Editor’s Remarks: Celebrating 100 Years of Radio Broadcasting!
The year 2020 marks the hundredth year of commercial broadcasting in the United States and most countries around the world. On November 2, 1920, the Westinghouse Electric Company in Pittsburgh converted its experimental station into a commercial radio station (Fones-Wolf, 2006). Ship-to-shore radio communication and experimental broadcasting, however, preceded the creation of commercial radio stations making the history of the medium longer (Alisky, 1954; Balbi, 2017; Briggs, 1995; Day, 1994; Douglas, 1987; Gilfillan, 2009; Johnson, 1988; MacLennan, 2010; Slotten, 2006; Stiegler, 2008; Vaillant, 2010; Vipond, 1992). Regular commercial or public radio stations were quickly established all over the world, the earliest in 1919 and 1920.
This issue is a peer-reviewed symposium that celebrates and commemorates the last 100 years of broadcasting from an international perspective encompassing five continents; looking at its history; and examining policy, content, formats, and alternatives. The issue begins with Michael Socolow’s review of the writing of broadcasting history in “Radio’s Waves of History: How Social, Political, and Regulatory Activism Inspired Radio Network Historiography in the United States, 1930–2020” (Socolow, 2020). Socolow notes that in “moments of struggle that the best critical and independent histories of U.S. national radio network development have appeared” (Socolow, 2020, p. 228) as he takes his readers on a detailed and deliberate path through circuitous travels of radio history for the last 90 years.
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Author: Anne F. MacLennan