The Not Quite So Inevitable Origins of Commercial Broadcasting in America

This paper charts the very beginnings of commercial radio broadcasting in the United States in the early 1920s.

The Not Quite So Inevitable Origins of Commercial Broadcasting in America

Dave BerkmanUniversity of Wisconsin

Different values, different beliefs, different political systems and different class structures, broadcast historians have suggested, made inevitable the different, national broadcast outcomes of the mid-1920s. Thus, there could have been no other result but that an advertiser-supported, private-sector medium would quickly evolve in a business-dominated, government-distrusting, Harding/Coolidge America, whose 'business', its leaders proclaimed, 'was business' [1]; whose government was best because it governed least; and an America where a 'businessman-theologian' such as Superadman Bruce Barton, could publish a...

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