For many journalists, the proper relationship between government and the news media begins and ends with the First Amendment’s charge that "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." In this view, government is an adversary of the press – a source of censorship at worst, corruption and disinformation at best.
Paul Starr’s profound and illuminating The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications offers a different view. In Starr’s wide-ranging historical analysis, the federal government emerges as a force that can, with the right decisions, create the conditions in which journalism can flourish. With the proper public policies, his story suggests, we get innovative and lucrative forms of communication, a vigorous public sphere, and vibrant politics. With the wrong ones we suffer choking media monopolies, reduced freedom of expression, and a dangerous imbalance between market forces and our capacities for self-government. While Starr’s historical examples are drawn from the American past, they shed important light on the shared future of both democracy and journalism.
The Creation of the Media is densely written, deeply researched, and subtly argued. Starr’s historical analysis – which embraces ideas, institutions, and politics – stretches from the pamphleteers of the sixteenth century in Europe to the radio broadcasting networks of twentieth century America. His subject is always broader than journalism, and he ranges from newspapers to the telegraph to telephones to movies to radio. But he never loses sight of how the larger media system, and the political and economic tendencies of an era, establish the context that offers greater and lesser possibilities for journalism.
Starr, a professor of sociology at Princeton University and co-editor of The American Prospect, always relates the relationships between media, markets, and democracy to their impact on the public sphere – which he defines as "the sphere of openly accessible information and communication about matters of general social concern." Throughout The Creation of the Media he refutes claims that technology and free markets necessarily improve journalism and the media.
Changes in communication assumed to be caused by technology, he argues, "may be slow in coming, hard to isolate from other contemporary developments, and related less to a medium’s intrinsic properties than to constitutive choices about its design and development." He recognizes that markets are vital forces for innovation and growth in communication. Yet he concludes that "If, however, all were left to the market – if government had not promoted communications networks, the press, education, and innovation while attempting to check tendencies toward excessive concentrations of power – the public sphere would be poor indeed."
At the heart of Starr’s analysis is the awkward but important phrase, "constitutive choices." Media systems aren’t imposed on us by omnipotent technology or economics, he argues. We build them, making fundamental decisions along the way "that create the material and institutional framework of fields of human activity." Such choices, made at the intersection of power, culture, institutional weight, and historical legacies, can be made over time or in the circumstances of a moment. Their consequences may resonate far into the future, setting influential patterns and precedents that decision makers can scarcely foresee. The First Amendment’s constitutional guarantee of press freedom was one. The decision to develop American broadcasting overwhelmingly along commercial lines – and not as a public service, as in Britain – was another.
Starr’s story, spanning four centuries, is grounded in four periods of American history. Each is defined by vital choices.
During the American Revolution the words of pamphleteers such as Thomas Paine established the press as the people’s tribune. With independence, Americans set about building a new kind of country, where the people would rule. They ratified the Constitution and the First Amendment and established the Post Office, which made the new nation a fertile ground for journalism. The Post Office’s rate structure quickly made it cheap to distribute newspapers. Although press freedom would not gain strong judicial support until the twentieth century, the ready distribution of information and ideas through the Post Office combined with strong popular support for a free press to lay the foundations for vigorous journalism and contentious democratic politics.
If the choices made in the early American republic expanded the possibilities for journalism and public life, the choices made from the 1840s to the early twentieth century were more likely to narrow possibilities and give private enterprises greater power over American communication. Unlike Britain, which eventually lodged its telegraph in the Post Office where it could equally serve all customers, Americans chose in the 1840s to privatize the telegraph. The result, Starr writes, was a new kind of media power.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, Western Union gained control over the telegraph. Instead of opening its lines to all customers, it emphasized the service of business and colluded with the Associated Press to form "a monopoly telegraph in close partnership with a monopoly news service." The consequences, in Starr’s analysis, were sinister.
During the notoriously close and corrupt presidential election of 1876, William Henry Smith, general agent of the AP and one-time Republican politician, used AP reports to support the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes. When disputed electoral votes threw the election into the specially created Electoral Commission, Western Union violated its own confidentiality policies and revealed the contents of Democrats’ telegrams to Smith, who used the information to instruct Republican Hayes’s camp. Not until 1910 would Congress find the political brain and muscle to pass the amendments to the Interstate Commerce Act that defined telegraph and telephone companies as common carriers required to send messages for any paying customer.
