October 10 - Studying TV and an Introduction to US Broadcasting Policy

Case Study: The US and Latin America II

• Basic relationship between US and latin american governed by monroe doctorine

• US has right to intervene in affairs of any region in western hemisphere whenever american

interests were threatened, formed basis for US policy until 1934

• Regular armed intervention and occupation of offending countries

• Policy was not same as european colonialism

• US presence in counties occupied lasted only long enough to put a local elite into power and

would continue the job of protecting american interests

• 1933 roosevelt good neighbour policy- shift from hard to soft power

• Use carrot of diplomacy and trade to maintain US dominance in area instead of stick of

military force

• Put into practice with withdrawal of US troops from Nicaragua and haiti

• Ww2 US created office of coordinator of interamerican affairs 1940

• Goal of agency was to Promote co-operating and friendship between US an neighbour by

supporting export of press and radio propaganda programs, the export of Hollywood feature

films and newsreels

• They form motion picture society for the americas to liaise with various leader in the movie

colony In hollywood

• Tasked with prevent appearance of negative images of latin america in american films and

encouraging hollywood studios to make more films about the region

• OCIAA encouraged hollywood to make movies showing latin americans in positive light and

avoid cruder stereotypes of earlier hollywood productions

Readings: Textbook Chapter 6

• Commercial radio broadcasting began shortly after WW1

• Technology behind it goes back to 1890 though developing technologies required for a system

of wireless telegraphy or telegraph transmission without wire

• Laid basis for what we call the radio

• Ship-to-ship and ship-to-shore used this communication and main use for radio first 2 years

• Radio was used extensively during WW1

• Hobby of 2 way radio became popular

• Form a patent pool called radio corporation of america

• First commercial radio station KDKA, opened by westinghouse in 1920 in Pittsburgh

• Early 20s anyone could set up radio station

• Religion and education station

• Competition and cutting of stations

• Progressivism was a complicated set of political and social beliefs that were popular in the late

19th century and early 20th century

• Response to social problems created by rise of industrial capitalism

• Embraced by people who were on left or right of political spectrum

• Progressivism identified with aspirations of framers, immigrants and industrialists but also

members of middle class treated by corruption and immorality of changing social system

• Government had a important role in controlling society

• Government can establish regulation either expands or restricts the power of individuals in

society

• Prohibition 1919-1933

• Progressivist ideology: power of corporations over society and other was a fear that individuals

potentially disruptive to society could get hold of the airwaves

• Radio act of 1927: limit access to airwaves to a few responsible broadcasters

• Left to itself the radio spectrum could become dominated by all kinds of potentially subversive

voices and there was a need to limit the number of potential voices

• Freedom to listen not freedom to broadcast

• Radio industry developed a system of using advertising to pay for its ongoing costs

• American system of commercial broadcasting unique

• Authoritarian countries used it as a form of social control while representative democracies

saw these media as an import form of moral and intellectual uplift

• Many felt commercial system was geared too much to provision of entertainment

• 25% of all radio frequencies to education and religious organizations

• 20s and 30s american commercial radio grew into a dominant form of mass media

• Idea that radio could be used by government to keep its citizens informed or by educational

institutions to reach out to students was largely defeated

• NBC,CBS,ABC dominated radio and television when it arrived in 1941

The TV Reader Chapters 1 and 2

• Chapter 1

• Television as culture and mass mediated communication

• Culture originally meant tending or cultivation of something (animals/crops in particular)

• Since 18th century culture: as a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period or a

group of humanity in general OR as the works and practice of intellectual and especially

artistic activity

• Tv is interwoven with customs, beliefs and practices which constitute the way of life of a

specific group of people

• A significant cultural product that the culture industries of canada and the united states

produce and distribute as a commodity in a marketplace

• Jerry mander believed that tav made viewers susceptible to ideological manipulation by

elites and threatened democracy

• tvfa (tv free america) has promoted richer, healthier and more productive lives families and

communities

• Television is a routined cultural practice

• People are differentiated by their socio-economic class, political views and gender,

ethnicity and religion

• What many people share inc ommon in NA is their consumption of TV

• Embedded in custom, believe and practice, tv is an integral part of canadian and american

cultures

• Television is a form of mass mediated communication

• Television broadcasting is an imprint form of mass mediated communication; involves

transmission or carriage of tav shows from one point to another over vast distances

