Before Net Neutrality: The Surprising 1940s Battle for Radio Freedom

Before Net Neutrality: The Surprising 1940s Battle for Radio Freedom
by Victor Pickard, Author of America's Battle for Media Democracy
The Atlantic January 29

In 1947, near the 40th anniversary of his invention of the Audion tube, Lee de Forest, “the father of radio,” addressed a message to the National Association of Broadcasters that was widely circulated and printed in Time magazine, the Chicago Tribune, and other news outlets:

What have you gentlemen done with my child? He was conceived as a potent instrumentality for culture, fine music, the uplifting of America’s mass intelligence. You have debased this child…made of him a laughing stock… The occasional fine program is periodically smeared with impudent insistence to buy or try… Soap opera without end or sense floods each household daily.

De Forest’s anguish over radio’s lost democratic potential echoed across a chorus of media criticism.

His position also evokes a more contemporary debate about a much newer technological infrastructure and its cultural purpose. Recent policy battles over net neutrality may seem unprecedented, but we’ve faced similar moments in American history.

As we again set policies that define core power relationships for a new medium, we might look to our past to discern lessons for charting our future. For the media system we’ve inherited—one dominated by a small number of corporations, lightly regulated in terms of public interest protections, and offset by weak public alternatives—was not inevitable or natural; it resulted from the outcomes of specific policy battles, and from specific logics and values triumphing over others.


Read the rest here: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/before-net-neutrality-the-surprising-1940s-battle-for-radio-freedom/384924/