Map of NBC’s combined red, blue, orange, and gold networks in 1928.

Post by Bruce Lenthall, University of Pennsylvania

Teaching a media history course nearly 15 years ago, one day I found myself stumbling in search of a metaphor to help explain to undergraduates the network radio system that arose in the late 1920s.

“Think about network stations on television,” I suggested.

“What are network stations on TV?” the students asked. “How are they different than any other stations? How do you find them?”

“Do you remember those two knobs on a television?” I asked, trying to make this as simple and concrete as possible. Succeeding, instead, in showing my age. “Essentially, one knob let you change between the national channels, the network channels. When you turned the other knob, you changed channels among the local, non-network ones.”

There was a long pause.

Finally, with the air of one who has figured out something that has long confused her, a student spoke up. “This is really helpful,” she said. “My grandmother had a television with dials on it and I never could figure out what you used them for.”

The point here is not the futility of trying to explain television knobs and dials to a generation in the age of the remote control. The point is not even my own occasional cluelessness about current cultural experiences. No, the real point here is about some of the challenges of teaching radio history.

When I teach the history of radio – as I have done in a variety of course contexts from a media in history course to a history of American culture in the 1930s – I am routinely reminded that for undergraduate students, the basics of the early radio systems have long since been lost from cultural memory. Notions of national networks, of limitations on the number of stations – and with that, limitations on what audiences might hear and who might speak on the air – are unfamiliar. Even the metaphors a later generation might use to recall some of the early days of radio no longer have currency.

At the same time, though, other elements of the American system of broadcasting as it rose to prominence remain so entrenched in our deeply held assumptions that it can be hard for students to question them at all. For many of my undergraduates, commercially funded, for-profit broadcasting seems such a natural and positive way to organize media that it can be difficult for them to step out of such a system and examine it.

Such challenges are, of course, common ones for instructors: how to make the unfamiliar understandable and to understand the familiar by reexamining it through new eyes. And such challenges are why, in part, studying media history in general, and radio history in particular, is so powerful. Comprehending the unfamiliar media of the past can help us to see the familiar ones all around us anew. Digging into the history of broadcasting provides a comparative perspective – a comparison that enables us to see the system of our own time as distinct. Examining the historical comparison and the decisions that shaped past radio allows us to take what seems natural to us and to see it as something that has been constructed by choices – choices that could have been made differently. In turn, that perspective enables students to consider the benefits and costs of those choices.

As my classes explore the history of radio, we peer through three sets of lenses: the messages and content on the air, what radio meant to its listeners, and the structure of the industry. I ask my students, which frame of reference provides the most valuable insights into radio’s past? Invariably, my students say we need all three perspectives to really understand radio. That’s true, of course. But it also reveals how hard it is for novice scholars to take a stand. All of us who research radio know there are many valuable approaches to our work that we could take; but we also know that we have to pick one because we cannot do everything at once. My students are less comfortable choosing the approach that offers them the greatest insight.

There is no question, though, which is the easiest area for them to discuss. The early radio programs may be foreign to students, but discussing those programs is not. When we talk about Amos ‘n’ Andy in the 1920s and 1930s, for instance, my students quickly understand the importance of talking about the program’s construction of race. They may not see the differences between the works we read by Melvin Ely and Michele Hilmes on this question at first, but they get there. This becomes an opportunity to consider factors that made radio so popular and the role racial othering played in the creation of a mass audience. Similarly, students are comfortable considering Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds” as a potential critique of the media itself (OK, for that one, they also see Citizen Kane to help them unpack Welles’s views).

My students have a more difficult time considering what radio meant for its listeners. Here I have raised for them some of the issues I address in my own book. What did it mean to connect with far-flung and often-imagined others? To be part of a mass audience? Where did listeners find a sense of control and where did they lack it? Maybe I am too close to some of these questions or maybe others need to come first, but I’ve never fully gotten students to engage with them. Instead, I have repeatedly found my classes tacking to questions of what was on the air and, even more, the early structure of the industry.

That last one, the structure of radio, is particularly hard for students to understand. It is not just, as I have said, that the comparisons we might offer are both too unfamiliar and familiar for them. More than that, such structures themselves were – and are – often invisible and inaudible. I also wonder if, in the United States, we are not always comfortable thinking about economic motives and structures as something open for questioning. The idea that a radio system that prized commercial success and the pursuit of profit could be something we created, rather than the natural state of a society that values freedom, can be a jarring one. Exchange students from France and Germany in my classes have been quicker than many of their peers to envision means of funding media other than through advertising.

Because the centralized and commercial system of broadcasting is so hard to make plain to students, it is doubly difficult to present alternatives that existed. Alexander Russo has a detailed account of the structures that bolstered radio beyond the networks – an account I have never taught. How to showcase for students the limits of a structure, when the students do not know the structure itself?

Ultimately, understanding that structure requires students exercise imagination as much as analysis: visually representing radio’s complex reach, for instance, and, critically, imagining alternatives to a commercial network system.

In the end, though, the difficulties in teaching this material help make it so compelling. When students successfully come to terms with radio’s messages, meanings and structures, they take something opaque and make it their own, and they take something that is very much their own and find the distance to shine a light into it. Considering a host of historical media systems and critiques – hopefully – sets them up to decide what they value in, and to consider alternatives to, contemporary media as well.

And if, in the process, they learn that once upon a time, people changed channels by walking across the room and twisting a dial, well, so much the better.

