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âEssential, Desirable, and Possible Marketsâ
Broadcasting Midwestern Tastes and Values
As a technological, infrastructural method of content distribution and market organization, networking developed in the United States coincident with and integral to the final solidification of cross-continental settlement, the emergence of the mass consumer market, and the conceptualization of a national audience, or conjoined, national community. From its emergence in vaudeville, through the radio age and televisionâs standardization, networking has been prerequisite to the modern, cultural imagination of the nation. Ideally, it allows for the âspecial kind of contemporaneous communityâ and âunisonanceâ theorized by Benedict Anderson as âthe technical means for ârepresentingâ the kind of imagined community that is the nation.â1 And yet, this idealized notion of âunisonanceâ effaces the tensions and struggles between region and nation that consistently appear in historical discourse. Such struggles encourage us to consider the significant unevenness with which networking was actually realized (both spatially and temporally). This unevenness is structured into networking by the geographic expanse of the United States, but it also has been encouraged in institutional, regulatory, and cultural struggles to balance the systemâs inherently conflicting imperatives: Organized as a for-profit market, broadcasting is also mandated to serve in the public interest.
While, in the interest of national integration, network promotional rhetoric promised âunisonanceâ via the broad American publicâs equal access to broadcasting service, economic imperatives encouraged a much more cautious developmental approach. Behind closed doors, network strategy emphasized universal access as a distant âpossibility,â focusing, instead, on the practicality of selective market cultivation. Regional âdifferenceâ from the national network remained simultaneously powerful, however, as law and regulatory policyâs locus of expected service ideals and obligations.
âPublic interestâ refers both to access to broadcast media outlets and to a judgment of the content or âcharacterâ of programming provided therein. While national network programming is idealized as shared public culture, locally affiliated stations are charged with providing programs that meet the particular needs and interests of the specifically regional viewing audience each serves. Historically, lawmakers and regulators relied upon recourse to presumed, distinct regional differences to challenge monopolistic network practices and, periodically, to re-calibrate network profit motives. As broadcasting developed and stabilized, nationally, it relied upon regional difference to manage and balance its founding paradox. In network planning documents, broadcast law, and regulatory policy from the 1920s through the immediate postwar era, the Midwest and midwesternness often became the site through which âservice in the public interestâ and profit imperatives were assessed and defined.
Struggles over regional definitions are, across this history, struggles to define representative American ideals through comparative market value and social ranking. The formation of national corporate culture required the development of differentiated, âperceived ⊠âtaste markets.ââ2 The history of broadcast networking exemplifies how these markets were created and addressed. Specifically, network development rationales, broadcast law, and regulatory policy can be studied in terms of broader assumptions regarding midwesternness as a comparative capital relation or âclassedâ disposition allied with rurality, traditional modes of cultural expression, and relatively homogenous tastes. The networked Midwest is uniquely imagined as distant from cultural trends and as the most âmass,â homogeneous, stable market within the continental expanse.
This chapter examines three interrelated phenomena in network broadcast development, chronologically, from the 1920s until 1950: the emergence of the Midwest as cartographic region and symbolic Heartland in relation to ânationalâ ideals in the period; network development and expansion as it was marked by a conflict between public appeals to universal access and an internal focus on economy of scale; and broadcast lawâs and regulatory policyâs struggle to define, balance, and apply local âserviceâ ideals within the framework of national market development. The history of broadcast networking and localism in the United States most typically has been told in one of two ways: either through analysis of broad macro-political institutional struggles (focusing on network development in technical, physical, infrastructural, and economic terms), or through analysis of cultural tensions at the level of everyday engagements with media (focusing on, for example, local resistance to network representation and battles over scheduling and sponsorship control). Here I argue that if the histories of network development and broadcast policy are read in dialogue with contemporary understandings of regionalism, then institutional and cultural struggles over networking, instead, emerge as integral to and inseparable from one another. This chapter interrogates how broadly circulating mythologies of geographic âdifferenceâ shaped and became codified within network development plans, broadcast law, and regulatory policy independent of programming and reception. It argues that a particularly selective and limited way of imagining the Midwest as Heartland has been encouraged and reinforced structurally as well as symbolically in broadcast history, and considers how this, in turn, has encouraged certain understandings of the regionâs value for the nation.
