warfare to Welfare, 218n63 Lindblom, Charles, 189 Lindsay, John, 127–­28 Lipsitz, George, 4; Rainbow at Midnight, 192n18 “Local Cable TV 1st Show on Sunday” (Gary Post-­Tribune), 219n88 local contexts: FCC and, 17–­18, 34–­36, 49–­50, 62–­63, 82, 85–­86, 125, 126, 212n19; land-­grant college radio stations and, 57–­58; news and, 50–­51; pay-­TV versus free broadcast television and, 108–­109; spectrum allocation and, 52–­61. See also community; network-­affiliated broadcast stations; peripheral access; small/independent/local businesses local expression: advertising and, 66, 77–­92, 203n46, 205nn60,67; Blue Skies discourse versus, 153; community and, 65–­72; consumer choice and, 64–­65, 66, 73; Dayton, Ohio, and, 156; educated elites and, 115–­116; FCC and, 64–­65, 66, 72–­77, 79, 80–­82, 111–­113, 117–­118; hierarchical judgments and, 111–­136; neoliberalism and, 66, 72–­76; number of stations and, 204n47; performing arts and, 92–­100; pluralism and, 65–­72, 100–­110; radio advertising and, 204n57; rural populations and, 76–­77; social science and, 112–­113; U.S. Congress and, 65–­66. See also Black cable ownership; booster systems; local contexts; local origination; public access cable; public discussion programs local governments, 66, 79 local origination, 2, 49–­50, 57, 64, 72, 111–­118, 127, 129–­130, 135, 212n19. See also public access cable “long tail,” theory of, 29–­31 Los Angeles, California, 87, 134, 144, 152–­156, 153, 208n36, 217n55 Los Angeles School of Black Film Makers, 163 Lotz, Amanda, 28 low-­income people and poverty, 1; cable costs and, 156; Lasswell on, 6; local radio advertising and, 204n57, 205n60; pay-­TV versus free broadcast television and, 88; racism and, 33. See also class privilege; Community Action Program (CAP); marginalized (disenfranchised) people; masses, so-­called, mass culture and mass media; race and ethnic exclusions (racism) Lynd, Robert and Helen, Middletown, 68; Middletown in Transition, 68 Maccaulay, Bonnie, 156 Macdonald, Dwight, 91, 109–­110; “A Theory of Mass Culture,” 91 Madison, James, 9 Mafundi Institute, 152–­153, 154, 155, 156, 157–­158 Magness, Bob, 73–­74 manufacturers, equipment, 54, 92, 154, 162. See also RCA

manufacturers, pay-­TV device, 92 marginalized (disenfranchised) people: broadband access and, 178; civic culture and, 115; community studies and, 69, 70–­71; equality and, 3; FCC and, 23; Gary, Indiana, cable and, 167; hierarchical judgments and, 30; media history and, 4, 29; ownership opportunities and, 32; pay versus free TV and, 88; pluralism and, 9; public access cable and, 138; social science and, 4, 5–­6, 11; urban cable and, 118. See also African Americans; Community Action Program (CAP); hierarchical judgments; leisure-­time entitlement; masses, so-­called, mass culture and mass media; peripheral access; public access cable; rural access; Spartanburg, South Carolina, experiment; women; working class Marshall, William, 164i, 165 Martin, George R. R., 186 Martinez, Katynka, 31 Marxism, 13–­14, 20, 21–­22, 24, 69, 91, 150, 193n51. See also McChesney, Robert and other Marxists masses, so-­called, mass culture and mass media: Cold War fears and, 119; commercial programming and, 174; competition and, 72–­73; democracy and, 9; Greek democracy and, 15–­16; jazz and, 40; logic of inequality and, 32; marginalization of experts and, 100; Marxism and, 21–­22; media history and, 29; method of equality and, 16–­17; “minority” elites and, 121; pay-­TV versus free broadcast TV and, 32–­33, 92, 95, 98; pluralism and, 36, 88–­92, 102, 183, 189; public interest and, 6, 175; social science and, 5; spectrum allocation and, 60; stability and, 9–­10, 17, 51, 88–­92, 121–­22. See also class privilege; community; cultural and educational hierarchies; equality/ inequality, logics of; hierarchical judgments; local expression; marginalized (disenfranchised) people; public access cable; working class mass media symposium (1959), 89 Mayor’s Advisory Task Force on CATV and Telecommunications (New York City), 127–­128, 129–­131, 214n66 McCarthy, Anna, 24–­25; The Citizen Machine, 193n46 McChesney, Robert, 21, 193n51 Mcdonald, Dwight, 91 McKinney, Sam, 84 McKnight, Marilyn, 217n55 McLaurin, Dunbar S., 151 McLevy, Jasper, 71 McLin, C. J., 157–­58 McLuhan, Marshall, 123, 132 McPhee, William N., Voting: A Study of Opinion Formation in a Presidential Campaign (with Berelson and Lazarsfeld), 211n12 media culture, 180–­88

