Selling the Air
A Critique of the Policy of Commercial Broadcasting in the United States
352 pages
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6 x 9
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© 1996
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.
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.
McGannon Center at Fordham University: McGannon Center Research Award
Won
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1: The Fact of Television: A Theoretical Prologue
2: Liberalism, Corporate Liberalism
3: A Revisionist History of Broadcasting, 1900-1934
4: Inside the Beltway as an Interpretive Community: The Politics of
Policy
5: Postmodern Property: Toward a New Political Economy of Broadcasting
6: "But Not the Ownership Thereof": The Peculiar Property Status of the
Broadcast License
7: Broadcast Copyright and the Vicissitudes of Authorship in Electronic
Culture
8: Viewing as Property: Broadcasting's Audience Commodity
9: Toward a New Politics of Electronic Media
Index
Introduction
1: The Fact of Television: A Theoretical Prologue
2: Liberalism, Corporate Liberalism
3: A Revisionist History of Broadcasting, 1900-1934
4: Inside the Beltway as an Interpretive Community: The Politics of
Policy
5: Postmodern Property: Toward a New Political Economy of Broadcasting
6: "But Not the Ownership Thereof": The Peculiar Property Status of the
Broadcast License
7: Broadcast Copyright and the Vicissitudes of Authorship in Electronic
Culture
8: Viewing as Property: Broadcasting's Audience Commodity
9: Toward a New Politics of Electronic Media
Index
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