Mixed media: Newspaper ownership of radio in American politics and culture, 1920--1952

This dissertation traces the history of newspaper ownership of radio stations in the United States from 1920 to 1952. It attempts to demonstrate that radio was less a harbinger of modernity than it was a way for publishers to protect their businesses and expand their roles as the dominant purveyors of news and information. Though radio did have many novel characteristics as a medium, its development was structured to a great degree by the older institution of the newspaper. Newspapers owned some of the most powerful and important stations in the 1920s and 1930s. By 1940, they owned almost a third of American radio stations, and they owned almost half of the first group of television stations in the early 1950s. Despite its significance in helping to develop American broadcasting, historians have largely overlooked the role of the newspaper in radio history. This dissertation examines the broadcast ownership of large enterprises such as the Tribune Company, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, and Gannett, and balances this national story by looking at the numerous smaller communities around the United States where the sole newspaper became the sole radio station owner.;This dissertation expands upon this business history narrative by analyzing how the newspaper-radio combination was understood in American politics and culture. The issue stimulated serious concern at all levels of the federal government, and regulatory proposals always engendered heated debate. Leading social scientists, intellectuals, broadcasters, and journalists were instrumental in shaping these policy debates. Ordinary Americans responded by writing thousands of letters to the Federal Communications Commission to voice their opinion and, more importantly, by forming groups to challenge the broadcast licenses of local newspapers. By combining these various perspectives---elite and popular, local and national---this dissertation provides a robust history of the American media in the first half of the twentieth century.