At breakfast one morning in 1992, while visiting a friend in the ancient Russian city of Kostroma, I asked my host about a black box sitting on a shelf above the kitchen table. “Oh,” he said, looking up from his kasha and tea, “that’s our Stalin radio.”
It was a simple box with speaker vents and a single knob, to adjust volume. There was no antenna and no receiver and you couldn’t turn it off, you could only turn it down. It was, basically, a speaker hard-wired into what once was Soviet propaganda central, and every apartment was required to have one.
This was Stalin-era pre-television mass media. It gave the Party line on all things, played Party-approved music only, and presented only Party-approved dramas and variety shows. By 1992 it had already become a relic of the Soviet era, airing mostly easy-listening and classical music. But its utility as an exclusive conduit for one point of view for nearly 50 years was undeniable. Unless a Soviet citizen had access to Voice of America or other Western media, his view of the world was seriously skewed.
I was reminded of my friend’s Stalin radio as I read the numerous obituaries and eulogies for ABC anchorman Peter Jennings, who died of lung cancer on Aug. 8. Most of these tributes have mourned not only the passing of Jennings but of the old three-network anchorman system that gave Americans their news at the dinner hour for five decades. Some eulogists have waxed nostalgic for the network monopoly, openly unsettled that it has given way to a raucous free market of media choices.
Like the Stalin radios, the three major networks reported news from a single point of view, and arguably do so to this day. In the early days of anchorman-dominated television news you didn’t become a Chet Huntley-David Brinkley family versus a Walter Cronkite family because of content. You based your choice on Chet and David’s repartee or Walter’s grandfatherly mien, because the content was essentially the same.
It didn’t improve during the Frank Reynolds-Dan Rather-John Chancellor era, or during the most recent Rather-Jennings-Brokaw regime. The party line, as dictated by the Northeast political elites taking their cues largely from The New York Times, was faithfully adhered to by each network news show. The newsmagazines that came later (“60 Minutes,” “Dateline,” “20/20”) only gave the networks greater opportunities to push identical agendas (business bad, environment good; management bad, labor good, etc.).
The advent of cable news, in the form of Ted Turner’s CNN in 1980, had no effect on the network monopoly since CNN’s worldview was identical to ABC’s, CBS’s and NBC’s. CNN’s advantage was that it could push this agenda 24 hours a day instead of just 30 minutes a night at the dinner hour. The networks and CNN (plus the prime time political content of the sitcoms of Linda Bloodworth-Thomason) provided a formidable megaphone for liberalism during the Reagan years.
But that was to change. Potent forces would soon undermine the liberal, mainstream media monopoly, just as Reagan, Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, perestroika and glasnost combined to undermine world socialism. First there was Rush Limbaugh, who debuted nationally in 1989. For several years his was the only conservative take on news available, serving as a Voice of America for those wanting something other than the view of the world received from the network news.
The sizeable fissure that Limbaugh opened in the mainstream media monopoly soon became a yawning crevasse. It widened further in the mid-1990s when the Internet arrived, providing conservative-oriented news sites such as WorldNet Daily, Lucianne.com, Drudge and NewsMax. The arrival of Fox News in 1996 vastly increased options for those tired of the networks and CNN.
But the deathblow to the media monopoly, it can be argued, was administered by bloggers. No one had paid much attention to them until after 9/11. Early on, mainstream journalists dismissed them as mere diarists. Some still do. But in the aftermath of Sept. 11 many Americans found that they were getting a more accurate view of the world via the blogs than via their old Stalin radios, the networks.
It’s all changed now, for us and for my Russian friend.
Jon Ham is vice president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of its newspaper, Carolina Journal.