This post continues the ongoing “From Nottingham and Beyond” series, with contributions from faculty and alumni of the University of Nottingham’s Department of Culture, Film and Media. This week’s contributor is Elizabeth Evans, Assistant Professor of Film and Television Studies in our department.

In March 2014, the BBC announced plans to “transform” one of its channels, BBC Three, into an online-only “channel.” Under the proposals, BBC Three would cease linear broadcasting and exist only via the Corporation’s website and the hugely popular online catch-up service, iPlayer. This would then allow the channel’s broadcast spectrum space to be transferred to a new BBC One+1 channel and to increase the broadcast hours of children’s-only channel CBBC from twelve hours to fourteen. The announcement comes at an uncertain time for the BBC. After several years of budget freezes, its Royal Charter, which gives the BBC the right to collect the legally enforced license fee, is due for review in 2016. Its future has been positioned front and center in public debates. Party leaders called for the Corporation’s reform during the recent UK general election. Prime Minister David Cameron then appointed a new Minister for Culture, Media and Sport who had likened the license fee to the hugely unpopular and riot-inducing Thatcherite poll tax. Central to these debates are questions around the future of television viewing in light of digital technologies, and the continued value of public-service broadcasting.

It’s unsurprising that BBC Three has been the catalyst for these debates. BBC Three is clearly and incessantly labeled as a “youth-oriented” channel with an intended audience aged 16-34. That same group is equally consistently associated with changing viewing habits and a shift away from traditional distribution avenues such as broadcasting. This association was central to how the BBC announced its plan. Director of TV Danny Cohen told the press in December 2014 that it was the BBC’s responsibility to adapt to perceived changes in how 16-24 year-olds watch television. This necessary change is, apparently, a move away from broadcasting, producing a mix of episodic and short-form content, and positioning streaming technology at the heart of the BBC’s activities.

Although justified via beliefs concerning changing audience behavior, the BBC Three announcement also involved a series of claims about the value of broadcasting or, more specifically, values that broadcasting lacks. Cohen pronounced that the new, online BBC Three would “have the freedom to break traditional shackles and allow the BBC to be a leader in digital change.” BBC Three Controller Damien Cavanagh equated this “breaking [of] traditional shackles” to short-form video and to more transmedia or interactive storytelling forms designed to promote debate and to generate a “richer experience” for audiences. This sense of experimentation and innovation was explicitly positioned as a value that BBC Three’s new form would offer its youth audience, and which broadcasting apparently lacks.

Broadcasting was instead constructed as beholden to regimented episode lengths and slow production schedules. Both claims are somewhat ironic and problematic. BBC Three already produces short content in the form of 60 Second News, and on multiple occasions during its history, the BBC has created broadcast content that isn’t an hour or half-hour in length. Short-form content is a regular feature of rival public-service broadcaster Channel 4’s weekday evening schedule, with a five-minute slot for its series 4Thought. The BBC has equally ignored the hour and half-hour as program start times, most notably in Saturday early-evening slots. In terms of responsiveness to emerging events, the valuing of online over broadcasting also ignores the central technological feature of broadcasting: that it can be live, with news and current-affairs programming regularly responding rapidly to real-world events via broadcast means. Nothing inherent in broadcasting technology requires regimented slots or a delay in production. Ultimately the BBC positions the creative value of online engagement in terms of freedom from the (perceived) traditional practices of the broadcast industry, practices that have seemingly restricted the potential of broadcast technology itself.

Thus, the transformation of BBC Three has been couched in debates that devalue broadcasting in favor of a streaming-based distribution system seen as more agile, creative and relevant for younger audiences. To this end, the proposed changes to BBC Three are positioned as not simply about changing a single television channel, but about reinventing what the BBC, and what public service, means, future-proofing it for 2016 Charter renewal and beyond.

At the same time, however, the proposals contain unspoken value statements that actually privilege broadcasting. After the full plans met with criticism, Kavanagh worked to reassure critics that new BBC Three content would still appear on BBC One or BBC Two in late-evening slots, creating a hierarchy of content at the fringes of the BBC’s broadcast activities. More prominently, at the heart of the BBC’s announcement is the provision of a BBC One+1 channel, which would repeat that channel’s content one hour later, along with expanded broadcast provision for children aged 6-12 via CBBC. By balancing an online BBC Three with broadcast expansion elsewhere, the Corporation makes a number of further assumptions about the value of television technology for its audiences, highlighting contradictions in its overall strategy. The general audience is positioned as still predominantly valuing broadcasting, but that “general audience” apparently does not include younger audiences or those who enjoy content aimed at younger audiences (that is, people not aged 16-34 but still interested in content pitched to that demographic). It also assumes that BBC Three’s audiences will not suffer from the same problems with accessing broadband services that BBC One’s audience would. Younger audiences, according to the BBC, would not only prefer to access content via streaming but are also universally able to do so, and thus are unaffected by the myriad of socio-cultural factors that play into the digital divide or infrastructural discrepancies in broadband access.

Whether the transformation of BBC Three actually goes ahead is still to be seen (governing body the BBC Trust has yet to approve the idea, and it has already been delayed until 2016). However, the way the BBC has proposed the strategy highlights the contradictory values currently at play in the UK television landscape. The notion that public-service broadcasting must change is positioned as self-evident. Online spaces are seen as agile and creative in ways that broadcasting is not, as protected against any further changes that may be wrought by digital convergence. Younger audiences are seemingly denied this value of broadcasting and firmly associated with the changes that are positioned at the heart of the new public-service media. But at the same time, additional value is placed on broadcasting for general – read older – audiences. As the BBC presents streaming and digital technologies as the future, it simultaneously reinforces broadcasting and the TV set. This works to position the Corporation as embracing the new while still valuing the old, and reiterates the centrality of the relationship among content, audience and distribution to public service broadcasting’s future definitions.

