Description
The Citizen Machine is the untold political history of television's formative era. Historian Anna McCarthy goes behind the scenes of early television programming, revealing that long before the age of PBS, leaders from business, philanthropy, and social reform movements as well as public intellectuals were all obsessively concerned with TV's potential to mold the right kind of citizen.Based on years of path-breaking archival work, The Citizen Machine sheds new light on the place of television in the postwar American political landscape.
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In the early days of television, corporate executives, philanthropists, and social reformers hoped to use the new medium to enforce morality and safeguard the free world against the specters of communism, race conflict, and nuclear war. McCarthy (cinema studies, New York University) describes the work behind examples of sponsored programming such as an animated cartoon on free enterprise, and asks how TV came to be seen by some elites as a vehicle for governing the moral and mental development of the populace. She sheds new light on the place of TV in the political landscape during the postwar period, and on the role of television in conceptualizations of democratic governance as a process best managed through the transfer of state responsibilities to the private sphere. The book is illustrated with b&w photos, stills from TV programs, and pages from actual scripts. About 65 pages of in-depth chapter notes are included. Annotation ©2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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