Page 96 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

P1: IPI/IBE/IRR/GYQ
0 521 80067 6
August 13, 2002
CY101-02
CY101-Bimber
The Mass Audience 10:39
fortheirwares.Thesenorms,whichfadedbythe1930s,likelycontributed
to the brief, initial hesitancy of candidates to produce commercial-like
advertising. But by 1928 and 1932 the political spot ad had emerged
as a technique alongside the broadcasting of speeches. An early radio
advertising handbook published in 1929 and providing instruction on
the new medium to businesses listed among categories of advertising
clients “political speakers” sponsored by the Democratic and Republican
parties – evidence that paid political advertising was recognized early on
as a source of revenue to media businesses. 121 A list of NBC customers
for 1930–31 includes the national Republican Committee, the campaign
of San Francisco Mayor James Rolph for Governor of California, and the
Tammany Hall organization. 122 By one estimate, the total spent on radio-
based campaign advertising in 1932 was $5 million, a sum equivalent to
nearly $70 million today. 123
At the presidential level, Hoover made regular use of radio in of-
fice, and along with Coolidge was known by contemporaries as a radio
President. By the time of Roosevelt’s famous fireside chats, radio had
already become the most effective means for Presidents to communicate
with a national audience, and the fact that citizens could build strong po-
litical preferences based on perceptions of individual officeholders built
through broadcasting was proven. Those twenty-eight fireside addresses
did not so much inaugurate radio as a political tool as consolidate what
had already become a standard channel for political communication.
By 1938, Congress was beginning to board the new bandwagon as well.
Both chambers of Congress had functional radio galleries with facilities
for commentators, although live broadcasts from Congress would not
come until the 1970s. The 1930s were also the time of the “press–radio”
war, when print journalists sought to block or constrain the emergence
of broadcast news, which initially had amounted to little more than the
reading of newspaper articles by radio announcers. By the late 1930s,
radio had prevailed in the war after a series of moves and countermoves
by the industries, establishing itself as a permanent and important new
medium for news.
Even before World War II, then, it was possible in principle for a
candidate with an independent source of funds to communicate effec-
tively with citizens outside the channels created by party organizations.

121 Dunlap, Advertising by Radio, p. 178.
122
Frank A. Arnold, Broadcast Advertising, the Fourth Dimension (New York: J. Wiley
and Sons, 1931).
123
Sterling and Kitross, Stay Tuned.
79