Radio and Media

The mass media had already been around for many years mainly through print--newspapers and magazines; but what happened in the 1920' was the rise of radio. This made a major impact on American mass Media. Thanks to the growth of radio broadcasting, entertainment, news, sports, and politics could now hear in the comfort of anyone's home. Listeners who were poor and could not afford tickets, or listeners who were black and lived in segregated states, or anyone who lived far from a center of population, or anyone else for that matter, could now have access to the most famous performers or hear the best-known political figures. This helped the nation become more informed, and it also helped entertainers gain larger audiences than ever before. It also affected politicians: now, candidates were judged not only by what they said to the newspapers, but how they sounded when speaking over the radio.

Increased radio broadcasting made small towns and big cities similar in the opportunity to entertain and inform the public. Unknown local performers were able to be heard for the first time. Similarly, the public heard speakers from a number of points of view, and were exposed to a variety of political issues. Some stations offered college-level courses or gave educational debates. Various sects of Christianity and also Reform Judaism offered live broadcasts of religious services. Sports fans were especially pleased, because now the most important events were available to them, and there were even some interviews with the athletes. And finally, there was a new interest in public speaking, as many listeners decided they wanted to be on the radio like the people they were hearing.

Radios were less expensive and widely available by the 1920s, it especially had the exceptional ability of allowing a vast number of people to listen to the same event at the same time. (In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge’s pre-election speech reached more than 20 million people). Radio was a blessing for advertisers, who now had access to a large and captive audience.

The reach of radio also further helped forge an American culture. It was able to soften regional differences and encourage a unified sense of the American lifestyle. Culture and communication became centralized and standardized. The modern radio cultures threatened overpower individuals, leaving them with little control either in their own lives or in the wider world.

Many found radio could enable them to gain a sense of autonomy in their own lives by helping them understand an encroaching mass world in familiar, personal terms. To some, radio also offered the prospect of speaking meaningfully in that world, through a newly viable hope of communication with a mass audience. As Americans determined what radio meant to them, they used the mass medium itself to gain a measure of control and perhaps a voice within the disempowering mass world that radio helped to create. And this process, in turn, helped to shape that modern mass media.

With the rise of broadcasting, as the possibility of speaking to the whole of a nation at once became more and more real, the meaning of communication changed. Audiences seeking access to influential voices welcomed this development. Broadcasting made it possible for a single powerful speaker to move a large part of the country at once.

In the broadcasting age, listeners came to imagine they could enter the public world in private terms. Radio brought far off voices and events into the home in a familiar way. This eroded lines between the public and private spheres, making it more difficult to differentiate public and private and to determine separate priorities and behaviors for each.