A unique and definitive study of freedom of expression rights in electronic media from the 1920s through the mid-1930s, Louise M. Benjamin's "Freedom of the Air and the Public Interest: First Amendment Rights in Broadcasting to 1935 "examines the evolution of free speech rights in early radio. Drawing on primary resources from sixteen archives plus contemporary secondary sources, Benjamin analyzes interactions among the players involved and argues that First Amendment rights in radio evolved in the 1920s and 1930s through the interaction of many entities having social, political, or economic interests in radio. She shows how free speech and First Amendment rights were defined and perceived up to 1935. Focusing on the evolution of various electronic media rights, Benjamin looks at censorship, speakers' rights of access to the medium, broadcasters' rights to use radio as they desired, and listeners' rights to receive information via the airwaves. With many interested parties involved, conflict was inevitable, resulting in the establishment of industry policies and government legislation--particularly the Radio Act of 1927. Further debate led to the Communications Act of 1934, which has provided the regulatory framework for broadcasting for over sixty years. Controversies caused by new technology today continue to rage over virtually the same rights and issues that Benjamin deals with.

Religious programming has been on the airwaves since broadcasting began, but today it is one of the fastest growing categories in radio. This book examines the progression of Christian radio from its beginnings on tiny local stations (like WCAL from St. Olaf's College in Minnesota) to its presence on network and satellite radio of today. The author notes the factors that brought Christian music into the mainstream and discusses how network policies and regulations affected the development of Christian radio. Also considered are the changing demographics that have contributed to the success of Christian broadcasting. Major Christian networks and their evangelical missions are discussed, along with such programs A Money Minute, Life on the Edge and Focus on the Family, which offer practical topical advice for today's Christian. The final chapter considers the future of Christian radio.

This essential text provides a detailed account of the complex character of modern television. Covering issues ranging from television's historical development to its impact on culture and society in general, the text provides an insightful analysis of television's strengths and limitations. The book's scope and clarity make it an ideal text for all media students, as well as others, interested in the historical, cultural and social contexts of broadcasting.

As the dominant form of electronic mass communication in the United States from the 1930s into the 1950s, radio helped to forge a modern continental nation. It fused myriad subcultures?heavily rural, ethnic, and immigrant?into a national identity, unifying the nation in the face of the Depression and war. Later, federal deregulation allowed the radio of the ?Golden Age, ? 1926?1952, to devolve into a chain-dominated, satellite-fed plaything of Wall Street. Today, radio has the highest profit ratio of all the media outlets?and Golden Age traditions of programming taste, diversity, balance, and localism are a legacy squandered. This anecdote-rich sweep of radio history, from its birth as Marconi's ?wireless telegraph? through its current status under deregulation, analyzes the changing medium's social, political, and cultural impact. It casts new light on many topics, including the roles of women and African Americans, programming sources outside the Hollywood-Broadway nexus, and arguments about Amos ?n? Andy?once the hit that jump-started radio's young networks, now a controversial remnant of a bygone era. The book is augmented with more than sixty photos, extensive source notes, and a bibliography.

When American radio broadcasting began in the early 1920s there was a consensus among middle-class opinion makers that the airwaves must never be used for advertising. Even the national advertising industry agreed that the miraculous new medium was destined for higher cultural purposes. And yet, within a decade American broadcasting had become commercialized and has remained so ever since. Much recent scholarship treats this unsought commercialization as a coup, imposed from above by mercenary corporations indifferent to higher public ideals. Such research has focused primarily on metropolitan stations operated by the likes of AT&T, Westinghouse, and General Electric. In American Babel, Clifford J. Doerksen provides a colorful alternative social history centered on an overlooked class of pioneer broadcaster-the independent radio stations. Doerksen reveals that these "little" stations often commanded large and loyal working-class audiences who did not share the middle-class aversion to broadcast advertising. In urban settings, the independent stations broadcast jazz and burlesque entertainment and plugged popular songs for Tin Pan Alley publishers. In the countryside, independent stations known as "farmer stations" broadcast "hillbilly music" and old-time religion. All were unabashed in their promotional practices and paved the way toward commercialization with their innovations in programming, on-air style, advertising methods, and direct appeal to target audiences. Corporate broadcasters, who aspired to cultural gentility, were initially hostile to the populist style of the independents but ultimately followed suit in the 1930s. Drawing on a rich array of archives and contemporary print sources, each chapter of American Babel looks at a particular station and the personalities behind the microphone. Doerksen presents this group of independents as an intensely colorful, perpetually interesting lot and weaves their stories into an expansive social and cultural narrative to explain more fully the rise of the commercial network system of the 1930s.

