I was tickled—or, rather, pricked—by the snide remarks a certain John Wallace made in the April 1926 issue of Radio Broadcast, in which he expounded on “Radio and the Taste of the Nation.” In particular, Wallace took issue with the assertion that the new medium was threatening to turn the United States into the “Land of the Cretin” and the “Home of the Depraved.”
While not actual quotations, the phrases “Land of the Cretin” and “Home of the Depraved reflected, according to Wallace, the
utterances of any one of several of God’s private secretaries, expressed editorially in any one of several pastel colored periodicals on the occasion of that sage’s discovery of the existence of radio.
Their “pious pessimism,” so Wallace, was
that the taste of the American nation is lower than that of any other similar body of men on this sphere, and that, among the agents engaged in undermining it, radio promises to be one of the most effective.
“[I]n fact,” Wallace opined, the “custom of unfavorably comparing the kultur of America to that of any other nation,” was not restricted to the realm of broadcasting. Adopted by and cultivated among his countrymen and women, it was an attitude rooted in the notion that “America, in respect to its appreciation of the ‘higher things” was an infant among nations. The belief, according to Wallace, was so “widespread” as to constitute “one of the cardinal planks in the American credo.”
It finds place in our code of national convictions along side of such sacred tenets as “We must avoid all entangling alliances,” “The French do not know how to make coffee,” “Success is always the reward of effort,” “Newspaper men are conscienceless scoundrels,” “Abraham Lincoln was the incarnation of all virtue,” and “The Japs are a dangerous little people.”
As a US-educated ex-Academic mindful of his European perspective, I shall refrain from commenting on the US aversion to “entangling alliances,” other than allowing myself the aside that, one hundred years on, said view has experienced a remarkable resurgence in the age of MAGA and to pose the question, if only by the by, what America First might mean for the future of NATO.
And while I have nothing to say about the coffee culture of France, or about prejudicial views thereof, my musings on so-called “legacy media” such as radio and their reception does encourage me to consider the anti-wireless bias of which Wallace speaks vis-à-vis the effectively re-seeded and carefully nurtured suspicion that “Newspaper men are conscienceless scoundrels.”
After all, never has anti-media bias in the United States been more pronounced than in the second coming of MAGA.
As I browse online century-old periodicals like Radio Broadcast in the year of the 250th anniversary of the US of A, I feel compelled to revisit yesteryear’s attitudes toward radio as a moronizing force in the context of today’s radically transformed media landscape, especially in light of the Trump administration’s weaponization of the FCC.
Is ridding ourselves of traditional mass media making us more discerning consumers of news and entertainment?
Continue reading ““… this Land of the Cretin and Home of the Depraved”: US Radio Naysaying Anno 1926 and the Silencing of So-called “Legacy Media” in the Age of AI Slop”
Last night, I felt like an old queen. Granted, that is not an uncommon feeling for me; but the Queen in this case was none other than Victoria, who, in the last years of her reign, enjoyed partaking of live opera without actually having to leave for the theater at which it was presented. Her royal box was a contraption called the Electrophone, a special telephone service that connected subscribers with the theaters from which the sounds of music and drama could be appreciated while being seated in whichever armchair one designated as a listening post. Today, we may be accustomed to live—or, wardrobe malfunctions notwithstanding, very nearly live—broadcasts of sounds as well as images; but last night’s event felt as new and exciting to me as it must have been picking up the electrophone or dialing in to those experimental theater relays during the 1890s and 1920s, respectively.
Harry Heuser 