• Sender to receiver

• Viewers my give networks feedback through ratings, blogging, sending emails or changing

the channel

• Three types of viewer decoding

• Dominant hegemonic decoding (accept tvs preferred msg)

• Negotiated decoding (understand preferred meaning but slightly dissent from it)

• Oppositional decoding (viewer understand dominant meaning but reformulate, criticize

and reconstitute it in different ways)

• Television shows as texts: ideology and identity:

• Sitcoms to convey meaning to entertain, news clips to communicate meaning to inform, ads

impart meaning to persuade

• Tv is often a significant instrument of influence that shapes public consciousness,

perceptions and viewpoints

• tv represents a sense of reality to viewers that is never valueneutral

• tv shows are not apolitical, harmless or value free forms of interment

• tv shows are carriers of ideology,defined here as a system of ideas characteristic of a

dominate class or group in society, or illusory fake or distorted ideas that my be contrasted

with true or objective knowledge

• Marxists argue tv represent reality promoting capitalist ideology

• Capitalism leads to conflate between owner and workers, rich and poor

• Capitalist ideology presents rugged individualism, extreme self interest and competition as

good for everyone; private property, public goods as waste

• tv shows convey and legitimize and moralize capitalist ideology, promote false

consciousness and misrepresent the experience of the working class

• Hegemony degree ruling class to exert moral leadership in society using strategies of

coercion and ideological persuasion, brute force and const building

• Cultural marxists view tv as an instrument of ideological persuasion used to organize the

contest of people to the goals of a ruling bloc

• Not all tv shows communicate a single dominate ideology that serves on dominant class

• tv shows participate in political struggles for hegemony, legitimizing and delegitimizing

different ideologies

• tv participates in the ideological reproduction of capitalism and class dominance

• tv promotes ideology of patriarchy or male dominance

• Women treated in oppressive ways

• Men control more wealth, women expected to do unpaid jobs like cook and clean

• tv shows represent women in stereotypical gender roles that distort the complexity,

independence and diversity of women

• Represent women has innately domestic beings, emotionally unstable and infantile,

dependent on men, one dimensional beauties and dehumanized sex objects

• Represents men and masculinity and challenge heteronormativity of the feudal by

exploring representations of LGBT

• Racism in tv : idea that there are inherent, essential unchanging differences in a group of

peoples physical and psychological traits and capacities due to their race and as a

consequence forms of racist oppression and discrimination against the radicalized group in

society are okay

• Innately superior vs inferior

• Middle class white as superior norm

• Assimilation tv distinguish the complete elimination or marginilization of social and

cultural differences in the interest of shared and universal similarities

• Pluralist tv emphasize differences between white and non white people

• Multicultural tv try to represent lives, experiences and struggles of non white people and

groups from their own vantage point

• Critical studies of tv's ideological representations of class gender and race demonstrate that

commercially popular tav shows dont reflect everyone in society but often privilege the

representation of some people

• They usually overrepresent middle class

• Most tav shows are designated to resonate with a specific audience demographic that is

targeted by advertisers

• If the text can be interpreted many ways then the show will be a hit

• They must resonate with the fears, hopes, anxieties, desires, experiences and attitudes of

the particular viewers that address their audience

• Tv shows as escapism

• Postmodernists believe people can no longer distinguish between fact and fiction, actuality

and virtuality (tv world and real world)

• Television audience

• Mass audience

• Who watches, what they think, where they watch, why they watch and how they decode

• Television as communication technology

• Technological determinists say technology is primary agent of social change

• tv impacted and transformed society

• Whether politics, religion, news, war, sexuality, teaching or learning, television so alters

them that they have no other quality or substance than entertainment value

• tv is responsible for the dissolution of public scours in NA and it conversion into the art of

show business

• Religious techno-pessimists believe tv crass secular content is threat to religious doctrine

