Word: barnouw
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...produced a Report on Chain Broadcasting, acknowledged by most critics to be an effective guide to broadcasting, but its final effect was nil. Its definitions of "public interest" programming were read by each station according to its own proclivities; so were its commercial vs. "sustaining" program regulations. Barnouw finds this ritual the classic cycle of attempts to alter programming. The FCC "power move" caused counteracting Congressional "power moves": "speeches of protest: demand for investigations; resolutions; proposed amendments to the Communications Act." Little came of FCC action, except when a commissioner's interests were the same as a manufacturer's. When...
...most frightening segment of Barnouw's entire history, however, comes not in the "muddling through" decades of industrial machination and government ignorance, but in the instances where broadcasting is used as an aid to empire. In the final volume of his history, Barnouw states that most of these instances were accidental. But the history of the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Liberty shows the conscious U.S. reliance on radio to further counter-revolutionary ends...
...threads of domestic commercialism and foreign domination are evaluated in Barnouw's "Reckoning." For the former, he quotes Leo Rosten "it seems self-evident that to strain the milk of life through the cheesecloth of advertising must curdle creativity and--more ominously--contaminate truth." For the latter, he states: "The notion that America needs an assortment of...false faces for different purposes is a cold-war heritage that could be usefully abandoned...(also) it has involved large investments of public funds in broadcasting ventures...It is significant that countries which have become important bases for American propaganda transmitters include Portugal...
There are flaws in Barnouw's massive work. The author is clearly not as comfortable in dealing with the literary value of entertainment broadcasts, or with aesthetic endeavor in general; his eulogies of Norman Corwin, Archibald MacLeish and Paddy Chayefsky are embarassing, though they might not have been so if he'd have honed cleanly to a sociological viewpoint. His large chunks of political history often show an unsubstantiated leftist bias, particularly in his coverage of World War II political tensions...
...these are minor points beside the great chain of events Barnouw has for the first time bound together for us. A Tower in Babel. The Golden Web, and The Image Empire should be read by anyone interested in the people's right to information in a democratic society. If the work is lengthy, detailed and at times unevenly, written, it never falls into the traps of dreary academicism. And if Barnouw is sometimes seduced by mere sentiment, the fervor he expresses and the anger he provokes are preferable to most intellectuals' disdain of broadcasting's industrial workings, programming sins...