Radio Listening Groups in the USA: ‘Haphazard' Development and Comparative Perspectives

• In Event: Listening Learners: The Political Economy of Media Education During the New Deal, 1935-1948

Abstract

One of the six research investigations to become a part of the program of the FREC was a project to research radio listening groups, financed by the Carnegie Corporation. While the Princeton Radio Research Project has received historical attention, the Carnegie listening group study responded to and sought to shape one of the most prominent enthusiasms of radio and education activists in the 1930s. Group listening in the first decades of broadcasting was sometimes a product of a scarcity of radios, but also and more significantly grew from an organized reform strategy that sought to discipline and instruct the listening audience; organized radio listening groups were possibly one of the last formal attempts to teach people how to interact with mass media, and considerable resources were devoted to the effort. Listening groups were a significant part of the adult education programming, and high hopes of enhanced tolerance and cosmopolitanism, of uplift and self-improvement, surrounded them. This paper considers the history of organized radio listening groups in the US. Most radio listening groups were formed by voluntary associations – parent-teacher groups were the most active, but there were also listening groups associated with labor unions, churches, YMCAs and YWCAs, hospitals, schools and colleges, alumni organizations, women’s clubs, and libraries. By briefly comparing this US history to the history of listening groups in the UK, Canada and Australia, I will illuminate further the distinctive conditions of American collaboration in this era between educators and the commercial broadcasters – both how much was borrowed from the UK and other nations with a national public broadcaster, but also the extent of American adaptation and innovation.

Author

• David Charles Goodman, U of Melbourne