Reminiscing in 1951, Detroit News publisher William E. Scripps recalled that he was something of an experimenter as a young man and mused that, had he not had the calling of a family publishing business, his interests “probably would have led me into engineering had I been growing up today.” Instead, William started working at the News because he was “ambitious to try to help my father,” James E. Scripps, who had founded the paper in 1873. In the summers, William worked for the paper as a “messenger boy or any other job that there was to do” and soon,...

After broadcasting the Michigan primary election results in August 1920, the Detroit News station WWJ continued to deliver a regular slate of programming to an expanding listening audience. WWJ aired weekday concerts in the late morning and early evening, often by playing phonographs but occasionally by securing live singers and musicians. Later that fall, WWJ broadcast the results of the 1920 World Series and the 1920 presidential election. On 1 January 1921, the News claimed that WWJ was the first station to have broadcast a “human voice singing a New Year’s melody of cheer” as the clock struck midnight the...

In November 1930, Chicago Tribune executive W. E. Macfarlane traveled to Sea Island Beach, Georgia, to address the fall convention of the American Newspaper Publishers Association. The pleasant climate did little to calm some of the assembled newspaper representatives. The U.S. economy was sliding into depression, newspapers’ advertising revenues were declining, and the upstart new business of radio seemed to be capturing not just publishers’ disappearing incomes but also the American popular imagination. For publishers already skittish about the country’s economic situation, fears of losing money and readership were pushing some into open hostility toward broadcasting. Macfarlane went down to...

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s election in 1932 marked a turning point not only in American politics but also in the American media. Over the previous twelve years, newspaper corporations had become increasingly active in the radio industry, so much so that people like Karl Bickel and H. O. Davis could call them “empires” as both praise and condemnation. Strategic publishers had created multimedia corporations profiting from the sale of printed newspapers and radio advertisements. These multimedia corporations had also come to have a great deal of political significance, as the struggles over radio licensing in Wisconsin demonstrated. Having a favorable newspaper...

The problem of corporate power was among the greatest concerns for New Dealers as they sought to end the Great Depression. During Franklin Roosevelt’s first term, the National Industrial Recovery Act proved to be an unsuccessful and ultimately unconstitutional way to reform the economy through cooperative management by government and industry.¹ Early in Roosevelt’s second term, the economy slid into a recession that New Dealers blamed on corporate opposition to their policies. Resentful monopolists, many believed, were deliberately sabotaging the New Deal, and historian Ellis Hawley remarks that “theory that capital was on a sitdown strike was soon to become...

In May 1942, Archibald MacLeish, the poet turned director of the government’s Office of Facts and Figures, addressed the 20th Annual Convention of the National Association of Broadcasters in Cleveland to plead with broadcasters for their assistance in the war effort. MacLeish stated that Americans “do not need exhortation; they do not need and do not want the promises and threats which the Nazi radios pour upon the German people; they do not need and will not abide the hysteria, the false heroics, the brassy rhetoric of the Italian loud-speakers. They need, and want, and are entitled to have the...

In the late 1940s, the Chicago Tribune, a pioneer in radio broadcasting since the 1920s, went on television. During a televised dedication ceremony for WGN-TV’s new transmitter in 1949, Tribune publisher Robert McCormick announced that a new era was dawning in America because of television. The “age-old human limitations of voice and vision have been utterly outmoded and overcome,” McCormick claimed, and now a “man’s personal appearance,” with all its “clues to his personality” would be made visible to his audience. Speakers could be “pictured intimately … upon an electronic screen” and “widely scrutinized,” giving audiences more and better information...