ABSTRACT
Caroline Frick’s contribution examines Lyndon B. Johnson’s KTBC radio and television stations in Austin, Texas, from the archival “ground-up.” Using newly digitized 16mm newsfilm alongside both secondary and primary sources, particularly from the LBJ Library and the pages of local newspapers, “Mama’s Brand of TV” proposes that the importance of family ownership of stations, and concomitant staff loyalty, has too often been ignored within industry studies. It deeply influenced the ethos at KTBC from the time the Johnsons purchased the radio station in 1943 through the development of the television station, including Johnson’s years in the White House. The Johnsons’ family-owned station, under Frick’s examination, also offers a means to understand the intricacies of LBJ’s political relationship to the media more broadly. Although most local television collections were discarded when a station was sold or hastily moved into understaffed libraries, some survivors have recently gained greater visibility. Frick looks at how these local stations’ records reveal the working processes for station news production and, in KTBC’s case, how the political lives of the Johnsons intertwined with their media ones. The history of KTBC also illustrates the complex status of the Austin-based television station, since it was defined as “local” in a regulatory sense but was often simultaneously of national, regional, global, and local value. Frick’s study of KTBC challenges easy historical assumptions about local film and television culture as being disconnected from larger national and even international production and distribution networks.
