Victor Pickard, America’s Battle for Media Democracy: The Triumph of Corporate Libertarianism and the Future of Media Reform

Victor Pickard’s book on the formative years directly after the Communications Act is a major contribution to media history research, and should be read by policy historians and media advocacy researchers. In America’s Battle for Media Democracy, pulling from rigorous archive work, Pickard examines the subsequent players and organizational framework of the FCC in the 1940s. Intriguingly, he has found that contrary to our received narrative, the 1940s saw liberally invested commissioners who authorized studies to increase access to public airwaves. Roosevelt’s New Deal technocrats were hired to implement a policy that favored privatization. But the work they actually conducted, Pickard argues, paved the way for alternative media practices to develop, from educational broadcasts to journalism ethics. And according to Pickard, this first U.S. debate, essentially regarding the federal deliberations over if public or private institutions were best prepared to steward the U.S. airwaves, still animates contemporary media studies debates. Is democracy better served by public or commercial broadcasting? What does a successful media advocacy look like in practice, and what impediments do progressive investments face when working to change policy? Pickard’s book shows that activism in the 1940s provides a case study of how progressive goals to encourage public service media materialized into specific administrative legacies. The posterity of these advocacies resulted in a failure to fully instigate a progressive framework for media policy, yet at the same time a tradition that can still be reclaimed by progressive advocates. Both outcomes were the result of this period of strategic interpretation after the Communications Act, and to understand these legacies, a dedicated and close study of these methods is necessary.