Bill Kirkpatrick: Dissertation Abstract
LOCALISM IN AMERICAN MEDIA, 1920-1934
by Bill Kirkpatrick
Previous scholarship has considered localism in broadcast regulation—i.e. policies designed to encourage support for geographically based local identities and public spheres through a licensee's program service—a well-meaning but failed attempt to recover pre-modern small-town life. According to this view, policymakers in Congress and regulators in the Commerce Department and the Federal Radio Commission (FRC) were motivated by nostalgia or sentimentality to resist the nationalizing and modernizing trends of twentieth-century American life. They failed, such studies assert, either because the economic pressure or audience desire for national programming was too strong, or because the FRC was too weak to stand up to large commercial broadcasters.
This study challenges that received view and argues instead that localism in American media before 1934 was not a straightforward effort to foster local identities and public spheres. Instead, localism—both in the media and in American political thought—constituted a key battleground for largely class-based conflicts over economic and cultural changes in U.S. society. Localism was not simply an effort to resist or slow modernization, but became the site of ongoing struggles over how and on whose terms the modernization of America's economy, culture, technological infrastructure, and social networks would occur.
These struggles shaped a range of important features of American media and politics: how a common-sense classification of stations developed, producing the idea of "local" and "national" stations long before any policymakers organized broadcast service into those categories; how regulators used discourses and structures of localism to achieve a modern, professional, and national radio service; how network employees at NBC and CBS articulated their national mission and tried to balance local and national business interests, profoundly affecting the growth of the networks and their programs; and how individual localities could advance their interests within a modernizing America and participate in radio's spatial, political, economic, and cultural reorganization of the nation on their own terms.
Viewing early radio history through the lens of localism allows the re-examination of the philosophy of localism both as a democratic political concept with a long history in American thought, and as a fundamental principle of media policy.
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