I ndex 2 4 5

media history, 27–­33, 87–­88, 111–­12, 170, 171, 172, 180–­88. See also Powell, John Walker, and other scholars Merriam, Charles, 4–­6, 7, 36, 50, 68, 191nn11, ­12 Merryman, Philip, 71, 72 method of equality (contestation): civic culture versus, 190; cultural studies and, 19–­27; defined, 19; democratic politics and, 13–­33; Internet and, 169, 181, 185–­186, 187–­188; media history and, 27–­33; peripheral populations and, 16, 62–­86; qualifications for participation and, 60. See also entitlement claims; race rebellions; subjectivation (disputing hierarchical order) Mexican Americans, 200n85 Meyersohn, Rolf, 90–­91 Miami Valley Council of Governments (COG), 156, 160 microwave systems, 62, 63i–­64i, 74, 74i, 201n6. See also booster systems migrations to cities, 85 Millender, Dharathula “Dolly,” 219n88 Miller, Toby, 24–­25, 30–­31 Mills, C. Wright, 11–­13, 80, 193n51 minorities rule, 9–­10 Minority Media and Telecommunications Council (MMTC), 177–­180 Minority Telecommunications Development Act, 168–­169 Mitchell, Parren, 167 Model Cities program, 152, 157, 159, 218n66 The Model Cities Program (Marshall Kaplan, Gans, and Kahn), 218n66 monopoly practices, 38–­40, 202n7 Montana, 62–­64, 65, 73, 74, 74i, 75i, 76–­79, 78–­79, 83f, 204n53 Montgomery, David, Workers’ Control in America, 200n86 Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycotts, 71–­72 Morris, Illinois, study, 69–­70 Motion Pictures Association of America, 126 movies, 87–­88, 97, 98, 106, 107, 108–­109, 126–­127, 176, 208n30. See also Black film festival; Committee Against Pay-­to-­See TV; HBO; Hollywood studios movie theaters, 88, 108 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 118–­120, 141; Beyond the Melting Pot (with Glazer), 215n13; The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, 215n13 Mullen, Megan, 3, 28 multiple ownership, 50, 52, 201n7 multisystem operators, 18, 131, 145, 155, 156; Black cable ownership and, 159–­160, 161–­162, 168–­169 Mulvey, Mary, 107 Muncie, Indiana, studies, 68–­69 Murrow, Edward R., 128 music, Black commercial, 164–­165. See also jazz music, classical: culture/education and, 36, 40–­41, 44–­45, 46, 53–­54, 60, 199n75, 208n22; news versus, 49, 197n44; pay-­TV

