Corwin developed a template for what MacLeish called a "strategy of truth" just as the United States began facing the demands of a two-front, global war. Blending selected OFF data with fictionalized accounts of foreign battles and homefront activity, he designed his shows to convince Americans they were already deeply involved in the worldwide conflict. In several episodes, Corwin sandwiched uplifting accounts of mobilized Americans among tragic stories of battles taking place around the planet. Paralleling the narrative structure of newsreels, the radio series jumbled scenes of spatially distant events into seemingly coherent montages of interconnected elements, bombarding its recently neutral audiences with the impression that distant battles had come home to roost in the United States. Officially regarded only 2 months earlier as regional wars of European and Asian belligerents, those wars, the series counseled, had suddenly metastasized into a planetary conflict.

the networks urged radio programmers to support U.S. efforts by disseminating strictly "truthful" information about the war and censoring information that could aid America's enemies. It was not initially clear, however, how such information could be used to inspire citizens' enlistment in the armed forces and commitment to wartime production.

Before the United States entered the Second World War, American mass media generally shied away from endorsing either side of the global conflict. Although many Americans opposed the fascist powers, and journalists broadcast reports from European war zones critical of Axis belligerents, isolationists were sufficiently powerful to ensure that movie studios and big city newspapers rarely advocated U.S. military intervention on behalf of the Allied countries. The four major radio networks were even less apt to overtly support any of the opposing belligerents. These networks generally avoided alienating their federal regulators, corporate sponsors, and politically divided audiences with blatantly biased war-related reports (Sterling & Kittross, 1978). The U.S. media's pretenses to neutrality abruptly disappeared on December 7, 1941, when Japan attacked U.S. naval forces at Pearl Harbor. Lining up behind Washington's declarations of war against Japan and then its Axis partners, network radio, Hollywood and print media promoted America's new war efforts to their national audiences. Radio was particularly important in this media blitz because more than 80% of American households then had radio sets (The first fifty, 1982). Tens of millions of Americans had already listened to eyewitness accounts of European war zones, and radio continued to deliver information on the war to Americans' living rooms. Because information was relayed immediately and intimately over the airwaves, government agencies and their willing partners in network radio used the medium to inform Americans about the war, to impress on them that hostilities bordered on their own doorsteps, and to urge them to help finance, fight, and produce materiel for global combat.

This action must have been at least one of the reasons for the networks' entering into the "Biltmore Program" with the publishers and the Associated Press in December of 1933. The press had been able to turn an untenable position into a strategic advantage. On December 16, 1933, the New York Times reported a 10-point plan for supplying news to radio which was drawn up and agreed upon by the radio committee of the ANPA, representatives of the press services and representatives of NBC and CBS at the Biltmore Hotel in New York City. The points were as follows: 1. A seven member committee was to be set up to supply limited news for broadcast. 2. The newspaper and press association members of the committee were to select editors who would choose the news from the three wire services. 3. News from the morning reports was to be aired no earlier than 9:30 AM and for day reports no earlier than 9:00 PM. 4. Broadcasts were not to be sponsored. 5. CBS was to dissolve its news service and NBC was prohibited from starting such a service. 6. The broadcasters were to bear all costs of the new service. 7. News bulletins of "transcendental" importance were to be furnished at times other than those specifically prescribed. 8. Broadcasters were to control their commentators so that they would just give background information and no spot news. 9. The newspapers and the broadcasters were to cooperate to limit news broadcasts of newspaper owned stations. 10. Publishers National Radio Committee would recommend the plan to the publishers and it would urge the Press Associations to adopt it.28

According to Hammargren, the Associated Press had spent $250,000 to cover the election, while NBC and CBS had set up networks totaling 126 stations to broadcast the results of AP's efforts.9 The publishers' concern over radio's increasing intrusions into news reporting was the dominant issue at the 1931 meeting of the American Newspaper Publishers' Association (ANPA). The Radio Committee of ANPA issued a report which concluded that: "Radio competes with newspapers today in news, editorials, features, and advertising, and when you have named these you have just about encompassed the whole newspaper."10