• tv's technological form, function, use and impact in society are shaped y the choices of

societies large scale structure and organizations

• Television is shaped in profound ways by capitalism and the action state. Represent

powerful interests of corporate ands state actors

• Chapter 2

• Radio act of 1927: regulated radio broadcasting as a mass medium

• The radio act of 1927 remains the legislative cornerstone of governing broadcasting in the US

today

• The principal players in writing the legislation were either progressive or influenced

progressive ideology

• Language of the act had its precincts in progressive legislation, legal cornerstone of public

interest, conscience and necessity

• Parts of the congressional debate dealing with free speech issues for broadcasters expressed

progressive concepts of epistemology and ideology. Language of the act put into praxis

progressive concepts of epistemology and ideology..the solution contained within the radio act

to resolve points of contention likewise reflect progressive concepts of epistemology and

ideology

• Members of public interested in radio legislation accepted a progressive concept of regulation

based on public interest standard

• Progressive concept of free speech convinced with contemporary ruins of Us supreme court

which define free speech rights

• Radio was intended to be the voice for the dominate values in american culture as those values

were understood by the progressive and by many middle class americans••

• Congress never intended for radio broadcasting to be an unfettered marketplace of ideas

• The progressives

• Progressivism grassroot reform movement in 1800s, aspirations of farmers immigrants and

industrialists but also members of the middle class threatened by the corruption and

immorality of chaining social systems

• Progressive members of middle class sough to define their place in new order

• Middle class led the way in a shift form rural, agricultural, small town thinking to urban

industrial, big government solution

• Progressives found too much individualism and freedom threatened society

• In the radio act of 1927, the congressmen, regardless of party, accepted a progressive way

of thinking about the role and mechanisms of government

• The praxis of ideology

• Progressivism was one of the competing/emerging ideologies within the hegemony of the

1920s

• Hegemony: social interplay of groups which compete for dominance

• Progression of the development of those in power and those on the fringes of power

• Perceptive recognizes dominant group whose ideas maintain the dominate position within

the social system while acknowledging the existence of competing ideologies

• Hegemony is a concept which at one includes and goes beyond the term culture and

ideology

• Hegemony continues to be renewed, recreated, defended and modified

• Continually resisted, limited, altered and challenged by pressures not at all its own

• Hegemonic dominance is never either total or exclusive

• The forces of silence and surveillance were unified when the progressives codified their

assumptions into the radio act of 1927

• The praxis, the socio-political implementation of the ideas that one becomes ideological

and where the actual doing begins to inform the philosophical assumptions

• Radio acts public interest, convince and necessity standard and the creation of the federal

radio commission performed ideological functions for the progressives

• Only those voices fitting into the framework of the dominant ideology, as designed by

progressives, were granted access to media

• Ideological assumptions of the progressives, who were the primary promoters of this act

and the ordinate force behind ensuring federal radio commission

• The principal players

• 4 principal players

• Clarence dill

• Herbert hoover

• Considered control of radio important to the functioning of the federal government

• Federal government needed radio to be effective and would require direct

government control over some aspects of broadcasting

• Predicated free speech and public service upon existence of the moral hand

• Wanted to be responsible for licensing

• President coolidge

• Congressmen Wallace white

• The white bill not only reflected the congressman thinking but the RCA and hoover, with

agreement of president coolidge

• Hoover, collidge, senators and white agreed on what federal regulation could achieve and

sought similar goals for radio; disagreement was over mechanisms of government to sue to

achieve those goals

• The need for legislation

• Anyone could broadcast in frequency chosen by hoover

• Airways by 1926 were an open forum for anyone with expertise and equipment to reach an

audience with 25million potential listeners

• Too many people on bandwaves and threatened economics of radio

• Undisciplined and unregulated voice of public interfered with corporate goals of delivering

programming and advertising on a dependable schedule to mass audience

• White and dill try to bring order out of chaos as they led the year long fight in 1926 to pass

legislation to regulate radio, leading to radio act signed by calvin coolidge in feb 1927