Ted Turner revolutionized television. Foreseeing cable's potential in its infancy, he parlayed a tiny UHF station in Atlanta into a national superstation, invented CNN, and transformed sports teams and the MGM film library into lucrative programming. Ken Auletta, the most respected media journalist in America, enjoyed unparalleled access to the outspoken and defiant Turner in writing this book (named one of BusinessWeek's Top Ten Books of 2004), capturing the visionary businessman as he built and lost his improbable empire."

Cinzia Padovani takes an in-depth look at Italian public service broadcasting, covering its history, its role in Italian society, its relationship to the political party system, and its influence on cultural and linguistic unification in Italy. Tracing the history and development of Italian public television broadcaster Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI) to the present, Padovani challenges traditional views by asserting that parties' "interference" in RAI has, at times, strengthened the role of public service broadcasting and that partisan journalism has even enhanced democratic potential.

The past few decades have witnessed profound changes in the structure, content, technology, regulation, and cultural forms of European television industries. Television in Europe operates in an increasingly globalized communications market characterized by commercialization, fragmentation, and transnational ownership. While these changes offer vast opportunities to both organizations and consumer-citizens in terms of access and choice, they also bring about uncertainties about the future shape of the medium. How will television be funded in the future? Will public broadcasting survive in the modern era? Will consumers respond to technological developments? How can regulation encourage investment, uphold quality, and effectively address concentration of media ownership? What is Europe's position within a global television marketplace?
"European Television Industries "addresses these issues in the context of developments in technology, changing ownership patterns, legislative change, and the much heralded likelihood of convergence between telecommunications, broadcasting, and computing. Concentrating on the historical, economic, cultural, technological, and political factors behind change, the book provides an opportunity to construct a conceptual and analytical base on which to judge future developments in television in Europe.

Offers a first look at the all-Arab news network and its controversial role in the Arab world. Al-Jazeera, the independent, all-Arab television news network based in Qatar, emerged as ambassador to the Arab world in the events following September 11, 2001. Arabic for the island, Al-Jazeera has scooped the western media conglomerates many times. With its exclusive access to Osama Bin Laden and members of the Taliban, its reputation was burnished quickly through its exposure on CNN. During the 2003 war in Iraq, Al-Jazeera seemed to be everywhere, reporting dramatic stories and images, even as it strived to maintain its independence as an international free press news network. Al-Jazeera sheds light on the background of the network: how it operates, the programs it broadcasts, its effects on Arab viewers, the reactions of the West and Arab states, the implications for the future of news broadcasting in the Middle East, and its struggle for a free press and public opinion in the Arab world.

The main premise of the book is that economic, cultural, political and institutional factors are necessary to fully understand and analyze national media policy developments and impacts, such as deregulation and/or privatization, government and judiciary oversight, media concentration, cultural imperialism, and even profitability. One of its main objectives is to assess the impact of core political and social institutions on regulatory structures and performance in order to derive some generalizations and/or conclusions about the reasons behind some of the developments in European audiovisual policymaking, as well as the performance of regulation in different national settings. Greece is used as a case study to both illustrate how different economic, cultural, political and institutional forces interact and affect each other in reshaping the audiovisual industry, and also address the gap in the literature regarding the development of the TV industry in small European countries. In confronts these developments as an integral part of deregulatory developments all over Europe.

This book is the first to offer a global perspective on the unique contemporary media phenomenon of transnational television channels. It is also the first to compare their impact in different regions of the globe. Revealing great richness and diversity across some of the world's main geocultural regions (Europe, the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, Greater China and Latin America), international contributors with in-depth industry knowledge examine the place of these channels in the process of globalization, their impact on the nation-state and on regional culture and politics. The book also considers audiences and geocultural TV markets, providing new ways of thinking about the emerging transnational media order.

