Radio Goes to War: The Cultural Politics of Propaganda: During World War II
2002; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 79; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2161-430X
Autores Tópico(s)Media Studies and Communication
ResumoRadio Goes to War: The Cultural Politics of Propaganda During World War 11. Gerd Horten. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002.232 pp. $45 hbk. In a speech in March 1942, Archibald MacLeish defined the principal battleground of World War II not as a physical place where armies collided, but rather the conceptual field of American public opinion. Americans had to understand what they were fighting for, to be motivated to sacrifice, and to buy into (literally and figuratively) the war effort. Gerd Horten's Radio Goes to War examines domestic radio's contribution to this key battleground, with particular emphasis on the partnership of government and corporate communicators. The book is both broad and narrow. It places radio propaganda in a context of changing social, political, and commercial influences during the pivotal time when President Franklin Roosevelt's Dr. New Deal gave way to Dr. Win-the-War. However, it also dissects small slices of air time-including government-sponsored information programs and network standards such as The Guiding Light and Fibber McGee and Molly-to document propaganda both subtle and heavyhanded. World War II radio has been given short shrift in studies of media content for obvious reasons: It is easier to spool decades-old newspaper microfilm than to track down and listen to 1940s broadcasts or to find and wade through accurate and transcripts. Horten has thoroughly mixed secondary sources with archival research to begin to fill the gap of ignorance. His book is a valuable contribution to the understanding of World War II radio, which heretofore has primarily been examined for its news content. It goes well beyond the foundational works of Allan Winkler's history of the Office of War Information, Frank Fox's examination of war advertising, and Betty Winfield's work on Roosevelt and the news media. World War II media scholars will find themselves pleasantly surprised by the book's mining of new information. The chapters on the attempts to integrate propaganda into radio comedies and soap operas may be unique; the analysis of radio's contribution to the postwar hegemony of free-enterprise capitalism, compared with the Depression-era hostility toward big business, is insightful. The only weakness is the handful of small errors that crop up when Horten focuses on the bureaucratic details of propaganda and censorship. (For example, the book erroneously suggests that the Sedition Act was active in World War II; conflates a White House trial balloon about sedition prosecutions in early 1942 with a later grand jury Espionage Act investigation of the Chicago Tribune for its publication of naval secrets about the Battle of Midway; errs by stating the complete archive of World War I's Committee on Public Information was rescued when only a fraction survived; and, in this reviewer's opinion, understates the role of the Office of Censorship in regulating foreign-language broadcasts. …
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