Starr’s third wave of choices stretches from the 1860s to the 1930s and embraces the rise of what we now recognize as the mass media: mass-circulation newspapers and magazines, movies, and radio. The choices around radio would prove decisive for American broadcasting.
Public service might define the British Broadcasting Corporation, but American radio, thanks to decisions made in the twenties, would work with a commercial ethos. Americans were fearful of "governmental control of communications" and unwilling to pay a tax on radio receivers, as the British did, to support a public radio service. Partly it was the power of advertisers and commercial broadcasters operating in a congenial climate: the twenties, the formative years in American radio, were dominated by Republicans who were sensitive to business interests. If radio had emerged in the thirties, in the era of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, it might have developed a more hybrid system from the start. (National Public Radio, for example, would not emerge until 1970.)
The American broadcasting system that appeared in the late twenties and early thirties, Starr notes, "stood in uneasy tension with the traditions of a free press." Regulators at the Federal Communications Commission and licensing procedures required broadcasters to serve the "public interest, convenience, or necessity." Networks raised the specter of enormous cultural and political influence in private hands, producing bland, mass-market programming to suit the needs of advertisers.
On the eve of America’s entry into World War II, when Starr ends his book, American radio was "more centralized, more subject to government control, less diverse, and less open to ideological contention" than the print press. Yet compared to European radio, with its tradition of a greater state presence in the airwaves, "American radio seemed decentralized, free of government censorship, and more diverse, competitive, and contentious."
Ahead, and beyond the scope of The Creation of the Media, lay "the expansion of public investment in science, technology, and higher education during World War II and the early Cold War and the ensuing revolutions in computers, electronics, and telecommunications" that bring us to the door of the Internet age. Given the strength of Starr’s history lesson, it is a touch frustrating that he doesn’t apply his judicious analysis to contemporary media issues.
The present, he concludes, is another story: "The American achievement – and the American dilemma in communications." Internationally, American firms profit from the commercial, popular orientations that first defined U.S. media industries. At home, the power and limitations of the American media sit awkwardly with the old democratic ideals of the press.
Reporters looking for explicit analysis of the major media stories of our time will probably be disappointed with Starr’s end point. It misses network television, the rise of cable, the fall of the fairness doctrine and the decline of public service requirements for network television, the emergence of a twenty-four-hour news cycle, the fragmenting of the public into niche markets, and media mergers. Also beyond the boundaries of this book are the crises of purpose that gripped so many journalists during the O.J. Simpson trial and the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, the rise of the Internet and conservative media.
But it would be a mistake to look for today’s headlines in this deeply learned work of history. Starr offers a yardstick and a set of principles for evaluating our media and the political choices we make about those media. In this, he has succeeded admirably.
From the early days of the Post Office, the First Amendment, and the press, he extracts the lesson that government can promote diversity in communications and freedom of expression. In the story of Western Union, he reveals the danger of a media monopoly that concentrates on serving business and avoids public service. The early history of radio reminds us that something we take for granted, on-the-air advertising, is the product of decisions that might, in another context, have gone a different way.
Today, when economic trends promote media concentration, Starr’s reminders about enduring American suspicions of centralized power gain special urgency. They also help explain the recent uproar over FCC regulations on ownership, which found conservatives and liberals on the same side in their suspicions of further media consolidation.
Starr may be optimistic regarding markets, democracy, and communication, but he is hardly naïve. He sees the present as the portal to an uncertain future. "The global influence of the American media and the American model now puts an even heavier responsibility on the United States than in the past," he writes. "History is no basis for a complacent triumphalism about American technology and institutions, especially if the original grounds of policy are forgotten."
Over more than 400 pages of historical analysis, Starr emerges as a tough-minded moderate: appreciative of the value of market economics for the media, but only so long as they are tempered by the influence of democratic institutions. Free marketeers will see him as a creeping socialist. Irreconcilable critics of the market economy will find him too tame. Everyone else, especially journalists, will find much to learn in this valuable book as we consider actions that will re-shape the media. "Our public life is a hybrid of capitalism and democracy," he concludes, "and we are better off for it, as long as the democratic side is able to keep the balance."