and, 31; public interest and, 41–­42; Siepmann on, 47; U.S. Congress and, 208n30. See also highbrow/middlebrow/lowbrow culture; performing arts; sustaining versus commercially sponsored programming music appreciation movement, 196n26 Mutual Broadcasting System, 38 NAEB, see National Association of Educational Broadcasters Nakamura, Lisa, 186–­187 Nathan, Robert, 101 National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Kerner Commission), 138, 141–­142, 144, 156, 167 National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB), 57, 58, 59, 144, 200n95 National Association of Independent Business, 79–­80 National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters, 92, 95 National Association of Retired Civil Employees, 107 National Black Media Coalition, 177 National Cable Television Association, 167, 168 National Community Television Association (NCTA) convention, 113–­114, 116, 212n19 National Education Association (NEA), 58, 197n35 National Hispanic Media Coalition, 221n28 National Science Foundation (NSF), 145, 148, 153 National Urban League, 102 Native Americans, 167, 200n85 NBC network, 35, 38, 41, 42–­43, 81, 91, 94–­95, 196n19, 204n47 NCTA (National Community Television Association) convention, 113–­114, 116 neoliberalism: booster systems and, 86; consumerism and, 30–­31; contestations of, 66–­67, 169, 190; cultural studies and, 21; democracy and, 188–­190, 222n47; deregulation and, 18–­19, 168–­169; FCC and, 66; literature review, 203n35; local expression versus cable and, 66, 72–­77; method of equality versus, 20, 32; participatory apathy and, 182; pay TV and, 19. See also capitalism; consumer choice; corporations; economic myths, classical; free markets; pluralism; property relations net equality, 171, 176–­180 net neutrality, 171–­177, 179, 180, 221nn27, ­28. See also cyberculture network-­affiliated broadcast stations: advertising and, 66, 78, 201n6; booster systems and, 85; leisure-­time entitlement and, 32; local expression versus cable and, 64, 65, 204nn47,53, 205n67; microwave systems and, 62; network monopoly practices and, 38–­40, 77; sustaining versus commercially sponsored programming and, 46, 196n19. See also local expression; networks, national broadcast

2 4 6 I ndex

networks, national broadcast, 28–­29, 35, 38–­61, 77, 94, 128–­129, 173–­174, 201n6. See also CBS and other networks; network-­ affiliated broadcast stations neutrality/objectivity/truth, 5, 21, 22, 26, 27, 55, 101, 169, 176, 221n27. See also net neutrality; social and behavioral sciences Newburyport, Massachusetts, study, 69, 70 New Deal liberals, 5, 19, 25, 38, 45, 53, 77, 100, 101, 141, 191n11, 200nn85,86 new golden age, 31, 32, 195nn80,81 New Haven study, 10–­11 New Left, 119, 123 Newman, Kathy, 48 Newman, Michael Z., 30 news, 49, 50–­51, 81–­82, 122, 128, 173, 197n44, 203n33, 205n67, 219n88. See also Friendly, Fred; public discussion programs New York City public access cable, 113, 127–­136, 211n7, 214n66 New York Philharmonic, 49, 89, 208n22 Nisbet, Robert, The Quest for Community, 119 Nixon, Richard, 33, 141–­142, 148–­149, 153 non-­profit organizations, 156, 159. See also Ford Foundation and other foundations objectivity/neutrality/truth, 5, 21, 22, 26, 27, 55, 101, 169, 176, 221n27. See also net neutrality; social and behavioral sciences Office of Economic Development, 124–­125 Office of Minority Business Enterprise (OMBE), 149 Olivier, Lawrence, 59 Olsen, Tex, 85 Olszyk, A. L., 205nn60,67; Live . . . at the Scene: Local TV News in Milwaukee, 1944–­1980, 205n67 on-­line gaming, 186–­187, 221n43 Open Channel, 132 “Operation Frontal Lobes,” 95 Orlando, Florida, 135 Ottinger, Ricard, 109–­110 Ouellette, Laurie, 24, 25; Viewers Like You, 193n46 Overstreet, Bonaro and Harry, 43, 60; The Mature Mind (H. Overstreet), 60 Painter, Patty, 55 Paley, William, 199n83 Palm Springs, California, cable pay-­TV trials, 87 Papernow, Leon, 159 Paper Tiger Television (New York), 211n7 Parsons, L. E., 34 Parsons, Patrick, 3 Parsons, Talcott, 139–­140 participation: Internet and, 117–­118, 182–­183. See also civic culture; passivity; qualifications for participation passivity, 28–­29, 115, 124, 132, 211n12 Pastore, John, 62–­63, 65, 66 Patman, Wright, 79 Payton, Sallyanne, 148–­149

