Creating the Silent Majority: State Censorship and the Radio Right in the 1960s
Open Access
- Author:
- Matzko, Paul Edward
- Graduate Program:
- History
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- October 05, 2016
- Committee Members:
- Philip Jenkins, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Amy S Greenberg, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Gary Scott Cross, Committee Member
Philip Jenkins, Committee Member
Roger Kent Finke, Outside Member
Amy S Greenberg, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor - Keywords:
- conservatism
New Right
New Christian Right
radio
broadcasting
Walter Reuther
National Council of Churches
United Church of Christ
John F. Kennedy
Robert F. Kennedy
Federal Communications Commission
Internal Revenue Service
Carl McIntire
Billy James Hargis
H. L. Hunt
Fairness Doctrine
censorship
Red Lion Broadcasting v. FCC
WLBT
WXUR
Everett C. Parker
E. William Henry
Ronald Reagan
Radio Right - Abstract:
- This dissertation explores the central role that radio broadcasting played in the rise of modern American conservatism. While it is a commonplace today to think of talk radio as a conservative medium, it was not always so. The rise of conservative radio broadcasting in the 1960s was an unintended consequence of the advent of network television in the 1950s. Radio increasingly became the preserve of independent station owners, who were desperate for cash and willing to air previously marginalized political dissidents including conservatives. For the first time in radio history, a dozen Right-wing broadcasters aired on a hundred or more stations nationwide. Their listeners formed the backbone of the New Right as conservative radio acted as a megaphone, amplifying local activism and creating a truly national grassroots movement. Indeed, conservative broadcasters were so successful in stimulating activism that the John F. Kennedy Administration, worried about its upcoming 1964 re-election campaign, targeted the offending broadcasters with selective enforcement of Internal Revenue Service and Federal Communications Commission regulations. The Kennedy Administration’s muting of the radio Right remains the most successful episode of government censorship in America since the Second Red Scare, albeit one that scholars have almost entirely overlooked. This story is thus an essential prehistory of the much better known emergence of the New Christian Right in the 1970s and the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.