This is the fourth post in our “Honoring Hilmes” series, celebrating the career and legacy of Michele Hilmes on the occasion of her retirement. 

Post by Jason Jacobs, University of Queensland

The impact of Michele Hilmes’ scholarship on me is best told by tracking its contribution to my early formation as an academic. In 1990 I was fishing around for a PhD topic; I’d spent the final year of my film degree at the University of Warwick under the charismatic mentorship of Charlotte Brunsdon, who had introduced a compelling television studies strand into the capstone Film Aesthetics course and, as a result, I found myself writing and thinking a lot about television. It was that period of British television when the last great dramas were still in recent memory: particularly that golden year, 1986, when the BBC transmitted The Singing Detective, The Life and Loves of a She Devil and The Monocled Mutineer; also the year, in fact, when public service broadcasting effectively ended as a practice in the UK. That, in turn, stimulated my curiosity about the history of television drama: Where did these great things come from? What traditions do they inhabit and respond to? With these questions in mind it made sense for me (plus I hail from the region) to enroll at the University of East Anglia under the supervision of Charles Barr, who had recently published a piece in Sight and Sound which had contrasted the achievement of Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson’s The Classical Hollywood Cinema with the dearth of work on television history. There really was very little written in the UK about the history of television that wasn’t anecdotal or mostly concerned with institutional history (such as Asa Briggs’ History of Broadcasting in the UK, rather like – but not quite – Barnouw’s three volume history of US broadcasting). Nothing, certainly, to compare to the work in Thomas Elsaesser’s magnificent collection Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, which was launched by him shortly after I arrived in Norwich.

Of course, as the famous parable by Richard Hamilton instructs us, what I assumed were issues unique to my intellectual tastes and dispositions, turned out to be part of a much wider cultural momentum. There was work being written on television history, and the best of it was coming from the US: indeed most of my reading in my first year of PhD came from US based scholars, in particular William Boddy, William Urrichio and, of course, Michele Hilmes’ Hollywood and Broadcasting. This was precisely the rich, theoretically-inflected revisionist history I craved and, for a long while, my thesis had a strong US component. I even lived in Manhattan for several weeks in order to view as much early material as I could at the (then) Museum of Television and Radio. The advantages of scarce primary material! I didn’t meet Michele until a few years later in Madison and it really wasn’t until the early 2000s that we began to meet and talk fairly regularly. By then television history had considerable momentum, but it remained nationalized. Which is to say there was still that Briggs-Barnouw division: US history on one side, the rest on the other. When we were working on The Television History Book together there wasn’t a moment when we doubted the wisdom of bringing national television histories together – that underpinned, in a very small space, our shared belief in the intellectual fascination of flows of talent, technology, training and ideas between broadcasting nations. It is an indication as much of Michele’s commitment to this as it is to my weakness, that without her example I may have let it drop – so strong had the cultural-nationalist inflected British television history become.

There’s still a bit of that around, but it looks and sounds odd. A couple of years ago Michele was the keynote at a conference in the University of Reading, UK, and although her paper was typically stunning in its ambition and delivery, during questions I noticed some senior British academics carried the whiff of indignation at the effrontery of a Yank speaking so well about aspects of ‘their’ television and its connections and absorption in the US. Afterwards, as I drove Michele and her husband Bruce back to my hotel for a nice cup of tea, we reflected on the odd shortsightedness of such a response. One thing about Michele and her work (and as the title of one of her books puts it!) that is so distinctive and unusual is that she is all about making connections across the lines, and not about policing borders or holding territory.

I don’t have a copy to hand, but in his wonderful book, True Friendship, Christopher Ricks talks about Eliot and Pound’s friendship as incorporating competition, yes, necessarily – but never ruthless competition. Over the past few years I saw a lot of Michele as our projects converged, both interested in transnational relations between British and American broadcasting. Sometimes we’d run into each other at the BBC Written Archives in Caversham Park, or when I was up to my neck in the NBC archives in Madison. Once, over margaritas in her lakeside home, we both expressed a desire the other would publish first – it would be so helpful! I’m glad to say Michele’s Network Nations was first. Here’s an image that shows how helpful it has been, and continues to be for me. Each yellow leaf a reminder to return to her again.

Much research on educational technology reforms in the twentieth century has placed emphasis on the idea that their inception and implementation has often been accompanied by a feverish excitement that sooner or later subsides. What is left, some of this research has argued, has been an all-too-common story of misuse and misguided aspirations. [1]

There have been many such reforms attempted in education since the end of the nineteenth century that have elicited widespread excitement about the potential for new forms of learning. Many of these reforms were backed by progressive educators in the early twentieth century. Edgar Dale, a professor at Ohio State University and a researcher at the university’s Bureau of Educational Research, identified himself as part of the progressive education movement. His instructional philosophy can be understood through a pyramid-like structure that he called the “Cone of Experience” (pictured right) in which he classified and detailed his beliefs about sensory and experiential learning.

