Selling the Air: A Critique of the Policy of Commercial Broadcasting in the United States / Edition 1

by Thomas Streeter

Overview

In this interdisciplinary study of the laws and policies associated with commercial radio and television, Thomas Streeter reverses the usual take on broadcasting and markets by showing that government regulation creates rather than intervenes in the market. Analyzing the processes by which commercial media are organized, Streeter asks how it is possible to take the practice of broadcasting—the reproduction of disembodied sounds and pictures for dissemination to vast unseen audiences—and constitute it as something that can be bought, owned, and sold.

With an impressive command of broadcast history, as well as critical and cultural studies of the media, Streeter shows that liberal marketplace principles—ideas of individuality, property, public interest, and markets—have come into contradiction with themselves. Commercial broadcasting is dependent on government privileges, and Streeter provides a searching critique of the political choices of corporate liberalism that shape our landscape of cultural property and electronic intangibles.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226777221
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	06/24/1996
Edition description:	1
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1: The Fact of Television: A Theoretical Prologue
2: Liberalism, Corporate Liberalism
3: A Revisionist History of Broadcasting, 1900-1934
4: Inside the Beltway as an Interpretive Community: The Politics of
Policy
5: Postmodern Property: Toward a New Political Economy of Broadcasting
6: "But Not the Ownership Thereof": The Peculiar Property Status of the
Broadcast License
7: Broadcast Copyright and the Vicissitudes of Authorship in Electronic
Culture
8: Viewing as Property: Broadcasting's Audience Commodity
9: Toward a New Politics of Electronic Media
Index

Editorial Reviews

A sociological look at how the creation and maintenance of American commercial radio and television has been shaped by ideas about markets, property, individuals, social process, politics, work, and the home. Not an attack on commercial broadcasting, but an inquiry into the conditions under which the technical process of disseminating disembodied sounds and pictures can become a commodity to be bought, owned, and sold. The treatment also reflects on the meaning of the ideas that are so manifest. Paper edition (unseen), $16.95. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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