Introduction: Hoover’s Men

 

 

THE HISTORY OF BROADCASTING is one of accidents.

The reason stations started was the dream—music, opera, plays, funny people telling jokes in your house. Stations broadcast: People bought radios. But people quit buying radios for a while because there was nothing to listen to twelve hours of the day. More radio stations were built that broadcast longer hours. People bought more sets. So many stations went on the air they interfered with each other. Radio sales went down again. The Commerce Department set up what later became the FCC and assigned frequencies, and thoughtfully divided up all the airwaves between Canada and the U.S., leaving Mexico out of the picture, which is what led in the 1950s to the million-watt blue-lightning-bolt-emitting Mexican-border radio stations like XERF, sending out signals you could pick up from Newfoundland to McMurdo Sound—won’t let us have any airwaves, señor? We’ll use them all. Networks were set up by the radio manufacturers to sell more radios.

Then somebody asked if he could advertise his egg farm on WHYY in Philly. He paid something like ten dollars for an hour’s worth of time over the next month. The guy was out of eggs in two days. . . .

Gee whiz! When they realized people would pay money to sell people stuff on your radio station, or network, the whole thing changed. Before, it had been about culture, entertainment, and selling radio sets. After, it was about the same thing it is now: dollars. The programming was there to get the audience to get the advertiser to pay dollars to sell their stuff to that audience . . .

Meanwhile, there were the Russians in the basements, and the ploughboys, and mad Scots, and people with a little brains at the stations and networks, who were working on Radio with Pictures, and just could not see that the same damned thing that had happened to radio was going to repeat itself with Tele-Vision. . . .

 

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I wrote this for one of Ellen Datlow’s what I call six-authors-for-a-buck things. Once every year or so at Omni—when it was a magazine—she’d ask six or seven writers for very short stories on common themes, and they’d all be printed in a single issue of the magazine. This went on for years—my year was 1988. Ellen said the theme was Urban Fantasy. Urban Fantasy? That means it takes place in a city, and it didn’t happen! Okay! Other writers my year: Daniel Pinkwater, Joyce Carol Oates, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Barry Malzberg, and K. W. Jeter. Pretty damn hot-shit company to keep.

And, as I said, after I’d killed myself in the research, here come PBS and the networks doing all my work for me, after the fact, making me sort of the John Logie Baird of the history-of-early-broadcasting SF story, of which I consider myself the exemplar. . . .