"Computers in Broadcast and Cable Newsrooms: Using Technology in Television News Production" takes readers through the use of computers and software in the broadcast/cable newsroom environment. Author Phillip O. Keirstead began writing about television news technology decades ago in an effort to help television news managers cope with technological change. In this text, he demonstrates the myriad ways in which today's journalism is tied to technology, and he shows how television news journalists rely on varied and complex technologies to produce timely, interesting, and informative broadcasts. Using a hands-on, practical approach to cover the role computers play in various parts of the newsroom, the volume will be of great practical value to undergraduate and graduate students in advanced broadcast/news television courses.

This study traces the evolution of the various categories of factual entertainment programmes which have come to dominate our screens over the last decade. The book focuses on issues such as the changes in the braodcasting environment which have given rise to such programmes, the relationshp they have to other popular TV genres and the huge appeal that shows such as Big Brother have for contemporary audiences. The book also seeks to measure the cultural significance of these new formats. Do they reflet a more general cultural malaise or should we measure their popularity more in terms of the changing expectations which modern audiences bring to TV entertainment? factual/documentary formats and assesses the institutional factors which have promoted their growth. Later chapters focuse on the inexorable rise of the docu-soap and reality game-docs. lucid, accessible style, exploring an important phenomenon in recent broadcasting history. It should be of relevance to all television and media studies students, both at undergraduate and sixth-form level.

New Media and Popular Imagination places the current technological upheaval in audio-visual culture in the context of previous periods of twentieth-century media innovation. Examining popular and industry responses to the introduction of radio, television, and digital media into the home, the book underscores the continuities and disjunctions in the ways in which electronic media have been anticipated, promoted, and resisted in twentieth-century America.

Micro Radio became a lightening rod for the emerging Media Activism and Reform Movement. Like the environmental movement in the 1960s and 70s that focused on specific issues like nuclear power, the Media Activism Movement discovered a significant formative issue in micro radio at the turn of the millennium. This book is a close examination of the struggle over micro radio. Throughout this research micro radio is viewed as a site of social activity, a unique cultural and historical bond where ideas about the relationship between media and democracy are explored. This work is the first to spotlight this emerging social movement and uses critical historical analysis to provide a description of it. The information in this book shows the struggle over micro radio as the most recent manifestation of a growing social movement, a movement of media activism and reform. As local people took to the airwaves, illegally broadcasting the frivolous to the serious, theoretical concepts such as localism and public access suddenly became grounded in a real world radio show. Micro radio broadcasters were able to demonstrate what is left out of most mainstream media. They showed what could happen when a diverse public is allowed to access the most universal telecommunications of the day. This look at micro radio will be valuable to communications students who are interested in the strategies behind media and social movements, alternative media, and news media practices.

" Among America's most unusual and successful weapons during the Cold War were Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. RFE-RL had its origins in a post-war America brimming with confidence and secure in its power. Unlike the Voice of America, which conveyed a distinctly American perspective on global events, RFE-RL served as surrogate home radio services and a vital alternative to the controlled, party-dominated domestic press in Eastern Europe. Over twenty stations featured programming tailored to individual countries. They reached millions of listeners ranging from industrial workers to dissident leaders such as Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel. Broadcasting Freedom draws on rare archival material and offers a penetrating insider history of the radios that helped change the face of Europe. Arch Puddington reveals new information about the connections between RFE-RL and the CIA, which provided covert funding for the stations during the critical start-up years in the early 1950s. He relates in detail the efforts of Soviet and Eastern Bloc officials to thwart the stations; their tactics ranged from jamming attempts, assassinations of radio journalists, the infiltration of spies onto the radios' staffs, and the bombing of the radios' headquarters. Puddington addresses the controversies that engulfed the stations throughout the Cold War, most notably RFE broadcasts during the Hungarian Revolution that were described as inflammatory and irresponsible. He shows how RFE prevented the Communist authorities from establishing a monopoly on the dissemination of information in Poland and describes the crucial roles played by the stations as the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union broke apart. Broadcasting Freedom is also a portrait of the Cold War in America. Puddington offers insights into the strategic thinking of the RFE-RL leadership and those in the highest circles of American government, including CIA directors, secretaries of state, and even presidents.

Focusing on the electronic media -- television, radio, and the Internet -- "Audience Economics" bridges a substantial gap in the literature by providing an integrated framework for understanding the various businesses involved in generating and selling audiences to advertisers. Philip M. Napoli presents original research in order to answer several key questions:

- How are audiences manufactured, valued, and sold?

- How do advertisers and media firms predict the behavior of audiences?

- How has the process of measuring audiences evolved over time?

