Page 304 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Nat onal sm and the Med a |

Broadcasting Service; Public Opinion; Public Sphere; Regulating the Airwaves;
Sensationalism, Fear Mongering, and Tabloid Media; Shock Jocks.

Further reading: Clemetson, Lynette. “All Things Considered, NPR’s Growing Clout
Alarms Member Stations.” New York Times, August 30, 2004, E1; Collins, Mary.
National Public Radio: The Cast of Characters. Washington, DC: Seven Locks Press,
1993; Engelman, Ralph. Public Radio and Television in America: A Political History.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996; Janssen, Mike. “Jacking Into Podcasts.” Current, Janu-
ary 31, 2005, 1; Ledbetter, James. Made Possible By . . . The Death of Public Broadcasting
in the United States. New York: Verso, 1997; Looker, Thomas. The Sound and the Story:
NPR and the Art of Radio. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995; McCauley, Michael.
NPR: The Trials and Triumph of National Public Radio. New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 2005; McCourt, Tom. Conflicting Communication Interests in America: The
Case of National Public Radio. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999; Stavitsky, Alan. “ ‘Guys in
Suits with Charts’: Audience Research in U.S. Public Radio.” Journal of Broadcasting
and Electronic Media 39, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 177–89; Witherspoon, John, Roselle Ko-
vitz, Robert Avery, and Alan Stavitsky. A History of Public Broadcasting. Washington,
DC: Current, 2000.
Tom McCourt

nationalisM and the Media

Throughout the last century, the mass media often played a key and defining
role in projects of nationalism: Hitler’s use of radio and film helped fashion Nazi
Germany, Roosevelt’s “fireside chats” on national radio aimed to unite America
in tumultuous times, Mao’s “little red book” gave a bible of communism to China,
and, more recently, extremist Hutus used the radio in Rwanda to provoke a geno-
cidal campaign against the country’s Tutsi population. The media can espouse
and transmit a national ideology, it offers us access to moments of shared na-
tional glory or failure, it tells the national history, and it creates images of our
fellow citizens. To what degree, then, is the media responsible for nationalism, for
the construction of national identity, or indeed for the very idea of the nation?
As Benedict Anderson argues, the nation is an “imagined community”—we
can never see all of our fellow citizens or commune with them; rather, we create
constructs and images of what the nation is, what it means to belong to the na-
tion, who belongs and who does not, and what the purpose and character of the
nation are. To a certain degree, each one of us may operate with slightly different
notions of what the nation is, since some of these acts of national construction
will occur at a personal level. However, all nations also engage in communal and
shared acts of construction. With few other institutions that address an entire
country’s population, the media frequently becomes our national “construction
site.” Not only does the media circulate images of the nation for nearly all to see,
hear, and read, but it also mediates our access to most other countrywide insti-
tutions, such as our national leaders, government, holidays, and public figures.
Thus, for instance, terms such as “American way of life,” “all-American
boy or girl,” or “American values” are frequently defined in and by the media.