Dale placed learning through direct experience at the bottom of the pyramid. Moving vertically up the figure, illustrated a shift in learning as it began to occur less through immediate experience, more through mediated means, and also became more conceptual and abstract. At the bottom of the cone, direct sensory learning provided students with rich experiences that included field trips, bird watching, fishing trips, and other types of worldly excursions. Next, came models and mockups of real experiences, such as miniature versions of airplanes, ships, and landscape scenes. These had educational value because they provided students with opportunities for scrutiny and analysis of structures, processes, and systems that could not be recreated through lecture and textbooks. Dramatic participation was the next up the pyramidal diagram. School plays were an example of this in which students either participated as actors or watched as spectators. Next came demonstrations enacted by the teacher, then field trips to cultural centers, and museum exhibitions, all of which had students function more as viewer than participant. Near the top of the cone was instruction that employed educational technologies including radio, film, newspapers, and phonograph records. [2]  To Dale, instruction with technology did not occur on a “direct sensory level”, but he saw this type of learning as important and necessary because it allowed students to encounter and examine the intellectual and emotional elements that were interwoven into many carefully devised media programs.

Dale spent much of his corpus examining the use of motion pictures in education, but in a large number of his writings he argued for the value of learning through all the senses, including the ears. [3]  Dale was also involved with the the Ohio School of the Air educational radio program at Ohio State University. In the 1935 inaugural issue of The News Letter, he argued for more research into the aural nature of radio programming. [4]

A nameless author, affiliated with the Ohio School of the Air, wrote a paper called “Will King Textbook Be Dethroned,” which illustrated Dale’s ideas about auditory education. In the paper, the author proclaimed that radio “become[s] a new sort of textbook – aural instead of visual.” [5]  The author illustrated this point in a cartoon (pictured left) that depicts a textbook, aptly named “King Textbook,” perched on a throne.

Educational radio was often characterized as a medium that encouraged passive listening and learning. The criticism was that students who listened to programs on the radio tended to sit lifeless in their seats while a radio instructor came through the ether into their classrooms to play music and authoritatively tell them what to think and feel. At a 1932 conference, Edgar Dale struck back at these sorts of characterizations with the argument that there was no such thing as passive listening and that listening should be seen as an activity in itself.

In the 1940s, numerous research studies investigated the efficacy of sensory learning. In a meta-analysis on audio-visual education, written in 1945, one author looked at learning with radio versus learning without radio and studies that compared learning that involved visuals with learning without them. [6]  The writer concluded that these studies “were inconclusive” and did not provide “definite proof” on the efficacy of auditory or visual learning through their respective technologies. Another group of researchers three years earlier had commented on studies that compared aural to visual learning, most notably one study by Paul Lazarsfeld from the Office of Radio Research at Columbia University called Radio and the Printed Page, in which he stated that “for every study which shows that the ear is more receptive, another study can be quoted which attributes the same advantage to the eye.” [7]  Lazarsfeld had concluded, according to the researchers, that what was most important was how well people concentrated on the medium at hand and their present context.

More recently, studies have shown that there has been “no scientific evidence backing up the idea” that teaching should be augmented for various learning styles even though “an entire industry has sprouted” up to support it. [8]  Other contemporary research has shown that learning is more effectual when it is varied and integrates various styles than when it targets only one mode of communication and one style of learning. [9]  What is important, as Dale argued, is that in order for sensory learning, involving educational technologies, to be useful, educators must have an explicit understanding about the types of lessons that make these technologies educational, how to use them in productive ways, and have clearly defined objectives that will result in effective educational experiences for students.

[1] David B. Tyack and Larry Cuban, Tinkering toward Utopia : A Century of Public School Reform (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995) 111

[2] Edgar Dale, “Coming to Our Senses,” The News Letter 5, no. 1 (November 1939).

[3] Audio-Visual Methods in Teaching (New York: The Dryden Press, 1946) 48

[4] Edgar Dale and I. Keith Tyler, “Foreward, the Radio,” The News Letter 1, no. 1 (November 1935).

[5] OSU Ohio School of the Air (RG 8d6), Box 1. Ohio Teaches School By Radio, n.d.

[6] Arthur C. Stenius, “Auditory and Visual Education,” Review of Educational Research 15, no. 3 (1945): 246.

[7] Seerley Reid and Daniel Day, “Chapter Vi: Radio and Records in Education,” Review Of Educational Research 12, no. 3 (June 1942): 313.

[8] Patti Neighmond, “Think You’re an Auditory or Visual Learner? Scientists Say It’s Unlikely,” http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2011/08/29/139973743/think-youre-an-auditory-or-visual-learner-scientists-say-its-unlikely.

[9] Richard E. Mayer, “A Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning,” in Multimedia Learning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

FM transmitter tower

Post by John Anderson
Brooklyn College at the City University of New York

For more than a decade now, a spectrum-grab of impressive proportions has been taking place on the FM dial in the United States. While services such as Low-Power FM and HD Radio have dominated many discussions about future paths for broadcasting, the proliferation of FM translator stations has dwarfed them both.

The Federal Communications Commission created the FM translator service in 1970. Translator stations are limited to 250 watts of power and can only rebroadcast the signals of other stations. The original intent behind the translator service was to help noncommercial FM stations located in areas with challenging terrain provide a mechanism by which to address coverage gaps.

In 1981, the Chicago-based Moody Bible Institute petitioned the FCC to allow translators to be fed with programming other than a locally based full-power FM station. The FCC initially denied Moody’s request, in large part due to worries that “some parties” were engaging in practices with translators that smacked of speculation, such as filing applications in bulk to preclude competitors from certain markets. The agency also noted that many broadcasters were stretching the existing rules by siting translators to extend the reach of a full-power station.