Historian Leo Marx once proposed that if geography was âa perpetual reminder of American differences,â then technology represented âthe possibility of plenty shared by all.â3 Here, Marx points to a key, if often implicit, assumption in media history and theoryâthat âregionâ and ânetworkâ are conceptually antithetical terms. The basis for this opposition rests in an understanding of networking as a âspace-bindingâ structural and technological phenomenon, while conversely region and region-based markets and culture are âplace-bound.â The network expands over territory in ways that benefit national and international market goals, exploiting spatial reach for efficiencies of scale. Networking is understood as a technological, economic, social, and cultural framework for the reorganization of space and time from the region and local expression to seemingly âplaceless,â modern, national modes of production and consumption.4 Networksâ âbiasâ relations toward a âhigh communications policy,⊠aimed solely at spreading messages further in space and reducing the cost of transmission.â5
Media scholar David Morley nuances this conventional network/region tension by pointing out that âwhile, of course, it must be acknowledged that new communications technologies are producing new definitions of time, space, and community, these are not necessarily erasing but rather overlaying old understandings of distance and duration.â Analysis of this dynamic in broadcast history thus requires interrogation âof how physical and symbolic networks become entwined around each other.â6 This sense of entanglement is particularly significant as regards the Midwest-as-Heartland, a geographic and perceptual region that, in a real historical sense, can physically and symbolically only be imagined through networked media.
The Physical and Symbolic Entwined: Regional Labels and National Value
James Shortridge argues that âmore than seventy years elapsed between the first use of the term Middle Westâ in the late 1820s, and the second, in the 1880s, concurrent with the active spatial reordering of a U.S. map that now differentiated the âcomparatively settled and stable âmiddleâ statesâ from the far western frontier and from the newly incorporated southwest.7 This sense of the Midwest as comparatively settled was encouraged by the regionâs increased centrality in transportation and commerce. With the expansion of railroads and telegraphy through the end of the nineteenth century, the northern channels of trade, which extended west from New York, and the southern channels of trade, which flowed through the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, converged to complete the transformation of Chicago from âhinterlandâ outpost to critically central, national hub. The Midwest was the nationâs cartographic âmiddle,â balancing between the relatively untamed West and the established East. And, the region was the nationâs economic âmiddle,â representative of âthe rise of middle class values and institutions of capitalism.â8 By extension, the Midwest was linked in the popular discourse of the period to qualities of âbalanceâ and solidity of characterâparticularly as evidenced in increased reference to the region as the nationâs âheart,â as the countryâs âmost sensibleâ region, as a place more âevenly American in toneâ than others, and, explicitly, as the âmost American part of America.â9
British cultural studies scholar Raymond Williamsâs The Country and the City suggests that this late nineteenth-century valorization of the Midwest as the nationâs âheartâ should be considered in the context of a broader western cultural revaluation of pastoral life in the face of new national communication and transportation systems, which forged unprecedented modern, economic, and extra-regional relations. The Midwestâs persistent association with the pastoral as temporally past tenseâas evocative of former life and culture, as the storehouse of âtraditionalâ modes of production and consumptionâhere contrasts with the ânation,â imagined as allied with the same sense of simultaneous âempty timeâ that characterizes space-binding network technology. Rural life and culture are thus counterpoised to modernity and national imperatives of progress. And yet, the Heartland also conjures a nostalgic realm of possibility as the âlastâ bastion of face-to-face, âknowableâ community in modern, market-oriented culture. The apparent need for the Midwest as imagined locus of unchanging values and traditions is striking, considering the market centrality of Chicago and other urban midwestern sitesâespecially Cleveland, Detroit, and St. Louisâin the development and success of a truly national economy. However, by the late 1920s, once cross-continental markets were achieved and stabilized, popular representations of the region began to excise such urban hubs from their storehouse of images. The myth of the U.S. Midwest as Heartland began to coalesce around a highly selective set of pastoral values and ideals positively associated with rural life and folk-cultural traditions as a national repository for the values of producerism, thrift, and humility. By the 1930s, cities such as Chicago were explicitly considered âextra-regionalâ exceptions to the Midwest status-quo which was now, thoroughly, allied with pastoralism and considered to be home to ânatural peace, innocence, simple virtue,â a producer ethic, and âauthenticâ American idealism.10 Pastoral/rural life and culture and industrial/urban life and culture were now âsegregated mentally: the former was assigned to a regional âboxâ called Middle West; the latter to one called East. . . . This left the term Middle West free to be employed ⊠as a synonym for rural America.â11