pay-­TV versus free broadcast television: aesthetic judgments and, 31–­32; California neighborhoods and, 208n36; consumer choice and, 93–­94, 97–­98, 106; equality and, 88, 110–­111; masses, so-­called, and, 32–­33; media history and, 3–­4, 29; method of equality and, 16–­18, 30–­31; neoliberalism and, 19; scrambling devices and, 87; seniors and, 107–­108; shopping compared, 74–­75; U.S. Congress and, 3, 91–­110, 113–­114, 208n22; viewer polls and, 1–­2. See also booster systems; cable versus broadcast television; Erb, Ida B.; FCC; public access cable; public interest and public service programming; sustaining versus commercially sponsored programming PBS network, 174 people of color, 176, 178–­79. See also African Americans; Asians; assimilation/acculturation/integration and white, middle-­class normativity; marginalized (disenfranchised) people; race and ethnic exclusions (racism) People’s Law School (cable program), 133 performing arts, 1, 30–­31, 35–­36, 40–­47, 49, 53–­54, 60, 92–­100, 93i, 105–­107, 165, 199n75, 208nn22,35. See also music, classical periodization, 28–­30. See also golden age peripheral access, 62–­86. See also antennas; cable versus broadcast television; local expression; rural access Perlman, Allison, 26–­27 Peter Pan (NBC), 94–­95 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 49–­50, 151 Phonevision, 92, 93i Picard, Victor, 37 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 81 pluralism: African Americans and, 139–­141, 149–­150; community and, 120; community studies and, 71; conceptual foundations of, 4–­11; critiques of, 11–­14; cultural studies and, 19–­20; Dayton, Ohio, cable and, 156; democracy and, 7, 16, 27, 175–­176; described, 3–­4; dissensual practices and, 189; equality and, 9; hierarchical judgments and, 189; local expression versus cable and, 65–­72, 100–­110; method of equality versus, 32; neoliberalism and, 14, 18–­19, 189; net neutrality and, 172; pay versus free broadcast TV and, 91–­92, 102; public interest and, 164; social science and, 66, 91; spectrum policy and, 52–­61; stability and, 18–­19, 36–­37, 123; white liberals and, 150. See also assimilation/ acculturation/integration and white, middle-­class normativity; civic culture; equality/inequality, logics of; liberalism; neoliberalism; stability/order Podgurnsky, William, 105–­106 policy, see equality; FCC; government; local contexts; pay-­TV versus free broadcast

I ndex 2 4 7

television; pluralism; qualifications for participation; spectrum policy; U.S. Congress polyarchal democracy, 9–­10 Porter, Paul, 45–­46 post-­broadcast (post-­network) era, 28–­29 Powell, John Walker, 59 Professor Quiz (radio program), 45 programming, see commercially sponsored programming; daytime programming; educational television Progressive Era, 105 property relations, 23, 33, 37, 84, 85, 88, 110, 114, 126–­127, 189. See also Black cable ownership; capitalism public access cable, 19, 102, 111–­113, 124, 125, 127–­136, 138, 156–­157, 211n7. See also Black cable ownership; local origination; pay­TV versus free broadcast television public broadcast television, 18, 19, 24–­25, 98–­99, 129, 163, 174, 193n46. See also educational television; Hennock, Frieda; National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB) public discussion programs: Black cable ownership and, 163–­164, 219n88; education and, 12, 36, 42–­45, 60, 81; FCC and, 45, 49, 50, 54, 116; General Federation of Women’s Clubs and, 105; news versus, 44–­45, 197n44, 197nn35,44. See also news the public interest and public service programming: aesthetic judgment and, 38; Black cable ownership and, 162–­164; Blue Skies period and, 138; civic culture and, 182; commercialism versus, 37; competition and, 195n10; contestations and, 86; education and, 122–­123; experts and, 2–­3, 50, 54, 60, 113; FCC and, 45–­46; hierarchical judgments and, 37; masses and, 6, 175; neoliberalism and, 188–­189, 190; New York City and, 130; pay-­TV versus free broadcast television, 108; pluralism and, 102; prioritized perspectives and, 16; soap operas and, 16, 48; sports and, 110; study of broadcasters and, 45–­46. See also Black cable ownership; class privilege; the commons; educated elites (experts) versus common people; educational television; gender privilege; Hennock, Frieda; local expression; music, classical; news; public access cable; public discussion programs The Public Service Responsibilities of Broadcasters (Blue Book) (FCC), 37, 45, 47, 49–­50 qualifications for participation, 4, 9, 10–­11, 17, 86, 118, 190. See also citizens and citizenship; civic culture; discourses of citizenship; discourse theory; hierarchical judgments; method of equality (contestation) Quay, Sara E., 21st Century TV Drama (with Damico), 195nn80,81

