ABSTRACT
From the very beginning, US government policy and regulation defined radio as a public sphere. For six decades it founded policy on a trustee model which
presumed that the airwaves are public property held in trust for the benefit of the people and the nation and their uses licensed only to operators under the condition that they serve the public interest. The public’s interest took precedent over the private interest of the licensee; the license was a privilege, not a property right, and could be revoked. This model defined radio in terms of the fourth estate tradition of the press as established in the First Amendment of the US Constitution, since the required public service programming was largely journalistic and placed radio and its audiences solidly in the public sphere. Of course, commercial radio and advertisers would frame audiences as consumers, and government ultimately favored commercial enterprises, as several radio scholars have shown (Barnouw 1966; McChesney 1993; Smulyan 1994; Benjamin 2001). However, private media corporations had to justify their actions in terms of the trustee model that defined audiences as citizen publics. Even before broadcasting, the US government framed radio as a public good. Before the 1920s radio was considered a wireless telephone, a form of two-way communication in which each user could both transmit and receive signals. The Radio Act of 1912 limited amateur radio transmitter operators’ use of radio on the grounds that unfettered use of the airwaves interfered with sea and military communication. The law required amateurs to obtain a federal license and reserved part of the radio wave spectrum for shipping and government use. This established the precedent that public interest in the form of governmental uses of the airwaves preceded private use. Using the public safety argument underlying priority for commercial sea communication, amateur radio operators formed the American Radio Relay League to promote themselves as providing a public service by relaying messages for emergencies (Barnouw 1966; Douglas 1987). During World War I the US government seized the radio patent rights of the Marconi Company as an Italian company. This presented a question about how the government should use or dispose of these patents. The US Navy argued for retention of the patents so it could better control communication at sea. The Navy did not prevail, as the government gave the patents to a consortium of AT&T, General Electric, and Westinghouse, which formed RCA to manufacture radios. But the Navy’s argument introduced the idea that commercial development should be secondary (Douglas 1987). When broadcasting began in the early 1920s, another dilemma again led to framing radio as public rather than private. The Radio Act of 1912, created for wireless telephony, was inadequate to regulate broadcasting. Regulation was in the hands of Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover who attempted to gain voluntary cooperation from broadcasters to solve problems of interference and other issues. In some ways Hoover was favorable to private station owners,
particularly the larger ones. Nevertheless, he expressed the goal of defining the airwaves as public property. In 1924 he wrote:
We seek to preserve the ownership of the road through the ether as public property that we may maintain initiative by holding it a free field for competition; to keep alive free speech; to avoid censorship; to prevent interference in the traffic.
