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.

Growing out of the National Recording Preservation Plan (NRPP) of the National Recording Preservation Board (NRPB), the Radio Preservation Task Force (RPTF) is the Library of Congress’s first national radio history project.

The Radio Preservation Task Force (@radiotaskforce) was mandated by NRPB Chair Sam Brylawski in early 2014, and is directed by eminent broadcast historian and NRPB member Christopher Sterling, Associate Dean at George Washington University. Comprised of 100 media history faculty and the staff at the Library of American Broadcasting at the University of Maryland-College Park, the RPTF is currently aggregating participation from Affiliate Archives and assessing their collections. Radio shows that aired between 1925 and 1975 have been preserved in the form of “program transcriptions” – most often reel-to-reels or broadcasts pressed to vinyl. Thanks to previous work by the LoC, media libraries, and “Old Time Radio” (OTR) preservationists, the golden age of commercial radio is well represented at digital archives. The RPTF continues this work in application to local, regional, noncommercial, and under represented movements in broadcasting history.

Over the course of 2015 the RPTF will begin to analyze processed and unprocessed collections to create a national finding aid. Surveying the landscape of extant radio materials will require the application of metadata analytics to sound history, as well as the development of research caucuses comprised of faculty specialists and state university archivists. This work will culminate in an autumn radio history conference at the Library of Congress.

As we move closer to the conference, the RPTF will be airing features and series with our growing contingent of Online Partners beginning in November. Antenna will be running an ongoing series in which RPTF participants, graduate researchers, and radio practitioners will discuss historical and contemporary issues in radio studies. Over January and February Sounding Out! will air a short series on endangered radio collections, and In Media Res will run a week-long feature on radio archives. Next May, FlowTV will publish a special issue on historiographical and cultural questions facing radio researchers. Radio Survivor, a blog renowned for its ties to college radio, will post continued updates about the project. And we are delighted to name two preservation pioneers – Orphan Film Symposium and Ubuweb – as new partners.

Perpetually declared to be a dying medium, radio has continued to attract dedicated listeners and receive commercial and public support. We argue that the study of radio history is also a chronicle of cultural history in the United States. Radio historians have written about radio’s role during the progressive era, wartime propaganda, the origins of reception research, the struggle over the public sphere, program innovations in genre and journalism, and cultural tensions over gender and identity, among numerous other topics.

Yet so much of the cultural history of mass media remains inexplicably untapped, perhaps due to problems with availability and accessibility. Radio’s characteristic “liveness” has made it an integral tool for 20th century social movements, community building, civil rights, and local politics. Community and college programs have disseminated perspective, performance, and provided a medium for aesthetic experimentation. Educational and public stations have long aired (and hence preserved with their transcriptions) documentary evidence of national, regional, and local interviews, debates, curricula, and perspectives. Historical questions regarding the role of “old media” in social advocacy, cultural conflict, race, orientation, class, labor, and political uses of technology, are in many cases lying in wait to receive their first historical exegeses by media scholars. We hope that making radio materials widely accessible will help to encourage further interdisciplinary discourse about technology’s role in American history.

The RPTF is organized to encourage the preservation, research, and pedagogical application of media history through the implementation of five core initiatives, also listed at our Library of Congress site.

1. To support collaboration between faculty researchers and archivists toward the preservation of radio history
2. To develop an online inventory of extant American radio archival collections, focusing on recorded sound holdings, including research aids
3. To identify and save endangered collections
4. To develop pedagogical guides for utilizing radio and sound archives
5. To act as a clearing house to encourage and expand academic study on the cultural history of radio through the location of grants, the creation of research caucuses, and development of metadata on extant materials