Radio's Civic Ambition: American Broadcasting and Democracy in the 1930s

“Goodman’s book provides a great look at how the American broadcasting industry in the 1930s was civic-minded as well as responsive to government.” —American Journalism

“In Radio’s Civic Ambition, David Goodman has produced a significant critical rethinking of the philosophy and operation of American broadcasting. Bringing out the educational and public service aspects of what has commonly been derided as a wholly commercial system, Goodman demonstrates how American radio was shaped by larger currents in social and political thought, particularly in the fields of classical music and public affairs programming. This impressively wide-ranging study also sheds new light on Adorno’s famous critique of US media culture and provides a window into scholarly debates on radio and its social function in the 1930s and 40s. All scholars of American history and culture, as well as media studies, will find it provocative and stimulating.” –Michele Hilmes, author of Radio Voices: American Broadcasting 1922 to 1952 (1997) and Network Nations: A Transnational History of British and American Broadcasting (2011)

“A brilliant contribution to the history of American broadcasting. Goodman’s argument is subtle and bold, painstakingly researched and creatively conceived. Radio’s Civic Ambition is a revisionist history in the best sense of the term. Goodman has sifted through the archives, revisited the usual theoretical suspects, and produced an imaginative and persuasive new way to think about American radio’s Golden Age.”–Jason Loviglio, author of Radio’s Intimate Public: Network Broadcasting and Mass-Mediated Democracy (2005)

“A thought-provoking and, at times, innovative intellectual history of radio programming.”–The Journal of American History

“Not only a significant addition to the history of early American broadcasting, and one that forces a rethinking of entrenched assumptions about that system’s political alliances, but
it is also a model of the kind of cultural history that is possible when we are excused from having to constantly re-establish the pertinence of an area of study.” —Journal of Communication

“Goodman’s book provides a great look at how the American broadcasting industry in the 1930s was civic-minded as well as responsive to government. It poses many future research questions about radio and the listening audiences’ response to what was offered
to them.” —American Journalism

“Pushes readers to rethink what they know about the ideology of radio in the 1930s and the possibilities for media in a democratic state.” —American Historical Review

The first account of the cultural and civic ambition of American commercial radio in the 1930s