But by 1990, after a well-coordinated lobbying campaign, the FCC fundamentally overhauled the FM translator service, effectively opening it up to commercial development. Translators were also unchained from local parent-stations and could be fed remotely. These changes spurred the rise of broadcasters who used FM translators to build out their own networks of stations. Since there’s no office to keep or staff to pay, costs of operation are low. Religious and public broadcasters took the greatest advantage of these rule changes to expand their reach.

Then LPFM got in the way. In 1997, as the FCC began receiving petitions to legalize a local low-power radio service, it froze new applications for FM translators on the majority of the dial. From a purely technical perspective, the only real distinction between FM translators and LPFM stations is that LPFMs must be live and local to some degree, while FM translators cannot. But incumbent broadcasters fervently opposed the creation of LPFM because they believed that the band was running out of capacity to accommodate more stations.

There is a grain of truth to this argument; the Reagan-era FCC opened up the FM dial to an increasing number of applicants and liberalized the rules regarding the movement of existing stations between markets. By the time LPFM came on the scene, spaces for new development of the FM dial in most markets had been reduced to crumbs, typically doled out as full-power FM licenses in rural and exurban locales and translator stations elsewhere. Yet while incumbent broadcasters railed on LPFM stations for asking to be “shoehorned” onto the dial, they prepared to make their own grab for all the crumbs they could.

In 2003, the FCC opened up an application window for new FM translator stations, and more than 13,000 were filed. A goodly portion were tendered by established religious and public broadcasters, though individual speculators came primed to play big. One enterprising man in Idaho, who had previously worked to build a large network of translators for Calvary Chapel churches, wrote software to spam the FCC’s electronic filing system, filing some 4,000 applications under two corporate names. In all, the FCC issued more than 2,000 new translator construction permits, but many who got them never intended to build the stations—or, at best, they only planned to build them out just enough to sell them to someone else.

Willis Tower in Chicago

In the intervening decade, as proponents of LPFM fought a protracted battle with Congress to expand the service to a point of technical parity with FM translators, the trade in translators became a market all its own, now worth tens of millions of dollars. Single construction permits now sell for five to six figures each, and in major markets they’re more valuable than some full-power AM stations. Last June, a 10-watt translator licensed to broadcast from atop the Willis Tower in Chicago sold for $4.6 million, while in December, a 4-watt translator in Long Island City, Queens changed hands for $3.5 million.

Far removed from their original intent as supplemental repeater-stations, most FM translators are now widely employed by broadcasters as “new stations” built and programmed on the cheap. Since the FCC considers translators a secondary service, they don’t count against the agency’s caps on media ownership. It’s a loophole in the law that’s widely acknowledged with a wink and a nod. An executive at mid-market conglomerate Saga advises his sales staff to call translators “metro stations” in pitches to advertising clients, so as to deemphasize their relatively weak signals and “make them sound more legitimate.”

Furthermore, transactions in the translator marketplace demonstrate a curious financial symbiosis between noncommercial broadcasters and some of America’s largest radio conglomerates. For example, in multiple markets, the Educational Media Foundation—parent of the K-LOVE and AIR-1 music networks—has sold or leased translators to iHeartMedia, who uses them to relay programming previously available as an HD-only subchannel. (HD Radio’s proprietor, iBiquity Digital Corporation, openly urges stations to set up their own “HD-on-translator play” as way to make some analog hay out of the stalled U.S. digital transition.)

Other major broadcasters use translators to relay out-of-market stations, or to provide a foothold on the FM dial for their AM properties. In fact, AM broadcasters are clamoring for the FCC to open one more translator filing window just for them, as a way to provide “relief” to their “beleaguered” band. It’s the beginning of a trend toward the ultimate settlement of all over-the-air broadcasting on the FM dial, something already underway in several Latin American and European countries. While they may be small and secondary, the rise of translators speaks volumes about the state of broadcast innovation. Like most natural resources, broadcast spectrum is finite, and we’d be wise to utilize it effectively. Instead, we’ll deep-sea drill and frack it to exhaustion—spare no expense to suck those last crumbs.

Post by John McMurria

As the Radio Preservation Task Force embarks on a collective effort to identify and make publicly accessible radio broadcast recordings and the documents that inform their contexts of creation and use, it is worth posing the question of why we should care about these historical archives beyond their value as traces of the past. Indeed, a pervasive talk among cultural commentators and media scholars defines the significance and status of our contemporary media culture as a “post-broadcast” or “post-network” temporal break from a past media culture that emerged out of the radio broadcasting era of the first half of the 20th century. Frequent tropes invoked to describe this temporal break as progressive, liberating or even revolutionary include those pertaining to media source (from a few to many), media quality (from a lowest-common-denominator mass culture to a plethora of taste-diversified niche cultures), and media use (from passive reception to active engagement). Yet despite this increasingly prevalent temporal narrative, many scholars, including those who invoke the “post” to examine contemporary media culture, have increasingly problematized the verity of this narrative, whether in recognizing the on-going prevalence of broadcast network programming in contemporary media culture or questioning the liberatory state of our socially networked, on-demand media culture. Questioning this temporal narrative shifts the emphasis away from a technology-centric focus on these tropes of progressive social change to understanding media as a material location that is situated in a particular place and time. Locating and making publically accessible radio broadcasts and their supporting archival documents facilitates placing our media past within their particular material locations in place and time while mitigating the generalized understandings that radio broadcasting’s past was a “mass” media of little variety, low quality and limited engagement.

