Page 162 - Culture Society and the Media

152 CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA
about more general social organization, and which are mediated by such factors
as media ownership, finance, organizational conceptions of the audience, and the
development of professional or occupational ideologies.

Limits of organizational autonomy: the case of monopoly
control in British broadcasting

One of the most important features of media history has been the location of
broadcasting within centrally controlled systems. There have been countries—
for example, Holland—which developed systems partly analogous to publishing,
where control of the wavelength and editorial control were separated, but these
were very few indeed. Even in America, with its powerful doctrine of personal
cultural freedom and its lack of prescription on cultural choice, a central
licensing authority, the Federal Communications Commission, was set up to
regulate the allocation of wavelengths. Moreover, the rapid development of three
great networks with their own codes and editorial and commercial demands
helped to create a central ethos in American broadcasting.
The United States presents a different picture from much of the rest of the
world, especially from Europe where the central national authority (modelled in
many cases on the BBC) was accepted with seeming inevitability. Commentators
have ascribed this tendency to various factors. In Britain, for example, the BBC’s
first Chief Engineer Peter Eckersley has described the origins of centralization in
broadcasting organization solely in terms of a technical problem—the
wavelength shortage: ‘The BBC was formed as the expedient solution of a
technical problem; it owes its existence solely to the scarcity of wavelengths’
(Eckersley, 1942, p. 48).
But although the wavelength problem was clearly of importance in influencing
the decision to confine broadcasting within a single national institution—the
chaos of early radio broadcasting in America, where thousands of stations sprang
up in the early 1920s before the establishment of the FCC, had an important
effect in pushing Britain towards a highly disciplined system—there was no
technical need to concentrate wavelength and editorial control in the same
hands. The decision to create a broadcasting monopoly in Britain can be traced,
rather, to an historical period when developments in wireless telephone and
telegraphy had already been brought firmly under a form of government control,
via the Post Office; and when World War I had underlined the major importance
of the new medium of wireless. Moreover, centralization was in part a response
to the demands of the growing public of radio hams who pushed for the setting
up of some central broadcasting of programmes for general entertainment (Smith,
1974).
Although a variety of technical, historical and social pressures pushed towards
centralization, the particular form of centralized control eventually adopted in
Britain—the public service monopoly—has in large part been attributed to the
lobbying of one particular man, John Reith, the General Manager of the British