6
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Book: not found

      The Radio Right : How a Band of Broadcasters Took on the Federal Government and Built the Modern Conservative Movement How a Band of Broadcasters Took on the Federal Government and Built the Modern Conservative Movement

      edited_book
      Oxford University Press

      Read this book at

      Buy book Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this book yet. Authors can add summaries to their books on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          By the early 1960s, and for the first time in history, most Americans across the nation could tune their radio to a station that aired conservative programming from dawn to dusk. People listened to these shows in remarkable numbers; for example, the broadcaster with the largest listening audience, Carl McIntire, had a weekly audience of twenty million, or one in nine American households. For the sake of comparison, that is a higher percentage of the country than would listen to conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh forty years later. As this Radio Right phenomenon grew, President John F. Kennedy responded with the most successful government censorship campaign of the last half century. Taking the advice of union leader Walter Reuther, the Kennedy administration used the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Communications Commission to pressure stations into dropping conservative programs. This book reveals the growing power of the Radio Right through the eyes of its opponents using confidential reports, internal correspondence, and Oval Office tape recordings. With the help of other liberal organizations, including the Democratic National Committee and the National Council of Churches, the censorship campaign muted the Radio Right. But by the late 1970s, technological innovations and regulatory changes fueled a resurgence in conservative broadcasting. A new generation of conservative broadcasters, from Pat Robertson to Ronald Reagan, harnessed the power of conservative mass media and transformed the political landscape of America.

          Related collections

          Author and book information

          Book
          9780190073220
          9780190073251
          July 02 2020
          May 21 2020
          10.1093/oso/9780190073220.001.0001
          07988147-d121-497b-84ea-20f22df17474
          History

          Comments

          Comment on this book

          Book chapters

          Similar content52

          Cited by1