race and ethnic exclusions (racism): aesthetic judgment and, 24; arts organizations and, 99; Black cable ownership and, 156; Clark on, 142–­143; Coy and, 54; education and, 6; Gary, Indiana, cable and, 162; Internet and, 176–­180, 186, 221n43; mass culture and, 90–­91; pay versus broadcast TV and, 102–­103; poverty and, 33; public access cable and, 126–­127; social science and, 5, 11, 70, 160–­161; subjectivization and, 25–­26; Truman on, 7–­8; “Wired Nation” and, 143–­148. See also African Americans; Asians; assimilation/acculturation/integration and white, middle-­class normativity; Critical Race Theory (CRT); discourses of citizenship; Latinas/os; marginalized (disenfranchised) people; Native Americans; race rebellions race neutrality, 177, 221n27 race rebellions, 13–­14, 18–­19, 33, 112, 117, 121, 122, 133, 138, 141–­143, 148–­151, 156, 157, 177, 215n5. See also alienation; Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycotts radio: advertising and, 78, 80, 81, 173, 176, 198n63, 204n57; alienation and, 117; AM/ FM, 53, 199n76; crime shows and, 200n85; culture/education and, 36, 37, 39–­60, 90, 101–­102, 106, 173, 175, 197n44, 199nn75,76,83, 208n22; land-­grant colleges and, 57–­58, 59; Lazarsfeld and, 1–­2, 81; minorities and, 159, 161, 168, 177–­178, 198n63; music and, 199n75; New York City and, 129; non-­profit, 154; social science and, 81; socioeconomic factors and, 100–­101 Radio Manufacturers Association, 54 Raibourn, Paul, 92–­93 Ranciére, Jacques, 13–­17, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27–­28, 182n33, 192n30, 193nn44,66. See also method of equality RAND Corporation, 137, 144, 145, 148, 153, 156–­157, 159, 160, 218n63 Razlagova, Elena, 56; “True Crime Radio and Listener Disenchantment with Network Broadcasting 1935–­1946,” 200n85 RCA, 35, 54, 95 Reading, Pennsylvania, 135–­136, 216n27 Reagan, Patrick D., Designing a New America, 191n11 reality television, 31, 222n47 receivers, television, 60, 88 recreational entitlement, 66, 82–­86 recreation movement, 206n78 Redlich, Norman, 129 “redlining” practices, 179 regional wholesalers, 79–­80, 82 Reinsch, Jack, 84 Reith, John, 173 Report on Chain Broadcasting (FCC), 38–­39 “return of the repressed,” 20 Reuther, Walter, 101 Rifkin, Monroe M., 135 Robinson-­Patman Act (1936), 79 Rockefeller Foundation, 41–­42, 44, 58, 152