- How and why do advertisers assign different values to segments of the media audience?

- How does audience economics shape media content?

Examining the relationship between the four principal actors in the audience marketplace -- advertisers, media firms, consumers, and audience measurement firms -- Napoli explains the ways in which they interact with and mutually depend on each other. He also analyzes recent developments, such as the introduction of local people meters by Nielsen Media Research and the establishment and evolution of audience measurement systems for the Internet. A valuable resource for academics, students, policymakers, and media professionals, "Audience Economics" keeps pace with the rapid changes in media and audience-measurement technologies in order to provide a thorough understanding of the unique dynamics of the audience marketplace today.

Focusing on the electronic media -- television, radio, and the Internet -- "Audience Economics" bridges a substantial gap in the literature by providing an integrated framework for understanding the various businesses involved in generating and selling audiences to advertisers. Philip M. Napoli presents original research in order to answer several key questions:

- How are audiences manufactured, valued, and sold?

- How do advertisers and media firms predict the behavior of audiences?

- How has the process of measuring audiences evolved over time?

- How and why do advertisers assign different values to segments of the media audience?

- How does audience economics shape media content?

Examining the relationship between the four principal actors in the audience marketplace -- advertisers, media firms, consumers, and audience measurement firms -- Napoli explains the ways in which they interact with and mutually depend on each other. He also analyzes recent developments, such as the introduction of local people meters by Nielsen Media Research and the establishment and evolution of audience measurement systems for the Internet. A valuable resource for academics, students, policymakers, and media professionals, "Audience Economics" keeps pace with the rapid changes in media and audience-measurement technologies in order to provide a thorough understanding of the unique dynamics of the audience marketplace today.

If a judgment were ever rendered on all the multi-million words I have spoken into microphones, I hope something like this could be said: 'He [Huntley] had a great respect, almost an awe, of the medium in which he worked. He regarded it as a privilege, not a license.... Perhaps the best I might hope is that by some accident of voice tone or arrangement of words I did, on a few occasions, excite, exhort, annoy or provoke a few of my fellow human beings to think with their heads, not the viscera'"-Chet Huntley. This biography of NBC newsman Chet Huntley, who, along with David Brinkley, anchored NBC's "Huntley-Brinkley Report," covers his youth on a farm in Montana, his education and his graduation from the University of Washington, his development as a radio personality and news reporter for stations in Seattle, Spokane, Portland, and his work for CBS, ABC and NBC radio and television in Los Angeles from 1939 to 1955. It also details his move to New York and his work on the "Huntley-Brinkley Report" from 1956 to 1970, his retirement from the news business, his supervision of the development of the Big Sky Ski resort in Montana, and his death from cancer in 1974 at the age of 62.

Written by leading professional journalists and classroom-tested at schools of journalism, "Thinking Clearly" is designed to provoke conversation about the issues that shape the production and presentation of the news in the twenty-first century. These case studies depict real-life moments when people working in the news had to make critical decisions. Bearing on questions of craft, ethics, competition, and commerce, they cover a range of topics -- the commercial imperatives of newsroom culture, standards of verification, the competition of public and private interests, including the question of privacy -- in a variety of key episodes: Watergate, the Richard Jewell case, John McCain's 2000 presidential campaign, and the Columbine shooting, among others.

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aEverybody knows that TV is crucial to globalization. Now, thanks to Lisa Parks and Shanti Kumar, we know why and how television matters globally. With TV studies moving out of the classroom and onto the world stage, this volume is an indispensable passport.a
--Toby Miller, editor of "Television & New Media"

From the 1967 live satellite program "Our World" to MTV music videos in Indonesia, from French television in Senegal to the global syndication of African American sitcoms, and from representations of terrorism on German television to the international Teletubbies phenomenon, TV lies at the nexus of globalization and transnational culture.

Planet TV provides an overview of the rapidly changing landscape of global television, combining previously published essays by pioneers of the study of television with new work by cutting-edge television scholars who refine and extend intellectual debates in the field. Organized thematically, the volume explores such issues as cultural imperialism, nationalism, postcolonialism, transnationalism, ethnicity and cultural hybridity. These themes are illuminated by concrete examples and case studies derived from empirical work on global television industries, programs, and audiences in diverse social, historical, and cultural contexts.

