Selling the Air : A Critique of the Policy of Commercial Broadcasting in the United States

In this interdisciplinary study of the laws and policies associated with commercial radio and television, Thomas Streeter reverses the usual take on broadcasting and markets by showing that government regulation creates rather than intervenes in the market. Analyzing the processes by which commercial media are organized, Streeter asks how it is possible to take the practice of broadcasting--the reproduction of disembodied sounds and pictures for dissemination to vast unseen audiences--and constitute it as something that can be bought, owned, and sold. With an impressive command of broadcast history, as well as critical and cultural studies of the media, Streeter shows that liberal marketplace principles--ideas of individuality, property, public interest, and markets--have come into contradiction with themselves. Commercial broadcasting is dependent on government privileges, and Streeter provides a searching critique of the political choices of corporate liberalism that shape our landscape of cultural property and electronic intangibles. --Publisher

In this interdisciplinary study of the laws and policies associated with commercial radio and television, Thomas Streeter reverses the usual take on broadcasting and markets by showing that government regulation creates rather than intervenes in the market. Analyzing the processes by which commercial media are organized, Streeter asks how it is possible to take the practice of broadcasting—the reproduction of disembodied sounds and pictures for dissemination to vast unseen audiences—and constitute it as something that can be bought, owned, and sold.

With an impressive command of broadcast history, as well as critical and cultural studies of the media, Streeter shows that liberal marketplace principles—ideas of individuality, property, public interest, and markets—have come into contradiction with themselves. Commercial broadcasting is dependent on government privileges, and Streeter provides a searching critique of the political choices of corporate liberalism that shape our landscape of cultural property and electronic intangibles.

Booknews

A sociological look at how the creation and maintenance of American commercial radio and television has been shaped by ideas about markets, property, individuals, social process, politics, work, and the home. Not an attack on commercial broadcasting, but an inquiry into the conditions under which the technical process of disseminating disembodied sounds and pictures can become a commodity to be bought, owned, and sold. The treatment also reflects on the meaning of the ideas that are so manifest. Paper edition (unseen), $16.95. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Frontmatter Acknowledgments (page ix) Introduction (page xi) PART ONE Liberal Television ONE The Fact of Television: A Theoretical Prologue (page 3) TWO Liberalism, Corporate Liberalism (page 22) THREE A Revisionist History of Broadcasting, 1900-1934 (page 59) PART TWO The Politics of Broadcast Policy in a Corporate Liberal State FOUR Inside the Beltway as an Interpretive Community: The Politics of Policy (page 113) FIVE Postmodern Property: Toward a New Political Economy of Broadcasting (page 163) PART THREE Selling the Air: Property Creation and the Privilege of Communication SIX "But Not the Ownership Thereof": The Peculiar Property Status of the Broadcast License (page 219) SEVEN Broadcast Copyright and the Vicissitudes of Authorship in Electronic Culture (page 256) EIGHT Viewing as Property: Broadcasting's Audience Commodity (page 275) NINE Toward a New Politics of Electronic Media (page 309) Index (page 329) In this study of the laws and policies associated with commercial radio and television, the author shows that government regulation creates rather than intervenes in the market. It shows that liberal marketplace principles have come into contradiction with themselves.