2 4 8 I ndex

Rosenberg, Bernard, 90–­91; Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, 90–­91 rural access, 17, 28, 62–­86, 197n44, 201n6. See also booster systems; local expression; marginalized (disenfranchised) people; Montana and other rural locations; peripheral access; recreational entitlement; spectrum policy Saint-­Simonianism, 14 Salant, Richard, 95, 208n30 San Francisco cable pay-­TV trials, 87, 208n36 satellites, 129, 142 Saturday Review (magazine), 91, 121 the sayable/visible, 15 Schlesinger, Arthur Jr., 101–­102, 123 Schramm, Wilbur, 58–­59, 123 Schumpeter, Joseph, 172–­173, 174–­176 science, see social and behavioral sciences Seiter, Ellen, 195n79 Seldes, Gilbert, 91 senior citizens, 88, 107–­108, 135–­136, 210n73, 216n27 separation of powers, 9, 176 Sevier County, Utah, 85, 86 sexism, 7–­8, 24, 26–­27, 30, 221n43. See also gender privilege Shapp, Milton Jerrold, 34 Shattuc, Jane, 29 Shils, Edward, 89, 90, 91, 207n6 Siepmann, Charles, 43, 46, 47; Radio’s Second Chance, 47 situation comedies, 109, 125, 128 Sklover, Theodora, 131–­135, 136 Skornia, Harry, 122 Sloan Foundation, 97–­98 small/independent/local businesses, 28, 66, 77–­82, 88, 203n46, 205n59 Smith, Erin, 55–­56 Smith, Ralph Lee, 137–­138, 143, 173, 174 Smith-­Shomade, Beretta, 31 soap operas: aesthetic judgments and, 16, 24, 30, 31, 36, 59, 60; class/gender and, 2, 30, 46–­49, 51–­52, 109, 208n30; commercialism and, 60; education and, 40, 44–­45, 46, 51–­52, 59; FCC and, 47, 60; public interest and, 16, 48; race/class and, 47–­48. See also commercially sponsored programming social and behavioral sciences: aesthetic judgments and, 1–­3, 23–­24, 42, 89–­91; assimilation (white, middle-­class normativity) and, 6, 141–­142, 144; Black cable ownership and, 156; civic culture and, 32–­33, 114–­115; Community Action Program (CAP) and, 118–­119, 120–­121; community advisors versus, 153; community studies of, 67–­72; democracy and, 2–­3, 174–­175; discourse theory and, 22; on effects on children, 85; equality and, 36, 65–­66; experts and, 44, 60; governmentality and, 25; hierarchical judgments and, 4, 60, 65, 90–­92; N. Johnson and, 123; local expression and, 81, 112–­113; on mass

media, 89; net neutrality and, 172–­173; pluralism and, 3–­13, 19, 20, 138–­139; programming and, 47; public discussion programs and, 44–­45; race rebellions and, 177; racial discrimination and, 160–­161; violence on TV and, 122. See also American Academy of Arts and Sciences; RAND Corporation; Spartanburg, South Carolina, study and other studies social media, 32, 170. See also Internet Social Science Research Council, 5 socioeconomic factors: classical rationales and, 32; performing arts and, 92–­100; public access cable and, 125, 126–­127; public discussion programs and, 44–­45; radio and, 100–­101. See also Bourdieu, Pierre; capitalism; class privilege; economic development; economic factors; economic myths, classical; “long tail,” theory of; low-­income people and poverty; marginalized (disenfranchised) people; Marxism; neoliberalism; pay-­TV versus free broadcast television; small/independent/local businesses; taxes Spanish-­speaking people, 99. See also Latinas/os Spartanburg, South Carolina, experiment, 145–­148 spectrum policy, 52–­61, 65. See also UHF (ultra-­high frequencies); VHF (very high frequencies) speech, 15, 16, 20. See also freedom of speech Spigel, Lynn, 29, 85 Spokane, Washington, 204n53 sports, 72, 87, 97, 98, 101, 106, 107, 108–­109, 110, 211n78. See also leisure-­time entitlement “spreadable media,” 171, 184, 186, 187, 190. See also fan communities stability/order: Black activists and, 127; civic culture and, 112, 114–­115, 116; commercial broadcast culture and, 100; community and, 119, 120; democracy and, 16; educated elites and, 8–­10, 51; hierarchical classifications and, 7–­8, 25–­26, 36–­37, 211n12; masses/mass culture/mass media and, 9–­10, 17, 51, 88–­92, 121–­122; pluralism and, 18–­19, 36–­37, 123; polyarchal organizations and, 9–­10; public access cable and, 19; rural populations and, 84. See also subjectivation (disputing hierarchical order) standardization, 68, 86. See also conformity Stans, Maurice, 149 Stanton, Frank, 89 Stefancic, Jean, 194n66 stickiness model, 184 Stock, John and Miriam, 75 Stoney, George, 134, 214n81 Streeter, Thomas, 22–­23, 27 strikes, labor, 8, 76, 210n69 subjectivation (disputing hierarchical order), 16, 25, 33, 193n44. See also method of equality (contestation)

