By M ichael /. Socolow On September 21, 1970, the New York Times began publishing its op-ed page. "We hope," the editors wrote, "that a contribution may be made toward stimulating new thought and provoking new discussion on public problems." 1 This new forum of opinion and commentary was soon imitated by other newspapers. The importance of the op-ed page is easily recognized, but historians have not fully investigated its origins. Nor has the creation of the op-ed essay as a specific genre of journalistic writing been adequately examined. This article analyzes the historical development of both the op-ed essay and the op-ed forum at the Times within the framework. of Jurgen Habermas' public sphere theory and the context of industry needs and trends. The Times designed the page to be both profitable and intellectually stimulating. Although these objectives could be in conflict, newsroom managers worked to make their project viable and vibrant. The Times' effort synthesized various antecedents and editorial visions. Journalistic innovation is usually complex, and typically involves multiple external factors. The Times op-ed page appeared in an era of democratizing cultural and political discourse and of economic distress for the company itself. The newspaper's executives developed a place for outside contributors with space reserved for sale at a premium rate for additional commentaries and other purposes. Participants in the process have discussed the personalities involved, yet histories of the New York Times as well as biographies and memoirs provide only cursory treatments of the page's origins. 2 In his study of organizational communication, however, Chris Argyris did M ichael J. Socolow is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the University of M aine.
nique, that network's signal would be transmitted by multiple outlets across the nation. Under such a system, radio listeners anywhere within the country might find one of the National Broadcasting Company's (NBC) two networks at 660 kilocycles, or the Columbia Broadcasting System's (CBS) network at 880 kilocycles. By freeing up the numerous wavelengths employed for network radio, significantly more broadcasters-at the local, regional, and national levels-could be accommodated. Synchronous broadcasting was not simply a futuristic vision. By the end of 1930, NBC's general engineer acknowledged its technical feasibility. Elsewhere, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) began experimental synchronization in 1926, and German and Swedish broadcasters started using the system in 1930.3 In the U.S. context, the synchronous system (also called "synchronization") promised to alleviate tensions caused by the rapid expansion of NBC and CBS during the late 1920s and early 1930s. One such issue, regularly brought to the attention of regulators and politicians by irate radio listeners, was "program duplication." As the networks expanded, national programming transmitted by multiple stations on several different wavelengths seemed to diminish the diversity of programming on U.S. airwaves. Program duplication joined other contentious debates emerging in broadcasting's earliest era, including discussions of advertising on the airwaves and the apparent favoritism toward commercial broadcasters shown by federal regulators. These disputes testify to the vitality of early public debate over broadcasting's influence on American society. Radio's revolutionary characteristics-its creation of a new public sphere, a social arena both massively public and intimately personal-required novel policy considerations. Politicians, broadcasters, critics, regulators, and engineers all wrestled with broadcasting's role in the U.S. context. Issues such as the proper mode of regulation, applicable technical specifications, the acceptability of advertising, the boundaries of speech, and the optimal number of broadcasters were deeply intertwined; no single aspect of broadcasting could be addressed in isolation. Broadcasting, from its birth, stood athwart a nexus of technological, cultural, political, and social considerations.4
In 1946, at the age of 38, Frank Stanton was named President of CBS. While much of Stanton's work as a corporate executive has been chronicled, his accomplishments as one of America's earliest scholars of radio audience measurement remain neglected in media scholarship. This article reviews Stanton's research efforts between 1933 and 1942, and in doing so it places his work within the contexts of contemporaneous social and psychological media inquiry. Discussions of Stanton's methodological approach, his innovative dissertation, his scholarship, and his collaboration with key figures in the history of communication research are informed by primary and secondary sources.The young researcher immediately recognized the opportunity. Relaxing in his living room on a Sunday evening in October 1938, Frank Stanton tuned into CBS radio to catch Orson Welles's adaptation of War of the Worlds. As the powerfully realistic drama unfolded, Stanton sensed the singularity of the moment. Before the program finished he hurried from his Jackson Heights apartment to the parking garage, jumped into his car, and sped across the East River to the Madison Avenue headquarters of CBS. The broadcast ended just as Stanton's car pulled up. Three years earlier, Stanton had been hired by the network to improve its audience research efforts; on this night he rushed up to his desk and quickly telephoned his friend and colleague, communication scholar Paul Lazarsfeld. The two agreed upon a set of survey questions that could illuminate the just-completed remarkable mass media moment. With the blare of police sirens in the background-and panicked CBS executives preparing Welles's impromptu press conference a few floors awayStanton typed out the questionnaire. He then phoned the company CBS used for fieldwork, specifying the survey's key social and economic variables. A systematic survey began first thing the next morning-on Halloween (Buxton & Acland, 2001, pp. 212-216).As this and other episodes demonstrate, Frank Stanton devoted much of his life to understanding the cultural, social, and psychological effects of the mass media. When he died on December 24, 2006, at the age of 98, he left a series of complex, Michael J. Socolow (Ph.D., Georgetown University) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the University of Maine. His research interests include the history of broadcast regulation and network competition.
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