Contradictions of Care in the Rhetoric of US Broadcast Policy, 1920 to 1970

This article examines the way competing notions of care have been enlisted in broadcast policy debates from the beginnings of commercial radio in the 1920s to the radical guerrilla TV movement of the 1960s. The term’s semantic and ideological flexibility has provided an ethical rationale for the state allocation of a scarce public resource, a justification for restrictions on program content organized by “careful and caring” industry leaders and regulatory officials, while also providing a rallying cry for radical challenges to the fundamental economic and political features of mid-century American television. Appeals to the unstable and polyvalent concepts of care and community have been irresistible to both defenders and critics of the nation’s dominant media institutions and program practices. The article analyzes how a rhetoric of care has been deployed in a series of specific moments of economic disruption, regulatory scrutiny, and public and critical disaffection.