Moments of Truth

...Even when the U. S. was by no means the world's most prominent economic power, it led in media and communications...

...Over 95 per cent of The Creation of the Media is in line with the genre of historical writing that is growing in popularity, but professional historians will notice that it relies on secondary sources...

...Since then, much historical writing has moved away from amplification of the national political history we learn in high school and college to explore topics more akin to everyday life...

...the recent history of the construction of Rockefeller Center...

...Going beyond the mainstream curriculum taught in schools, it takes up thepost office, newspapers, the telegraph, the telephone, radio and movies...

...Until the mid- 1920s even broadcasters, who were not yet attuned to the commercial potential of radio, opposed carrying advertising because they deemed it too intrusive for a medium going directly into living rooms...

...Their authoritarian traditions plus frequent wars led European governments to use new means of communication for military purposes, and to adopt restrictive attitudes toward nascent media— starting with newspapers, which were taxed early on...

...Much of the "public service" ideology of traditional European radio and television monopolies was based on the notion that the media should fulfill an educative function for the public, rather than always react to what people want...

...Reviewed by Steven Kelman Professor of public managment, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University Flip through the catalogs of the leading university presses and you will notice the dominance of history books...

...Paul Starr's long-in-the-making The Creation of the Media is a new contribution to the increasingly appealing genre of academic historical writing...

...or the succession of volumes on the history of Boston as shown by maps...

...Silent movies attracted a largely immigrant audience, being inexpensive and easy for poor English speakers to follow...

...At the same time, Starr notes, private ownership made the U.S...

...This entrepreneurial activity expands the scale and scope of the public sphere...

...The AP's formation in the age of the telegraph explains the phrase "wire service...

...The book is rich in vignettes about how now familiar phenomena came to be what they are...

...His (qualified) defense of commercialism and approval of other aspects of American media development add up to a positive judgment on the path it has pursued...

...Hence the histories of restaurants and of the pencil, or accounts of the origin of longitude...

...For reasons not sufficiently explained, the account doesn't extend to television or the Internet...

...Some on the Left argue that there is no mass radical movement in the United States because no media will present a case for radical change...

...Earlier Starr notes that many European national radio broadcasters, including the BBC for a long time, have been subject to government political influence...

...By contrast, in the United States the press was an important tool of democracy...

...Politically speaking, if a demand for, say, strongly anti-establishment opinions is not being met because the wealthy media owners are stilling it, a marketbased system provides motivations for a wealthy entrepreneurto support such content regardless of his personal position...

...The telegraph, telephone and radio were often placed under the control of one government agency...

...Another contemporary development, the thousand-page biography, betrays a curiosity about the places and customs that contextualize the lives of the famous...

...More history has become local—witness the success of Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace's Gotham, the gargantuan history of New York City (through 1898) that details the geographic expansion of settlement in Manhattan and the genesis of neighborhoods still existing today...

...Ditto radio, seen as a tool for telegraphlike contact where no wires were available, such as ship-to-shore messages...

...Those Starr counters assert that commercialism fosters cultural or political bias: Media are owned by the wealthy and inevitably reflect or propagate ideas and values that keep the economic elite on top, thwarting what might otherwise be the popular will...

...Previously, recipients had to pay for letters—and often refused to, leaving many unclaimed...

...This reflects the conclusion that, with rare exception, history is the only commercially sustainable category of academic writing...

...The news received was then relayed to publications in other cities...

...After the invention of the telegraph, the Associated Press (AP) started with New York newspapers sharing the cost of transmissions from Europe...

...did little to inhibit the expansion of new media, and sometimes actually subsidized their growth while leaving them in private hands...

...In both cases entrepreneurs seeking to expand their markets triggered the uses we have come to associate with these technologies...

...The telephone, too, was initially viewed as a device for business communication (people thought of it in terms of the telegraph...

...Congress ensured that as settlers moved westward the postal service kept pace, whereas in British Canada, say, delivery was restricted to major cities...

...During the first half of the 19th century it furthered the advancement of American nationhood by enabling people strewn across the vast country to learn about one another...

...landfill, and the changing character of the Charles River...

...For example, the postal system mandated by the Constitution emerges as a miracle of innovation...

...In this view, the problem with commercialism is not that it is too elitist and insufficiently reflective of popular interests, but that it is not elitist enough...

...In all the cases Starr chronicles, the media here spread much faster than in Europe: Private firms had an incentive to increase production and to experiment with alternate versions of new technologies, allowing the best to win out...

...The reasons are not hard to discern...

...Glancing over to Europe, he compares our decisions at these moments with those made in Great Britain, France and Germany...

...The national postal network established in the U. S. cut the cost of transport, offering senders dramatically lower prices at the same time that demand for its services expanded...

...In stepping over from history to sociology at the book's conclusion, Starr cogently maintains that this criticism ignores the impact of the profit motive in prompting media owners to seek out new and different ways to respond to (or encourage) popular desires: "As publishers and other producers of cultural goods search for new works on which to place their bets, they are continually testing the popular appeal of new genres, styles, and subjects...

...As readers enjoy the stories told in The Creation of the Media, they may wish to ponder another critique of commercialism that Starr doesn't address, namely the view that the media should educate and raise popular tastes...

...That desire initially received attention in the context of the 1970s television miniseries Roots, which popularized the search for ethnic identities...

...media— radio being the most dramatic example—far more "commercial" than their European counterparts...

...In any event, Starr is a sociologist, not a historian, and at the very end it becomes clear that he has a deeper sociological agenda: On the penultimate page of his text he suddenly delivers a fascinating critique of critics of media commercialism...

...Everyone else, I think, will enjoy the narrative it provides...

...First, academic history is more accessible to nonscholars than contemporary research in other fields, whose practitioners often employ highly mathematical methods or focus on intradisciplinary issues outsiders neither know nor care about...

...Starr's objective is to illuminate how each medium's "constitutive moment"—the stage when choices were made about its organization—determined the way it was fashioned decades or even centuries later...

...The industry's hunger for new products is a spur to cultural as well as economic risk-taking...

...Second, historical writing satisfies an urge we have to anchor ourselves in time and place by gaining insight into how what we take for granted today began and evolved...

...Britain did revolutionize mail service, though, with the postage stamp...

...The U.S...