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By Root 1743 0

omnipotence have been nothing more than poorly veiled attempts at creating a favorable regulatory climate—and who would dare to regulate humanity’s triumph? But in the earliest stages of its history, radio was also seen as a way to educate the public about politics and raise the level of political discourse; it was widely expected to force politicians to carefully plan their speeches. In the early 1920s, the New Republic applauded radio’s political effects, for the invention “has found a way to dispense with political middlemen” and even “has restored the demos on which republican government is founded.”

Not surprisingly, radio was seen as superior to the previous medium of political communications, the newspaper. As one editorial writer put it in 1924: “Let a legislator commit himself to some policy that is obviously senseless, and the editorial writers must first proclaim his imbecility to the community. But let the radiophone in the legislative halls of the future flash his absurdities into space and a whole state hears them at once.” Just the way today’s politicians are told to fear their “Macaca moment,” politicians of yester year were told to fear their “radio moment.” Like the Internet today, radio was believed to be changing the nature of political relations between citizens and their governments. In 1928, Collier’s magazine declared that “the radio properly used will do more for popular government that have most of the wars for freedom and self government,” adding that “the radio makes politics personal and interesting and therefore important.” But it didn’t take long for the public mood to sour again. By 1930 even the initially optimistic New Republic reached the verdict that “broadly speaking, the radio in America is going to waste.” In 1942 Paul Lazarsfeld, a prominent communications scholar at Columbia University, concluded that “by and large, radio has so far been a conservative force in American life and has produced but few elements of social progress.”

The disappointment was caused by a number of factors, not least the dubious uses to which the technology was put by governments. As Asa Briggs and Peter Burke point out in their comprehensive A Social History of the Media, “the ‘age of radio’ was not only the age of Roosevelt and Churchill but also that of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin.” That so many dictators profited so much from radio dampened the nearly universal enthusiasm for the medium, while its commercialization by big business alienated those who hoped it would make the public conversation more serious. It’s not hard to guess Lazarsfeld’s reaction to the era of Rush Limbaugh.

Radio’s fading democratizing potential did not preclude a new generation of pundits, scholars, and entrepreneurs from making equally overblown claims about television. From the 1920s onward, Orrin Dunlap, one of the first television and radio critics for the New York Times, was making an argument already familiar to those who studied the history of the telegraph, the airplane, or the radio. “Television,” wrote Dunlap, without even a shade of doubt, “will usher in a new era of friendly intercourse between the nations of the earth,” while “current conceptions of foreign countries will be changed.” David Sarnoff, head of the Radio Corporation of America, believed that another global village was in the making: “When television has fulfilled its ultimate destiny ... with this may come ... a new sense of freedom, and ... a finer and broader understanding between all the peoples of the world.”

Lee De Forest, the famed American inventor, held high hopes for the educational potential of television, believing that it could even reduce the number of traffic incidents. “Can we imagine,” he asked in 1928, “a more potent means for teaching the public the art of careful driving safety upon our highways than a weekly talk by some earnest police traffic officer, illustrated with diagrams and photographs?” That such programs never really made it to mainstream American television is unfortunate—especially in an era when drivers are texting