• The historical argument

• End result was to transform industry from amateur communication to nationwide

broadcasting which met the economic needs of the major radio corporations

• The founders of the legislation sought to provide a degree of regulation that would preserve

industrial freedom and public interest

• The congressional goal in the radio act was not government censorship, but many in

congress feared the power of radio

• The free speech debate

• Pittman and davis believed that RCA was conspiring to turn radio into a monopoly

• RCA would use the voice of radio to gain great political power and to shape thought in

america

• White was creating a right to listen and equating it with freedom of speech

• Congressional intent was to give choice to the political parties by the middle class while

the candidates of immigrants, many of who supported unions or radical political change,

would have limited access to airwaves

• As praxis in the radio act regulated free speech meant that the only discussions to be heard

over the radio would be those consistent with the ideology of the progressives

• Progressive agenda could be presented to the public

• Within such an ideological context, the radio act of 1927 becomes a performance of

progressive ideology

• Radio act put the mechanisms in place for control of the airwaves through surveillance and

silence

• The determination would be based on the assumption that listeners did not have a right to

speak, only to hear

• Radio station owners had lost the right to speak for themselves, but in return they could use

the electromagnetic spectrum to make money through advertising

• For progressives such as dill, white and hoover, technology and progress could go

forwards, controlled by the moralistic hand of the middle class and the power of public

interest, convince and necessity

• Public interest, connivence and necessity

• The goal of the public was to empower the commission to limit the amount of adverting,

prohibit programs that it decide were harmful to the public as a whole and to refuse to

renew licenses of those ow disregarded its ruling

• Whit did not believe that protecting the public interest was censorship but that it was about

as far as we can go in permanent legislation regulate broadcasters

• Radio act protected profits, serving publics demand for entertainment

• It accomplished the social and legal compromises of progressive reform and the appeal to

public service and welfare

• The public perspective

• Radio offered an easy solution to any legislative limitation on the speaking public

• Freedom of the air does not require that everyone who wises to impress himself of the radio

audience need have his private microphone to do so

• Unlimited yes will lead to its destruction

• Propagandists, religious zealots and unprincipled persons are using rdio to grind their own

axes

• Free speech: the us supreme court concept

• A discussion of radical political change would not only seem to violate the radio acts

standard of public interest, connivence and necessity but also be illegal

• Conclusions

• White a hoover sought to balance the profit needs of the radio industry against the

entertainment requirements of the public

• Relied on the progressive concept of public interest, connivence and necessity to achieve

and maintain that balance

• Dill took a more insurgent approach forcing hoover and white to accept federal radio

commission, in hopes to protect the public interest of the monopolist design of RCA

• All wanted commission to play a role in radio regulation, argument over which branch of

the federal government should provide surveillance over the radios voices, not if there

should be surveillance

• Did not consider surveillance as being a restriction on free speech nor did they object to the

silencing of radical or immoral voices

• Progressive perspective--free speech meant the freedom to behave in a responsible manner

• Progressive epistemological and ideological assumptions were put into praxis through

public interest, connivence and necessity and the creation of the FRC

Screening: Big Dream, Small Screen (1997), Saludos Amigos (1942)

Lecture:

- radio started as wireless telegraphy

- Numerous inventors created the various technologies that made radio possible

- Used by the military before and during WW1

- Ships could communicate with other ships

- Amateur and commercial broadcasters compete for control of the airwaves in the 1920s

- Congress decides who has right to use airwaves

- Radio goes from 2 way to 1 way communication

- Radio act of 1927 - progressivism

- Idea that government should regulate the behaviour of individuals and institutions such as

corporations

- Provided programming to get them to buy radio receivers

- Sell air time to advertisers

- RCA radio cooporation of america

- Government needs to regulate things like airwaves to keep people in their place

- Progressivism also did prohibition

- People have the freedom to listen, but not to speak

- Religious and educational programs werent allowed

- Advertising to pay for its costs

- Broadcasting is the child of the state

- Radio broadcasting developed in early 20th

century

- End of ww1 RCA want to dominant airwaves

- Convince congress to allocate only ppl like them to use airwaves

- Sell receivers and air time ads to make money

- Geared to entertainment and possibility

- Philo t farmsworth - idea that small lines can make up a picture

- Invented electronic television

- Harvest electrons with no moving parts

- 1919-1930 RCA tried to monopolize company

- RCA and Westinghouse ruled

- Own their own networks - nbc (RCA), cbs (Westinghouse)

