This review of the history of the coverage principle developed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) concludes that government regulation of mass media program content can be dangerous and that the coverage principle needs to be abolished. The first section of the report discusses the FCC's interpretation of the 1934 Communications Act…

Municipal ownership and operation of radio stations, an interesting but forgotten variant approach to radio that flourished in the 1920s, is discussed in this paper. Specifically, it examines WPG in Atlantic City, New Jersey, the first and in many ways the most interesting example of municipal ownership of radio. WPG's operations are recounted…

This paper explores FM radio's struggle for survival in the 1940s, focusing primarily on the impact of Federal Communications Commission (FCC) decision making and on the influence and activities of the well-established radio corporations, primarily the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). It describes the invention of FM radio by Edwin H. Armstrong…

This is one of several papers presented at a Federal Trade Commission Symposium on Media Concentration. It analyzes trends in the development of one-newspaper cities. Some of the trends noted are that face-to-face competition has declined considerably over the last five decades, going from 90% of the circulation in 1923 to 30% of the circulation…

During the 1920s professional baseball emerged as both a mass sport and a mass media-reported sport. This emergence was accompanied by evolution and change in both radio broadcasting and newspaper sports writing. Live coverage of sporting events, particularly baseball's World Series, provided a part of radio's growth process that affected the…

This annotated bibliography is designed to survey the field of women in communication. The bibliography is centered on a specific context: who are and who were the women who worked in the communication field, and specifically, what were their writings like? The 56 annotations date from 1949 through 1990 and deal mostly with books (especially…

The Congressional Research Service prepared this compilation of articles and bibliography to facilitate student research on the regulation of mass media in the United States, the 1979-80 intercollegiate debate topic. The selection of articles reproduced in Section A and the citations chosen for the bibliography in Section B are representative of…

A study focused on how the broadcasting and advertising industries dealt publicly, through the medium of the trade journal, with political pressures shortly after the end of the Second World War. Was blacklisting and the political screening of talent acknowledged in the trade press? If so, did the publications approve or disapprove of the methods…

This theme issue of the "Centro Bulletin" examines media stereotypes of Latinos and presents examples of alternatives. "From Assimilation to Annihilation: Puerto Rican Images in U.S. Films" (R. Perez) traces the representation of Puerto Ricans from the early days of television to the films of the 1970s. "The Latino 'Boom'…

The object of this study was to decode the expressive symbol systems attached to broadcasting in the 1920s and to come to an understanding of the significance of the new technology by exploring the utopian dimensions which were tacitly held by the market model, and expressed in a variety of ways by the men and women who were connected in some way…

The challenge to public service forms of broadcasting posed by the adoption of neo-liberal communication policy strategies by a number of western European governments has presented the left with a dilemma. Traditionally these public corporations have been characterized as ideological instruments of class domination. Today, however, sections of the…

This study presents an overview and analysis of the continuing debate in the United Nations system on freedom of the press and the distribution of information. The three main chapters deal with sequences within that history. The first chapter discusses the debate on Freedom of Information which was pursued, particularly at the United Nations, in…

This publication resulted from a project of the British Film Institute (bfi). The aim was to emphasize that cinema takes a number of different forms, fulfills a variety of roles within different societies, and has different models of its social function. Toward this end, film-makers from all over the world were invited to write a diary about the…

Last May the Office of Education organized a list of pamphlet material under the title "Public Affairs Pamphlets." While this tabulation was prepared primarily to meet the needs of the 10 public forum demonstrations then organizing programs of public discussion, it was widely used by libraries, forums of all kinds, social science teachers and…