Struggling over Politics and Culture: Organized Labor and Radio Station WEVD during the 1930s
By the early years of the Great Depression, corporate-controlled national radio networks, Hollywood-centered motion picture producers, and large-circulation daily newspapers appeared to dominate the means of ideological and cultural production in the U.S. Labor, progressive, and radical leaders correctly perceived the mass media as an integral part of the larger social and economic relations of production. Echoing the insights of Karl Marx, they warned of how the nation’s dominant propertied classes would seek to control society’s “governing ideas and motives” by manipulating the mass media to justify, among other things, “great inequalities in wealth in the community.” Edward Nockels of the Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL), for example, protested that network radio reinforced the luster of consumption, the holiness of the marketplace, and the infallibility of business. The Socialist Party contended that commercial radio programs were as standardized as anything rolling out of a Ford factory. Nockels described such shows as bland entertainment “when not outright propaganda or delusive special pleading.” Such criticisms foreshadowed the arguments of émigré European intellectuals who, by the late 1930s, would denounce mass culture for its bourgeois “consumerism, intellectual vapidness, and political complacency,” and contend that ruling groups used it “to manipulate, pacify, and control” the general public. In recent decades, historians have come to comprehend popular culture as a complicated arena of social, political, and cultural con ict. One component of this reconceptualization of popular culture has been an emphasis on the active role that workers and working-class organizations themselves played in “consuming” and “producing” cultural goods. Michael Denning has gone the furthest in arguing that the decade of the
From Socialism to “Sentiment”: Toward a Political Economy of Communities, Counterpublics, and Their Media Through Jewish Working Class History
Although counterpublics have been well theorized by N. Fraser (1992) and M. Warner (2002), little research has been carried out along the lines of J. Habermas's (1962/1989/1991) original study, examining their “structural transformation.” Working class history might be used as a method to understand the interaction between the state-corporate nexus and counterpublics. Through an overview of Jewish working-class history in the United States, I demonstrate that counterpublics and their media are shaped in relation to the state and commercial interests, and community activity. I argue that attention to the role of community, as conceived by J. Dewey (1927/1954), might help us move (counter)public sphere theory away from a Eurocentric and toward a humanocentric (S. Gunaratne, 2005, 2006) framework.
Labor in the Radio News: An Analysis of Content
I SUMMER and fall of 1944 the CIO Political Action Committee adopted a new approach to an old controversy about the treatment of labor on the air. For a long time the leaders of organized labor have contended that newspaper and radio reporting 01 labor news is biased and unfair. Press and radio owners have vigorously denied this charge. During the presidential campaign the PAC decided to sponsor a 8tudy of radio news which would determine, at least in part, which side is right. The research technique employed in the study was "content analysis" 1 the quantitative analysi8 of content. Although relatively new, this technique is regularly utilized by govemment agencies, pressure groups, and policymakers of all kinds tokeep them abreast of the reception of their policies in the channels of communication. It also is tiled by sociologists and psychologists who are interested in the content of press, radio, and film for scientific reasons. This particular investigation set out to answer seven questions: