Paul Starr's The Creation of the Media
Scheuer, Jeffrey
THE CREATION OF THE MEDIA: POLITICAL ORIGINS OF MODERN COMMUNICATIONS by Paul Starr New York: Basic Books, 2004 484 pp. $27.50 AMERICA'S UNFINISHED journey toward democracy had uncertain...
...In fact, politics is at the center of Starr's universe...
...Two problems linger...
...So, of course, does an education system that doesn't cultivate a demand for quality news...
...By the early nineteenth century, America's attainments in the interlocking spheres of journalism, publishing, schooling, and literacy were unsurpassed even in Britain and France...
...It is not clear why the narrative stops there, or exactly what watershed it represents...
...Urging the primacy of politics is not so much wrong as unnecessary...
...He argues that the American constitutional framework, and defining political and legal decisions at "constitutive moments," more than any natural resource, cultural advantage, or economic condition or invention, produced the vibrant communications networks that partly define American history...
...but television in its infancy is given only cursory attention...
...One wishes that Starr had extended his analysis, if only to draw some general connections between his narrative and the momentous changes since World War II...
...The Constitution was designed to prevent this, and despite occasional lapses and flawed interpretations, it has worked pretty well...
...This efflorescence of talking, writing, and learning set the stage for both the 1 0 2 n DISSENT / Summer 2004 point-to-point, or "horizontal," electronic communication and the "vertical" broadcasting that define the modern media...
...The advent of radio, its early regulation, and its rapid progression from a not-for-profit medium to a predominantly and irreversibly commercialized one is treated deftly and in fine detail...
...Although media and First Amendment scholars have covered much of this ground before, Starr offers a concise four hundred page panorama of the terrain, including the serial emergence of new media, their complex interrelations, and the crucial connection of each to its political and legal context...
...But we also encounter the inspiring Caflin sisters— Tennessee Caflin and Victoria Caflin Woodhull—who in the 1870s "operated a brokerage on Wall Street and used its profits to publish a weekly advocating women's suffrage, spiritualism, and free love...
...Second, there is a great historical irony that Starr addresses only obliquely...
...The Creation of the Media is not, and doesn't try to be, a comprehensive history of American journalism or publishing, although a good deal of that history comes along for the ride...
...Primarily through local efforts, it extended primary schooling earlier to more of its population, including women . . . [t]he South conspicuously deviated from this pattern in critical respects...
...The very idea of what is news has altered to the point that headlines scream about fictional events from the unreal world of reality television...
...The media need a third way...
...Jurgen Habermas, the leading contemporary theorist of the public sphere and communication, is never mentioned...
...And there is the seminal 1976 Supreme Court decision in Buckley v. Valeo, which, by equating campaign expenditure with political speech, allowed money to deluge the political process through the floodgates of television...
...Just when that moral crusade was wearing thin, in a nation swollen and diversified by immigration, World War I brought a new round of political oppression...
...But as Princeton sociologist Paul Starr reminds us, the Framers did get a few things right...
...Arguably the most significant advance was the telegraph in the 1840s, which as Starr BOOKS notes, being the first electronic medium, "decoupled communication from transportation altogether...
...In a sense, the entire thrust of our constitutional tradition is backward toward a threat that has been largely contained and does not face the threat that exists...
...These various strands in the development of free expression are related in rich detail, and make for absorbing reading...
...DISSENT / Summer 2004 n 105...
...and the relentless commercialization of the media, including public television...
...The Creation of the Media is a detailed account of this explosive progression, as first printing, then daily journalism, telegraphy, telephony, film, radio, and television, expanded and altered the public sphere in America, and thus changed the scope, content, and instruments of free speech...
...It is, most of all, a political and economic history of the various media themselves...
...Good media networks guarantee neither...
...and the Constitution gave undue power to the less populous states in both the Senate and the Electoral College...
...Neither can one ignore the enigmas and vagaries of personality and individual genius that may or may not explain the signal contributions of individuals such as Jefferson and Madison, Morse, Bell, Edison, Marconi, or the various inventors and improvers of modern electronic media...
...Charges against them were dismissed, but the signs were ominous: free love—and free speech—were on the wane...
...But without intellectual artifice, one cannot isolate those political frameworks and decisions from economic, technological, cultural, religious, linguistic, geographic, demographic, DISSENT / Summer 2004 n 103 BOOKS and other factors...
...Theodor Adorno and critical theory are too hastily dismissed...
...There were some odd concurrences: between the wars, as the Red Scare abated and Supreme Court rulings expanded freedom of speech and eased bans on dangerous literature, the movie industry rushed to adopt a system of self-censorship through the Hays Office and the Motion Picture Production Code of 1930, which remained in effect for more than twenty years...
...Starr largely ignores issues of scholarship, other than passing mention of works by Walter Lippmann and Paul Lazarsfeld...
...The very formation of our government involved a moral compromise with slavery, which ultimately failed...
...Likewise, we are treated to an overview of the early evolution of the movie industry, but left in the abyss of the Production Code era...
...Starr's survey, which begins with the breakup of the licensing system for printers in late—seventeenth-century England, concludes abruptly at World War II, just as television is about to break out as a commercial medium...
...In fact, the media system that Starr so ably outlines across a span of centuries has produced, in the present era, great new democratic quandaries...
...For anyone who has studied the subsequent emergence of the electronic media as a cen104 n DISSENT / Summer 2004 tral and centrifugal political force, this is disconcerting...
...The history of American higher education—a sector in which the United States continues to excel—is also relevant to this story...
...These include the rise and fall of quality television drama and news and the emergence of talk radio and reality television...
...Government cannot be trusted to provide information, but commercialism and concentration degrade the news we get from the marketplace...
...Yet the contemporary threat to independent media comes not from government but from the marketplace and oligopoly: from rampant commercialism, lack of diversity, and dependence on the profit motive...
...the dominant role of broadcast media in the political process not just as a lens or filter but as the dynamic core of the process...
...The new American government did not just enshrine freedom of speech in its Constitution: "Instead of taxing newspapers," Starr observes, "the government subsidized them...
...Rather, they flow from the book's breadth and scope...
...Starr doesn't stint the darker sides of the story...
...Communications networks in general spread more quickly, more efficiently, and across a much wider swath of society—rural as well as urban—in the United States than in England or the Continent...
...But those other domains are part of the same causal puzzle...
...A vast amount of public land—a twelfth of the continental land mass—was granted to the railroads for those rights-of-way, a gigantic gift of the government to the marketplace...
...These include the infamous Comstock Act of 1873, which in seeking to ban obscenity (and related vices such as abortion and contraception) led to several decades of public prudery and sexual McCarthyism, dominated by a crusader for purity named Anthony Comstock and assorted religious followers...
...History, as he implicitly acknowledges, is multivalent, not merely political...
...Starr is certainly right that politics is definitive in shaping the media and communications environment—even if the muscularity of his claim is sometimes supported by the steroidal use of statistics...
...Some additional cavils are worth mentioning, but they don't detract from what this fine work has to offer...
...In each of these areas, market forces have driven the media at the expense of democratic values...
...A sequel exploring those issues would handsomely complement this book...
...If political frameworks and "constitutive moments" are keystones of modern media, Starr seems to want them to bear too much weight...
...Questions of balance, emphasis, and conceptual boundaries are difficult and sometimes imponderable...
...In addition to securing the liberties expected by former British subjects, the Constitution—and specifically the First Amendment—led to both gradual and dramatic expansions of public discourse...
...and railroads provided the telegraph with rights-of-way for its wires...
...The second Wilson administration propagated a Red Scare and convicted more than one thousand Americans— nearly all political radicals—of speech crimes under the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918...
...The central thesis of The Creation of the Media is announced in the subtitle: Political Origins of Modern Communications...
...In fact, the author's demonstrable acumen in matters economic and sociological belie his claims about the political sphere...
...Through this system of script-vetting, a terrified reaction of Victorian morality to the graphic new visual medium of motion pictures, "Jewish moviemakers came under the censorship of the Catholic Church in a predominantly Protestant society...
...All are given their due here...
...The political and legal climate was surely one reason for this, as was the absence of hostile neighbors, of political and linguistic fragmentation, and of the culture and traditions (including strong centralized government) that differentiated the Old World from the New...
...The changing and inexact nature and limits of the public sphere and its relation to technology, literacy, and news, might have received more attention...
...WITHOUT DIRECTLY disputing the argument, I am not sure that all readers will think it deserves the emphasis Starr accords it...
...The struggle for independent publishing in the seventeenth and BOOKS eighteenth centuries focused entirely on censorious governments and state monopoly of public information...
...Foreign-born troublemakers were deported...
...Everything is conditioned by politics, including what government leaves alone: the dynamism as well as the dangers of markets, for example...
...It is both a history of communication technology—without getting too technological—and a history of freedom of speech and the First Amendment, without being legalistic...
...the increasing concentration of media ownership and the evisceration of federal regulations governing ownership and access...
...JEFFREY SCHEUER is the author of The Sound Bite Society and is an occasional contributor to Dissent...
...But on its own terms, The Creation of the Media sheds important light on America's distinctive role in the halting progression from the politics of force and privilege to the politics of language and civic equality...
...It created a comprehensive postal network and ensured postal privacy...
...As politics has converged with modern media, there has been a parallel convergence (as yet incomplete) between political and media theory...
...27.50 AMERICA'S UNFINISHED journey toward democracy had uncertain beginnings...
...and because it depends on the quality of its news, so does our democracy...
...It introduced a periodic census, published the aggregate results, and assured individuals anonymity...
...How, with our great head start, did they come to pass us—aside from adopting our inventions and techniques...
...First, given the many political and material advantages Americans have enjoyed in communications, why are most of us today less informed, less educated, and far less politically active, at least in terms of voting rates—and why do we consume news that is generally much inferior—compared to most Europeans...
...The telegraph was symbiotic with the railroad: telegraphy enabled the coordination of trains sharing the same track, avoiding the cumbersome dual-track system of early English railway lines...
...Even the Progressives of the early 1900s, in their emphasis on moral purity and "social hygiene," were not entirely free of the repressive taint...
...Good journalism is as important to democracy as good education...
...This thesis is well argued, and Starr provides copious amounts of statistical evidence...
Vol. 51 • July 2004 • No. 3