Network Development and the Social Ranking of Markets
Though this chapter focuses on network development, broadcast law, and policy particularly as each relates to television, any such history necessitates reference to âpre-TVâ precedents. Networking emerged out of transportation and communication infrastructures of the late 1800s. Television followed the same service patterns and is legislated and regulated by the same guidelines and bodies as radio before it. This chapter thus uses the term âbroadcastingâ to refer to both radio and television, particularly as the laws, policies, and development plans studied here pertain to the development and operation of the âBig Threeâ radio and TV networks, NBC, CBS, and ABC. Additionally, I here refer to local stations that are affiliates of these networks (rather than independent stations or those of the Big Threeâs challengers). While such focus risks âprivilege[ing] national consciousness at the expense of local identities,â my intent is exactly thisâto theorize how the national imagination is itself built up by reference to the âlocal,â particularly in ways that license or limit understandings of place.12
In historical focus here is the period from the late 1920s through the immediate postâWorld War II era. Between the late 1920s and the mid-1950s, the âBig Threeâ television networks of NBC, CBS, and ABC were formed, expanded nationally, and solidified as the controlling U.S. network powersâa position of dominance they each held until the early 1990s when cable homes began to outnumber over-air broadcast reception homes for the first time in U.S. history. Paradoxically, as the networks became increasingly national in their distribution capabilities they became simultaneously more âlocal,â concentrating all network production and business operations in New York City and Los Angeles by the late 1950s. This period includes the development and institution of broadcast laws that remained fundamentally unchanged until the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The period of analysis thus begins with the opening of the broadcast era and concludes with the preeminence of the âBig Threeâ networks, anchored on either coast, as broadcast policy undergirded the growth and stability of network television which realized its promise to be a national presence in U.S. homes.13
While network promotional rhetoric promised that television would be an âimmediateâ postwar service for all Americans, the reality of the mediumâs gradual availability was much more staggered and uneven. The speed with which networking developed to serve a truly national audienceâparticularly in midwestern and mountain west regionsâwas biased heavily by the way the pre-existing âbonesâ of the system encouraged expansion along certain channels of transportation and communication over others. Network expansion plans were mapped to maximize economy of scale and to prioritize service only as it was economically strategic. Thus, while televisionâs introduction at the New York Worldâs Fair in 1939 showcased the Middleton familyâs eagerness to adopt TV, regular network service in their hometown of Riverdale, Indiana was not yet a guarantee. The public promise of universal access and national service was tempered by institutional imperatives.
In 1926 the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) famously took out full-page newspaper advertisements to announce the formation of its programming and distribution arm, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). The ads promised that, through networking, events of national importance would never again escape a broad American public now guaranteed the best possible programming on an everyday basis. The advertisement promoted networking as an idealized venue for national integration. The resources of a large corporation would allow for âbetter programs permanently assured ⊠in the interest of the listening public.â14 And yet, the advertisement also qualified that
[t]he National Broadcasting Company will not only broadcast these programs through station WEAF, but it will make them available to other broadcasting stations throughout the country so far as it may be practicable to do so, ⊠It is hoped that arrangements may be made so that every event of national importance may be broadcast widely throughout the United States.15
RCA, here, seems somewhat more circumspect regarding the prospect of rapid and immediate network service to the majority of the country than is recounted in most broadcast histories. Perhaps experiences within NBCâs corporate family contributed to this qualified tone. According to historian David Nye, General Electric and Westinghouse were so eager to expand into rural farming markets in the early 1920s that one-fifth of the companiesâ magazine advertisements were directed to that market, while each also invested in promotions such as an âall electric farmâ installation at the Pennsylvania State Farm Products Show.16 By the close of the decade, however, these corporations and power comp...