Developing a new critical framework for exploring the political, economic, sociological and technological dimensions of television cultures, and countering the assumption that global television is merely a result of the current dominance of the West in world affairs, Planet TV demonstrates that the global dimensions of television were imagined intoexistence very early on in its contentious history. Parks and Kumar have assembled the critical moments in television's past in order to understand its present and future.

Contributors include Ien Ang, Arjun Appadurai, Jose B. Capino, Michael Curtin, Jo Ellen Fair, John Fiske, Faye Ginsburg, R. Harindranath, Timothy Havens, Edward S. Herman, Michele Hilmes, Olaf Hoerschelmann, Shanti Kumar, Moya Luckett, Robert McChesney, Divya C. McMillin, Nicholas Mirzoeff, David Morley, Hamid Naficy, Lisa Parks, James Schwoch, John Sinclair, R. Anderson Sutton, Serra Tinic, John Tomlinson, and Mimi White.

Blending cultural, religious and media history, Tona Hangen offers a detailed look into the world of religious radio. She uses recordings, sermons, fan mail and other sources to tell the stories of the determined broadcasters and devoted listeners who, together, transformed American radio evangelism from an on-air novelty in the 1920s into a profitable and wide-reaching industry by the 1950s. Hangen traces the careers of three of the most successful Protestant radio evangelists - Paul Rader of Chicago, Aimee Semple McPherson of Los Angeles and Charles Fuller of Pasadena - and examines the strategies they used to bring their messages to listerners across the nation. Initially shut out of network radio and free airtime, both of which were available only to mainstream Protestant and Catholic groups, evangelical broadcasters gained access to the airwaves with paid-time programming. By the mid-20th century millions of Americans regularly tuned in to evangelical programming, making it one of the medium's most distinctive and durable genres. The voluntary contributions of these listeners in turn helped to bankroll religious radio's remarkable growth. Revealing the entwined development of evangelical religion and modern mass media, Hangen demonstrates that the history of one is incomplete without the history of the other; both are important to understanding American culture in the 20th century.

This book examines the representation of blackness on television at the height of the southern civil rights movement and again in the aftermath of the Reagan-Bush years. In the process, it looks carefully at how television's ideological projects with respect to race have supported or conflicted with the industry's incentive to maximize profits or consolidate power.

Sasha Torres examines the complex relations between the television industry and the civil rights movement as a knot of overlapping interests. She argues that television coverage of the civil rights movement during 1955-1965 encouraged viewers to identify "with" black protestors and "against" white police, including such infamous villains as Birmingham's Bull Connor and Selma's Jim Clark. Torres then argues that television of the 1990s encouraged viewers to identify "with" police "against" putatively criminal blacks, even in its dramatizations of police brutality.

Torres's pioneering analysis makes distinctive contributions to its fields. It challenges television scholars to consider the historical centrality of race to the constitution of the medium's genres, visual conventions, and industrial structures. And it displaces the analytical focus on stereotypes that has hamstrung assessments of television's depiction of African Americans, concentrating instead on the ways in which African Americans and their political collectives have actively shaped that depiction to advance civil rights causes. This book also challenges African American studies to pay closer and better attention to television's ongoing role in the organization and disorganization of U.S. racial politics.

ABC, NBC, CBS are the three names commonly associated with network television. The fourth name, Du Mont, is not usually recognizable by those younger than 50 or those who are not communications students. The Du Mont Television Network tells the story of the rise, the development, and the failure of this fourth network. Bergmann and Skutch present the Du Mont network's story in a dramatic, narrative style, from its days in the basement of an old pickle factory to its collaborations with the Paramount company. The story of the network's founder, Dr. Allen Du Mont, as well as details about management, programs, new technologies, and the network's fall from grace are a fascinating read. Bergmann, a former managing director of the Du Mont network, provides a rare insider's view of the network's history and its eventual demise. The Du Mont Television Network will intrigue television history fans, as well as communications students and media professionals.

It is often said that the greater Los Angeles area is the largest movie set in the world. Film and television series filming sites are, however, located all over the United States. This guidebook documents over 1500 locations where 1,106 movies and 48 television series have been filmed. Arranged by state and then alphabetically by movie title, each entry includes the year of release, the two main stars, a plot line and a description of the location. Filming sites located in Los Angeles are excluded. All sites are accessible to the public. The indexes make it possible to quickly locate a favorite star, favorite movie or favorite location.