Radio Preservation Task Force organizers Josh Shepperd and Chris Sterling have foregrounded the importance of place in organizing the search for radio archives on a geographical basis so that researchers in specific locations can develop a situated knowledge of radio history in their designated areas and develop relationships with the institutions and private collectors who might house radio archives. This localized research intends to expand our understanding of local and regional radio programming, an area that has been subordinated to the study of national network programming, and to reveal how localized contexts informed perceptions about national network programming. Thomas Conner, a doctoral student in the Communications Department here at UCSD, has begun a search for radio broadcasting in our neck-of-the-woods. Of particular importance will be finding Spanish language broadcasts that have emanated from both sides of the boarder. Also significant are the military broadcasts that have aired in this city where the military has had a prevalent place in the culture and economy of San Diego. While the search for these broadcasts continues, Thomas has discovered exciting finds such as 100 hours of LGBT programming on local public radio in the early 1980s located at The Lambda Archives of San Diego. The search takes perseverance as the vast majority of solicitations reveal no records or a mute response. Sometimes one’s own passions for radio history can sustain the search. An avid Woody Guthrie fan, Thomas is hopeful to find recordings of the American folk singer and socialist’s local radio broadcasts from Los Angeles in the late 1930s, which to date are non-existent.

Another way in which radio broadcast history can complicate technology-centric narratives of media progress is in the area of media policy. Defining the stakes of media policy today has been the debate over applying “network neutrality” regulations to broadband internet service which would prevent internet service providers from charging users for faster data speeds. But network neutrality talk draws heavily from its conceptual origins in internet utopianism and romantic individualism, the idea that if the networked digital technologies for communication remained open to everyone, society would evolve beyond the corporate controlled and homogeneous mass media of the industrial era toward a more liberated networked information era where individuals were freed to innovate, create, consume and prosper. Evident in statements from Lawrence Lessig and Robert McChesney, two prominent public intellectuals of the media, is a Horatio Alger mythology: “most of the great innovators in the history of the Internet started out in their garages with great ideas and little capital” because “network neutrality protections minimized control by the network owners, maximized competition and… guaranteed a free and competitive market for Internet content.”

Though present in broadcast policy history, this mythology of the liberating forces of market competition was couched within a broader discourse of public ownership of the airwaves. In my research on the emergence of cable television I found a similar discourse of the liberating forces of “pay-TV” to free viewers from the low culture of network television through creating a competitive market. But opposed to pay-TV were low-income and rural residents who were against this stratification of access to television that required subscribers to pay. African Americans too disputed understandings that cable technology would stimulate competitive markets open to all. Following two decades of having close to no opportunities to participate in the economic ownership of broadcast stations or television networks, African Americans faced similar barriers to owning cable systems, particularly when market competition logics drove cable policies by the 1970s. These challenges to the mythology that free markets could redress class and race inequalities included right or entitlement claims for equal access to television. Because many of these rights claims were motivated by the active pleasures that television provided in everyday life, pleasures that had been established in radio broadcasting, they also disputed official meanings of the public interest in broadcasting, including paternalistic notions that citizens were in need of ethical guidance to participate fully in democratic governance.

Restoring these historical contexts of pleasure and entitlement to broadcasting as a medium of public ownership is not only important to revising on-going “post-broadcasting” references to a prior era of limited variety and low quality, but also to intervening in today’s media policy debates. A voice in the broadband internet policy debate that has been subordinated to the organizing efforts of media activists and internet social networking companies who have supported network neutrality is a broad coalition of civil rights organizations who support an open internet but oppose the logic and limitations of network neutrality legislation. Organized through the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council, an advocacy group that has fought to open opportunities in media for historically disenfranchised people, this coalition is skeptical that network neutrality rules, and their promise of an open marketplace, could address issues of class, gender and race discrimination. The coalition advocates for more affirmative policies that would intervene into market forces, such as under Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act that gives authority to the FCC to take “immediate action” if broadband is not “deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion.” The coalition also recommends modeling the procedures for resolving complaints after Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of a race, religion and sex. This prioritizes the rights of historically disempowered people to equal opportunity that are not accommodated through the free market promises of network neutrality legislation.

Just as these rights claims of historically disenfranchised groups should not be dismissed in policy debates over our media future, we should not dismiss radio broadcasting’s past as a period that contrasts with the revolutionary status of our media present. Instead, a renewed focus on the material histories of radio broadcasting’s past can challenge us to suspend universal assumptions about open markets and attend to the localized material practices and rights claims of the historically disenfranchised.

I have a range of thoughts about Nine for IX, which is a step forward for the role of women in ESPN’s 30 for 30 documentary series but also exists outside of the 30 for 30 series in a way that seems problematic: why does there have to be a distinct reason to highlight women in sports compared to the more general goals of 30 for 30, which should be equal across both genders? However, today’s broadcast of the Wimbledon Women’s Semi-Finals foregrounds this question of equality not only within sports, but also specifically within the broadcast coverage of those sports on channels like ESPN (which starting in 2012 became the exclusive television home of Wimbledon).

Today’s 10^th day of play at Wimbledon featured two pairs of semi-finals taking place simultaneously: the Women’s Semi-Finals on Centre Court, and the Men’s Doubles Semi-Finals on Court 1. ESPN’s broadcast coverage was scheduled as the Women’ Semi-Finals, with coverage of Court 1 streaming live online on ESPN3.com (where ESPN has featured streams of all televised courts throughout their coverage of the event). However, throughout the primary coverage of Marion Bartoli’s routine victory over Kirsten Flipkens and Sabine Lisicki’s tense three-set win over Agnieszka Radwanska, ESPN consistently shifted to Court 1 for key moments in the Bob and Mike Bryan’s five-set win over Rohan Bopanna and Edouard Roger-Vasselin.

