Page 101 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Information Revolutions
to well-funded groups seeking to influence public opinion on a national
scale. Radio offered the opportunity to reach targeted audiences at far
lower cost. For purposes of identifying potential members or recruiting
members into action, television was in many instances too much a mass
medium for the interest groups.
Some groups selectively adopted television techniques without aban-
doning radio, and some avoided television all together. Religious orga-
nizations, for example, had used radio reliably in the 1950s and ’60s for
evangelical purposes – the first Christian broadcast took place in 1921
from Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh – and by the 1970s and ’80s
somereligiousbroadcastershadturnedexplicitlypolitical. 145 Astheydid,
these broadcasters focused on both radio and television: television for its
great reach and radio for its greater capacity to target audiences. By 1987,
therewereover1,000full-timeChristianradiostationsand200television
stations in the United States, many of which had a mixture of religious
and political aims. The rise in the 1980s of television broadcasters such as
Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson represented the exploitation of these es-
tablished audiences for political purposes in a television-intensive era. 146
The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), on the other hand,
never made that transition. It was an aggressive user of radio as early as
the 1930 debates over the Wagner Act. By the early 1940s, it was running
a weekly radio program carried by over 500 radio stations. 147 But, like
labor organizations, NAM did not take up television aggressively in the
1960s and ’70s or after.
Television became part of the arsenal of groups, used chieflyonoc-
casions where organizations sought to influence public opinion widely,
as in national health care debates in the 1960s and 1990s. But those
functions were less important to the interest groups than to candidates
running for office. In his early-1990s sample of fifty interest groups, Ken
Kollman found that only 2 percent engaged in general-audience televi-
sion advertising, compared with 4 percent using general-audience radio,

145
George Hill, Airwaves to the Soul: The Influence and Growth of Religious Broadcasting
in America (Saratoga, Calif.: R&E Publishers, 1983); William Fore, Television and Re-
ligion: The Shaping of Faith, Values, and Culture (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing,
1987); Hal Erikson, Religious Radio and Television in the United States, 1921–1991
(Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1992).
146
Sara Diamond, Spiritual Warfare: The Politics of the Christian Right (Boston: South
End Press, 1989).
147
Nathan Godfried, WCFL: Chicago’s Voice of Labor 1926–78 (Urbana and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 1997).

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