I ndex 2 4 9

Subscriber’s Choice programming guide, 208n35 Subscription Television, Inc. (STV), 95, 97 Sullivan, Leon, 151, 167 supply-­and-­demand logics, 30–­31, 32, 100, 108. See also capitalism; competition; consumer choice; liberalism sustaining versus commercially sponsored programming, 37–­38, 39–­40, 45–­50, 174, 196n19. See also cultural and educational hierarchies; music, classical; pay-­TV versus free broadcast television; performing arts; public discussion programs Sweezy, Paul, 21–­22, 193n51; Monopoly Capital (with Baran), 21–­22 Taft-­Hartley Act (1947), 8 Tamiment Institute, 89 Tanke, Joseph J., 16 Tarlton, Bob, 34 Tarshis, Morris, 128, 129 Task Force on Communications Policy, 144 Tate, Charles, 125, 149–­152, 156, 157, 164i; “Conceptual Origins of Black Economic Development and a Review of Residual and Contemporary Forms,” 150 taxes, 79, 108, 109, 127, 131, 135, 168, 177, 179 Taylor, Jim, 152–­153 Teamsters Union, 188 TeleCable, 145 “telecommunications,” 171–­172 Telecommunications Act of 1996, 179 telemedicine, 179 Telemundo, 173 TelePrompTer, 131, 159, 161–­162 television sets and manufacturers, 35, 81, 105 Thebom, Blanche, 94 Theta Leasing Company, 162 Third Cinema movement, 163 Thomas, Franklin, 125 Thompson, Priscilla, 76 Time, Inc., 50, 99 Title II authority, 171, 172, 179 Toronto, Canada, cable pay-­TV trials, 87 Torres, Sasha, Black, White and in Color: Television and Black Civil Rights, 203n33 Truman, David, 7–­8, 36, 37; The Governmental Process, 7–­8 Truman, Harry S., 53, 199n72 trust, 182–­83 truth/neutrality/objectivity, 5, 21, 22, 26, 27, 55, 101, 169, 176, 221n27. See also net neutrality; social and behavioral sciences Turner, Ted, 173 TV Communications, 115 two-­way (interactive) cable, 135–­136, 139, 143–­148, 153, 154–­155, 156, 168, 216nn25,27 UHF (ultra-­high frequencies), 24, 35, 65, 67–­72, 111, 116, 117, 201nn4,6, 202n7, 204nn55,69, 212n19. See also spectrum policy

