Robert S. Fortner, Radio Morality and Culture: Britain, Canada, and the United States, 1919�1945

The catalyst for the success of talk radio since 1992 has been the decision by programmers to debate societal values over the airwaves: the cultural wars. Seventy years earlier, during the first decades of broadcast radio, a similar debate occurred within the industry. The rapid modernization of society created, for many, a sense of losing control of one’s life, especially one’s moral life. In the 1920s, various groups fought a rearguard action against this loss of control. The Victorian upper class in England, the rural farming communities in the United States, and the new nationalists in Canada all sought to protect their identities from being subsumed by the industrial, urban, corporate society developing within their countries. For each group, the church became their standard bearer. In his book Radio Morality and Culture, Robert Fortner (Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at Calvin College) examines the relationship between the church and radio in the debate over the cultural role of broadcasting in modern society. Fortner’s study, therefore, provides readers with a cultural analysis of the first quarter century of radio’s existence. Ignoring an economic, biographical, or legislative history of broadcasting’s first decades, Fortner’s narrow focus achieves a more comprehensive profile of the development of radio as a byproduct of its birthplace, modern market capitalism. In eight chapters, he examines the emergence of radio in three distinct societies who only share one common characteristic: All three must adapt to a “quickening” of the pace of life. Each country reacted differently to this challenge. Britain fought to preserve Victorian morality. The United States attempted to create a new morality to reflect the modernization of its society. Canada struggled to create and maintain its new nationalism by fusing morality with identity. In all three cases, the radio broadcasters offered the established church of each country an opportunity to participate in shaping the societal role of radio. Fortner explains why the church failed to make the most of this opportunity. Formed in 1922, the British Broadcasting Company aired the first of its regular weekly religious programming two years later. The BBC consulted with the newly created Religious Advisory Committee about such programming throughout the 1920s. However, by that decade’s end, religious programming as a method to reenforce Victorian values all but disappeared. The Committee focused its attention more on Sunday programming as a threat to church attendance than as a means to communicate church teachings. And because the board of the BBC early on decided on public service as the purpose for British radio, programming rarely challenged the values of the established church. Shaken by the loss of life during World War I, both the Committee and the board of the BBC were not eager to embrace the values expressed by