"Irate listeners attacking anti-union advertisers, boycotts of soap
operas, a bitter ex-federal official who took up the cause of
consumers--Newman brings us all of this and more, revealing in her
stunning new book how twentieth-century consumers--especially
women--contested commercial radio in its glory years. With
tremendous clarity and analytical sophistication, she shows that
far from 'duped consumers, ' radio listeners were savvy, sassy, and
effective activists who talked back plenty to commercial radio.
Analyzing the dynamics of as a contested zone between listeners,
advertisers, radio stations, and new consumer intellectuals, Newman
deftly and persuasively reframes our understanding of the cultural
politics of consumption."--Dana Frank, author of "Buy American: The
Untold Story of Economic Nationalism
"Cultural historians often claim that audiences were far from
passive victims of mass media manipulation, but Kathy Newman is
among the first to reveal how ordinary people actually responded.
Focusing on the major mass medium of the 1930s and 1940s, the
radio, Newman brilliantly tracks the dialectical process through
which audience attention became a commodity that broadcasters set
out to sell to sponsors and then how listeners, often women, turned
their new-found importance to their own ends as assertive
consumers. This is cultural history at its best, bringing together
as it does the influence of intellectuals, the workings of cultural
institutions, and the reactions of popular audiences."--Lizabeth
Cohen, author of "A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass
Consumption in Postwar America
"Lively and accessible, Newman's fascinating account of the
characters and concernsbehind anti-commercial activism illuminates
an overlooked facet of radio history. Her cast of middle class
reformers who used radio's own commercialized address to mobilize
the consumer movement reminds us of advertising's complex and
contested relationship to twentieth-century American culture, and
points towards the same forces at work today, now on a global
scale."--Michele Hilmes, co-editor of "Radio Reader: Essays in the
Cultural History of Radio
"An important contribution. . . . More than any other work to
date, Newman deconstructs 'the' radio audience and demonstrates how
this often-referred-to singular entity was really a heterogeneous
body with multiple forms, faces, and concerns. She shows how radio
listeners used information they learned on air to launch social
movements that had broad economic and political consequences in
American society."--Steven J. Ross, author of "Working-Class
Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America
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