RTV Theory and Practice - Special Issue

xenophobia and collusion between General Electric Co . , The American Telephone and Telegraph Co. , Western Electric Co . , Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Co . , and friendly government officials combined to create the Radio Corporation of America (Douglas , 1987; Barnouw , 1966, pp . 50-61). 2 ) The new director of RCA , David Sarnoff , seeking to sell radio receivers devised a regular program service for which the public would wish to buy the new "Radio Music Вох" (Barnouw, 1966, pp. 78-80). Later in the 1920s RCA, and then Columbia Broadcasting System , would institutionalize the sending of a radio signal from a centralized source to a widely dispersed listening public, and by the beginning of the 19305, radio networks hađ become the dominant source of all programming carried via the radio (Barnouw, 1968). Such dominance of radio networks declined with the advent of television, but the basic model of providing a program service from a centrally-locateđ source , i.e. "broadcasting” , remains (Fornatale and Mills , 1980). 3 ) This model of "broadcasting" , therefore , is not inherent to the medium , but comes rather as the result of commercial anđ political decisions made by its inventors , the Navy, and rađio entrepeneurs in the years before 1920 (Douglas , 1987), 4 ) Point-to-point communication via the air became technologically unfeasible when too many people wanted to be on the same frequency at the same time (Barnouw , 1966); 5 ) but rađio (and other mass media) constituted a centralized system of information and entertainment đistribution controlled by a small professional group of writers and prođucers . (White , 1980). Radio as a channel for the "broadcasting" of information presents us with a tremenđous paradox, however . " (I )t increases the general knowledge of the auđience about the world , but this increase goes hand in hanđ with a proportional decrease in capacity to act politically on this knowledge . The power of radio is to give this paradox not only the appearance of naturalness , but to make it the fielđ of the most strenuous remedying efforts, while at the same time reinforcing the basic predicament" (Bruck , 1984, p.116 ) . Thus , the challenge for community radio is to endeavor to place the power for the creation and dissemination of messages back mto the hands of the listeners , while still workmg within the confines of the locally-based communication system . Rather than leaving the power in the hands of a few professionals who spreađ messages over a broadly-constiluted

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