unions, labor, 4, 5, 7–­8, 70, 71, 76–­77, 79, 97, 101, 105–­107, 106, 188, 210nn69, ­70. See also strikes, labor; working class universities, 12, 41–­42, 44, 45, 57, 58–­59, 136, 216n27 urban cable, 5, 12, 19, 33, 85, 112–­113, 117–­118, 137–­138, 209n56. See also Black cable ownership; Los Angeles and other urban areas; public access cable; “Wired Ghetto” project Urban Communications Group, 124–­125 Urban Institute, 124–­125, 149, 150 urban renewal, 143–­148 urban settlement movement, 40 U.S. Congress (hearings and legislation): Americans for Democratic Action and, 209nn55,56; antenna systems and, 202n7; booster systems and, 83; cable TV and, 3; chain broadcasting and, 199n83; chain retailers and, 79; community and, 65–­66; culture/gender and, 47–­48, 208n30; educational television and, 18; FCC and, 38, 40; hearings of, 62; Hennock and, 56; interactive cable and, 145; local advertising and, 77–­78; local expression versus cable and, 64–­65, 67, 71, 73–­74, 116; media history and, 29; minority ownership and, 168–­169; monopoly practices and, 202n7; pay versus free broadcast TV and, 3, 17, 91–­110, 113–­114, 137–­138; public access cable and, 124; public television and, 18; qualifications for participation and, 17; small business and, 203n46; taxes and, 177; television and juvenile delinquency and, 85; UHF/VHF and, 82, 201n4, 201n7, 202n7; on violence on television, 122; War on Poverty and, 118. See also civil rights legislation; pay-­TV versus free broadcast television; individual members of Congress U.S. Court of Appeals, 177 U.S. Department of Education, 42–­43 U.S. Department of Labor, 160 Useem, Michael, 94, 208n23 U.S. Office of Education, 58 U.S. Small Business Administration, 204n55 U.S. Supreme Court, 71, 87, 177 Valenti, Jack, 106, 126 “vast wasteland,” 24 Verba, Sidney, 11, 114–­115; The Civic Culture (with Almond), 112, 114–­115 veterans, 17, 29, 57, 76, 88, 104, 105, 106. See also marginalized (disenfranchised) people VHF (very high frequencies), 35, 65, 67, 81, 201n6, 205n69. See also booster systems; spectrum policy Viacom, 60 violence on television, 121–­122, 206n81, 213n36 the visible/sayable, 15

2 5 0 I ndex

Wang, Jennifer, 48 Warner, Lloyd, 69–­70, 202nn18,24, 203n27; Democracy in Jonesville, 69–­70 Warner Communications, 159 War on Poverty, 32–­33, 112, 118, 136, 150 Watts (Los Angeles, California), 152–­155 wealth, 9, 178. See also class privilege Weaver, Sylvester “Pat,” 95–­97 Webster, Margaret, 59 westerns, 109, 125, 128 Wheeler, Burton, 40, 47–­48, 77–­78, 199n83 White, David Manning, 91 White, Llewellyn, 50–­51 white, middle-­class normativity, see assimilation/acculturation/integration and white, middle-­class normativity Wicker, Tom, 141–­142 Williamson, Fred, 163, 165 Winston-­Salem, North Carolina, UHF station, 72 “Wired Ghetto” project, 144 “Wired Nation,” 137–­138, 143–­148 women, 2, 4, 11, 28, 71, 115, 133, 163. See also gender privilege; marginalized (disenfranchised) people; Spartanburg, South Carolina, experiment women’s groups, 17–­18, 26–­27, 41, 47–­49, 88, 97, 105

Wood, Mary, 1; Just Lucky I Guess, 191n1 working class: corporations and, 4; crime shows and, 55–­56; mass media and, 21–­22; method of equality and, 28; music and, 40–­41, 60; New Deal agencies and, 200n86; pay versus free TV and, 88; qualifications to participate and, 141; rural populations and, 84; as small business owners, 80, 205n59; social science and, 5, 10–­11; Wheeler and, 77. See also Bridgeport, Connecticut, UHF; class privilege; cultural and educational hierarchies; immigrants; marginalized (disenfranchised) people; Marxism; strikes, labor; unions, labor World War II, 41, 77, 85 wrestling on television, 194n79 Wright, Joseph, 109–­110 Wright, William, 125–­126 Wu, Tim, 172–­176, 179, 180; The Master Switch, 172 “Yankee City” study, 69 Young, Helen, 186 Zenith, 92, 93i, 109

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JOHN M CMURRIA is an assistant professor in the Department of Communica-

tion at the University of California San Diego. He is coauthor, with Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, Richard Maxwell, and Ting Wang, of Global Hollywood 2.