- 1940 ruled against nbc to break into two companies to abc

- Antitrust litigation

- Americans had a privatized

- Case study: americans asserted rights to get involved in the world anything that could involve

america

- Impose governments friendly to US interest

- US asserted its right to direct

- Early 20th

century - nircagua and haiti had long US involvement bc instability that could

involve US interest

- Negative relationship characterized my domination

- Great resentment

- 1930 policy shift

- Good neighbour policy - franklin roosevelt 1933-1945

- Roosevelt administration attempt to reject the intervention of previous US governments

- Emphasis on trade and diplomacy

- Almost immediate US withdrawl of troops from Nicaragua and haiti

- OCIAA office of the coordinator of interamerican affairs created in 1940

- Run by nelson Rockefeller (part of RIKO)

- Motion picture society for the americas (mpsa)

Test review - 20% (NO TUTORIAL ON TEST DAYS)

- 90 minute in class test

- 3 topics on the board

- Pick 1 and write a short essay

- 4-6 pages double space in text booklet

- Incorporate the readings and examples from film, lecture, etc

- Kinds of topics:

- Lecture 1: early american film industry (how/why it developed), film industry in general and

aspects of development, compare films,

- Lecture 2: Silent film analyze

- Lecture 3: Western genre (cultural products and myth)

- Lecture 4: Development of sound- revolution of south and change genre, musical

- Lecture 5: US self censorship, broadcasting policy in radio & tav, case study

- Compare case studies (film industry responded to state department, first world war, alliance

with government on diplomacy and trade, film industry to spanish war, us latin american

relations (monroe doctrine till 1930s)

- Movie today embraced good neighbour policy

- Compare the following… (is how it will be stated)

- chapters 1-6 textbook, 3 film reader readings, none on boardwell, TV reader (not chapter 1)

second reader

- NO NOTES - CLOSED BOOK

Tutorial:

- what is progressivism:

• Progressivism was a complicated set of political and social beliefs that were popular in the

late 19th century and early 20th century

• Response to social problems created by rise of industrial capitalism

• Embraced by people who were on left or right of political spectrum

• Government had a important role in controlling society

• Government can establish regulation either expands or restricts the power of individuals in

society

• Prohibition 1919-1933

• Progressivist ideology: power of corporations over society and other was a fear that

individuals potentially disruptive to society could get hold of the airwaves

• Progressivism grassroot reform movement in 1800s, aspirations of farmers immigrants and

industrialists but also members of the middle class threatened by the corruption (off

capitalists) and immorality of chaining social systems

• Progressive members of middle class sough to define their place in new order

• Middle class led the way in a shift form rural, agricultural, small town thinking to urban

industrial, big government solution

• Progressives found too much individualism and freedom threatened society

• Idea was to get government involvement so they wouldn't create monopolies, concerned

with freedom and how to regulate this

• Corporations, state and middle class are al involved

- Why is radio act a progressive act:

• In the radio act of 1927, the congressmen, regardless of party, accepted a progressive way

of thinking about the role and mechanisms of government

• Radio act of 1927: regulated radio broadcasting as a mass medium

• The radio act of 1927 remains the legislative cornerstone of governing broadcasting in the

US today

• Filtered content and stamp on who could and could not talk

• This connects to progressives: focused on freedom and how to regulate, get the creative

freedom out but still an ability to regulate it.

• Progressive of freedom of speech and damn to cooporations, they need state to come in and

state free speech laws

- Criticism of radio act:

- Commercial system and entertainment

- Market aspect

- question of capitalist ideology:

- Society is unequal by ruling class

- Rich people are better than poorer people

- System of ideas or beliefs in a certain class - ideology

- term of hegemony:

- Leadership or dominance by one country or social group

- 42nd

street hegemony --- money governs everyone in the movie

- marxism : power relations between working class and cooporations