To be clear, these were not simply short, 15-second status updates encouraging viewers to check out the full match on ESPN3. These were also not short updates taking place during breaks of play on Centre Court, as though to ensure there was active tennis for as many consecutive minutes as possible during coverage. Rather, these were long interludes of play necessitating cross-court updates in the top right corner of the screen on the women’s semi-final that was still ongoing on Centre Court, and in many cases still ongoing with tense back-and-forth tennis (specifically in the case of the Lisicki/Radwanska semi-final, which commentator Chrissie Evert lauded for its show of shot diversity and skill).

Some could argue that this decision speaks primarily to the ethnocentrism of ESPN’s tennis coverage. With no American player advancing to the semi-finals after Serena Williams’ exit in the Round of 16 and Sloane Stephens’ quarter-final loss to Bartoli, ESPN lost a national narrative during what they likely saw as a particularly national timeslot on the morning of the Fourth of July. The Bryan Brothers are long-time stalwarts for American tennis internationally, and are also competing for their fourth-straight major title—ESPN’s choice to highlight their efforts appealed to those who see tennis through the lens of those three-letter abbreviations after each player’s name, some of whom took to Twitter to advocate for more coverage of the Bryan Brothers’ match on nationalist grounds.

However, particularly only days after the debut of Nine for IX, it is hard not to see this as a blow against broadcast equality, a narrative also present on social media during ESPN’s coverage as per the above image. What are the chances of ESPN cutting away from tomorrow’s Men’s Semi-Finals between Novak Djokovic and Juan Martin Del Potro to highlight the Women’s Doubles Semi-Finals? Even if we explore the hypothetical of a prominent American women’s doubles pairing like Liezel Huber and Lisa Raymond—who are no longer playing as a team—competing in the Women’s event, would ESPN ever shift away from Andy Murray’s quest to become the first British man since Fred Perry to win Wimbledon to document the American team’s efforts to make the doubles final instead?

Within Venus Vs., director Ava DuVernay highlights many of the flawed arguments levied equal prize money and equality within tennis in general: men argued—and often still argue—the women’s game is less taxing, less exciting, and less popular (both in terms of attendance and broadcast ratings). Various representatives of the WTA and women’s tennis identified the flaws in these arguments, and in the case of broadcast ratings the counter-argument was that they were cyclical: sometimes women’s tennis is a larger draw, and sometimes men’s tennis is a larger draw.

However, I would argue that if we were to strip away the variables of nationhood and star power driving those cycles, ESPN and other broadcasters still believe men’s tennis is inherently a larger draw than women’s tennis. ESPN wouldn’t have cut away from marquee matchups featuring players like Serena Williams or Maria Sharapova as they did the matchups between these four players, which demonstrates the respect that the highest-ranked—and most recognizable—players on the women’s side have earned. With those players eliminated from the tournament, though, ESPN’s broadcasting decisions reveal their respect for those marquee players has not trickled down to the underdogs, creating a scenario where a battle between the number four women’s tennis player in the world seeking her second-straight Wimbledon final and a perpetual underdog trying to reach her first Wimbledon final is perceived as temporarily dispensable despite a high level of play.

It has long been common knowledge that ESPN’s coverage will be dictated by a homerism toward American contenders and global stars: you could hear the ESPN executives’ dismay when Williams and Stephens both exited, while the early exits of top contenders in both the Women’s and Men’s fields (Sharapova, Azarenka, Federer, Nadal) robbed them of many high-profile matchups later in the tournament. Today’s coverage, however, reaffirmed the intersectionality of sports and sports broadcasting: while the potential for gender equality may exist, it depends on circumstances in which gender equality is properly incentivized relative to higher priorities (and other hierarchies), circumstances that were apparently absent during today’s broadcast.

Setting aside the question of the viability of the broadcasters’ legal case, as well as the question of how useful Aereo might be for audiences, I’d like to consider the larger historical context of the broadcasters’ objections to Aereo. How might this case reflect how broadcasters are revising their commitment to “free” over-the-air (OTA) broadcasting? And how might this case reveal something about the shifting business models of OTA broadcasting, historically reliant solely on advertising revenues?

As other scholars have noted, proponents of advertising-supported U.S. broadcasting have since its origins in the 1920s-30s identified commercialism with freedom, both economic and political. Broadcasters get free spectrum, and the public gets programming free of cost to themselves and free from government control. They pay only with their attention to advertisers’ messages, attention organized and sold by broadcasters to advertisers. To address the criticism that a public resource, the spectrum, is being used for private gain, lawmakers require stations to serve the “public interest, convenience, and necessity”–a slight limitation on broadcasters’ First Amendment rights.

For nearly a century, competition to OTA has been regularly characterized not as a threat to broadcasters’ oligopoly but to “free” broadcasting and American liberty. For example, William Benton’s effort to create a subscription wired audio programming service (an early version of Muzak) was attacked for undermining “free” broadcasting, for attempting to impose a “tax” on listeners. Until 1977 or so, broadcasters prevented competition from cable television services by prevailing on the FCC to ban the importation of distant signals–an effort that, although it was actually designed to secure broadcasters’ oligopolistic control, was dressed up as the preservation of “free” programming from the threat of “pay TV.”

Today only about 10 percent of US households receive free OTA broadcasts. Most subscribe to multichannel video program distributors (cable operators, telcos, DBS, collectively known as MVPDs) and pay for the privilege of choosing among hundreds of program providers (most of which also carry advertising). After many court battles, some over copyright, others over the First Amendment, and many regulatory changes, the television industry has integrated broadcasting and cable networking in such a way as to allow the traditional OTA networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, CW) to receive a share of MVPD subscription revenues, known as retransmission consent (operators must compensate broadcasters for the retransmission of broadcast signals). These fees, as many have pointed out, are at stake if a disruptor like Aereo does not pay them to OTA networks.

When NewsCorp COO Chase Carey claims that, “Aereo is stealing our signal,” he ignores the fact the signal is still free to individual households (Aereo’s “theft” is based on a theory of “public performance”; Aereo claims its retransmission is a private performance). The exemption from fees, which in past eras was used to justify the ad-supported business model, is fading from memory: the industry now expects that audiences must pay. Since 85-87% of households do pay for television, the industry wants to believe this will remain the norm. However, over the top (OTT) services, such as Netflix, are providing options for cord cutters, “cord nevers,” and zero-TV households to opt out of the pay-TV bundles. (As broadband providers, the MVPDs are less endangered by this shift than the TV networks are.)

Carey’s threat to cut off Fox’s OTA signal and make the network available only through a MVPD subscription also indicates that many in the industry may be ready to discard the network/affiliate model of distribution. The technological need to use affiliates to retransmit network feeds has long since ended. Leaving the “free” broadcast spectrum would allow Fox to program without the onus of serving the public interest. Most view this threat as saber rattling, but it may be logical from both technological and economic perspectives: why continue to share retransmission fees with affiliates when Fox doesn’t need local stations or spectrum for national distribution?

Rather than embrace Aereo as a way to expand viewership (especially among cord cutters and cord nevers) and thus raise advertising airtime prices, broadcasters seem to be caught up in the fantasy that they are owed money for their transmissions–despite their continuing use of free public spectrum. Instead of relying on ad revenues fully to subsidize their programming, as they have for decades, broadcast networks today are expecting retransmission fees to become a greater percentage of their revenues (from about $2B/year to perhaps $6/B). Instead of embracing the possibilities of emerging business models, some of which rely on giving content away for free and so resemble the legacy broadcast business model, these broadcast networks are apparently throwing in their lot with the closed MVPD oligopolies, counting on retransmission fees to carry them, despite signs of consumer demand for alternate business models.

So, is the broadcasting business model dead if it is no longer “free” to most audiences and can no longer justify itself as promoting freedom and democracy as a uniquely “American system”? Should broadcasters be reminded that “free” programming is exactly what they are supposed to provide in exchange for their free (unpaid) use of the spectrum? Or is it time to take back the spectrum from commercial broadcasters and, perhaps, allow the development of a different use of the spectrum?

Broadcasting from sunrise to sunset

I have to admit, I listen to most of my “radio” online. Be it local community sponsored, pubic radio, college radio, or streaming commercial music stations from around the country, I listen to them all via computer, iPod, etc. However, the car seems to be the one place in which the radio waves, consumed the old fashioned way dominate.

But when my old standards failed me the other day (WSUM, WORT, oldies, and 93.1 Jamz if you’re curious. And yes, I’m one of the few people over the age of 14 that listen to that last station), I switched to the AM mode on my now outdated car radio and found Hit Radio WHIT — “The 50s, the 60s, every song’s a hit on Hit Radio WHIT” out of DeForest, WI. Aside from playing oldies you’d never hear on FM, at least not in Madison, WI anyway, the station only broadcasts from sunrise to sunset! I have yet to hear the sign on, but the experience of hearing a station sign off is actually amazing. As a media studies scholar, I almost feel like it’s blasphemous to say so, but dead air on the radio is fascinating!

At around 4.30pm, aka sunset during winter months, the song “Happy Trails” plays followed by a message from 1550 AM stating something along the lines of: “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, moms and dads; time for us to put the little tiny records in their little tiny beds. Tune in tomorrow. . .” And then dead air for about 2-3 minutes before an interfering signal kills the silence.

The absence of sound on an otherwise continuous stream is a bit jarring at first, but there’s also something almost pleasurable about it. And it’s unlike when your stream is re-buffering or cut out, the intentionality makes the silence completely different. When I thought about it though, it wasn’t the lack of sound, music, talk, coming from the receiver that was peaceful. It was what the silence signified that I appreciated.

Broadcasting from sunrise to sunset, in accordance with the presence of daylight, this is what I think I find attractive. The temporal coincidence of the signing off of a broadcasting station and the end of the day is something we rarely experience anymore. Let alone the day ending when the sun goes down! Both are nostalgic I think. I came across an HBO sign off from the 1980s recently that echoed the coincidence of signals ending when it was time to go to sleep.

Rarely, if at all do I hear aural cues from broadcasters telling listeners to end their day, go to sleep, eat dinner, and put the little tiny records in their little tiny beds. Yes, radio hosts sometimes make reference to morning and evening rush hours, and suppositions about what you might be doing at any given time, and might even beckon you to start and end your day with their station. But the act of starting and ending daylight hours with the start and end of a broadcast signal seems different.

The pleasure didn’t come from the fact that music wasn’t playing or the DJ wasn’t talking. Instead, that in the midst of the 24 hour, just in time labor, often non-local media landscape I often find myself enveloped in, there’s a place on the dial where the broadcasting day ends when the sun goes down. And my sun happens to be going down at the same time.

Have people encountered this part time model of radio broadcasting before? Or is this something exclusive to DeForest, WI?