Commercial sponsorship was the most practical means of support for broadcasting. There were a finite number of dollars being spent on advertising in all media. The ingredients for rancor between radio and the press were all present. There was no serious animosity at first. There was no real need for it. In the prosperous 1920's there seemed to be plenty of advertising money to go around,2 and the things which radio was doing made good newspaper copy. However, as the decade closed the newspapers were becoming aware of the fact that their advertising revenues were dropping, while those of radio were on the increase.3 Slowly, concern started to swell among the publishers who were not station owners. Silas Bent described the realization in the Century in 1929:

Radio and newspapers have been interrelated ever since the start of broadcasting in the U.S. as a form of mass communication. Regardless of the argument over which was the "first" radio broadcasting station in the United States, radio first achieved national prominence with hard news--election returns from KDKA, Pitts- burgh and WWJ, Detroit. In the beginning, however, newspapers were using broadcasting. The press looked upon it as a toy, a rather complex and sophisticated publicity tool in which there was a growing public curiosity. The initial analysis of the press was accurate, but what the press achieved in perception of the status quo they more than lacked in foresight. The role of broadcasting was going to change, but the nation's editors and publishers were slow to recognize this change, even as it was taking place.

In short, we can’t. And part of the intellectual heritage of twentieth century postmodernism is acknowledgment of this fact. The traditional historian takes a stance above and beyond the content of the book—omniscient, omnipresent, and invisible, neutrally and objectively setting out what is manifestly true about the past: “just the facts.” This book is predicated on the premise that such a stance is false and misleading. Each book, and especially a textbook designed for the classroom, starts out with a distinct set of assumptions and theories that guide the author in making the inevitable and extensive selections—what to put in, what to leave out—that go into writing a book. As cultural and historical theorists such as Michel Foucault and Michel de Certeau teach us, each book starts with a preconceived framework of ideas—about what’s important and what’s not, who counts in history and who doesn’t, which sets of causes and effects are relevant to the story and which aren’t—that all too often the author hides behind a mask of neutral knowledge and objectivity.

Why begin a book about the history of broadcasting with a quote from an author who wrote before radio, and most certainly before television, were even invented? For one thing, Forster’s novel is about the tragedies that occur when connections fail, or are mishandled. Sometimes it’s communication that fails— the telegram arrives too late, a dying woman’s will is ignored, or two conversations overlap in a way that confuses them both. Other times it’s a social or perceptual connection that’s missed—the failure to understand how one family’s affluence and good fortune is gained at the expense of a whole class of others or how an unconsidered effort to fix things can have tragic results. The novel is also a meditation on the changes that twentieth-century culture and “progress” are making on traditional ways of life, how a shift in one direction can cut off another, and how each “improvement” comes along with possibilities for ruin.

The title of this book, Only Connect, comes from Howards End, a novel written by British author E. M. Forster in 1910. You may have seen the film produced in 1992 by Merchant Ivory and released to much critical success in the United States. It’s about the intersecting lives of three families in Edwardian England—the romantic, liberal Schlegels; the wealthy, conservative Wilcoxes; and the poor, struggling Basts—who meet by chance and who, through a series of accidents and misunderstandings, find their lives forever altered. Forster opens the book with the phrase “Only connect …” above the first paragraph, and the process of making connections—between actions and their outcomes, between rich and poor, between the past and the present—creates all manner of problems for the characters. In the book’s climactic scene, Margaret Schlegel tries to make Henry Wilcox see that his behavior affects the lives of others. He doesn’t see the connection between his own adulterous affair with Mrs. Bast, which ruined her life and her husband’s, and his condemnation of Margaret’s sister Helen’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy.

Knowledge of historical facts has been used as a screening device in many societies, from China to the United States, and the habit is still with us to some extent.

People live in the present. They plan for and worry about the future. History, however, is the study of the past. Given all the demands that press in from living in the present and anticipating what is yet to come, why bother with what has been? Given all the desirable and available branches of knowledge, why insist—as most American educational programs do—on a good bit of history? And why urge many students to study even more history than they are required to?