Joy Elizabeth Hayes

Drama 'based on real events,' or docudrama, is a media format that emerged in film and radio in the 1930s and remains a popular mode of storytelling across broadcasting, cable, and streaming media. A study of the radio roots of docudrama reveals how these programs engaged audiences with a unique combination of fact and emotion. By comparing a commercially-sponsored series, Cavalcade of America (1935-1953), with a government-sponsored series, Americans All, Immigrants All (1938-1939), this study explores how early radio docudramas addressed audiences as members of a national community. An analysis of program form and content, together with an assessment of contemporary audience research, shows how docudramas positioned listeners not just as audiences, but as actors in the unfolding drama. This study offers a new perspective on the pre-war era of broadcast docudrama and the format's unique strategy of audience engagement.

This study investigates the history of family planning communication in Kenya and the role of international aid and radio broadcasting in that history. It focuses on family planning communication as a component of development communication that was woven into Kenyan nation policy shortly after Independence. It draws on the records of the Ford Foundation and other international agencies available at the Rockefeller Archive Center, along with radio programme recordings, government reports and other sources. This study identifies three cases that correspond to three historical periods of family planning communication in Kenya: the 1960s-1970s; the 1980s-1990s; and the 2000s-2010s. These cases allow us to explore how the Ford Foundation and other agencies worked with Kenyan organizations and state actors to develop large-scale family planning campaigns targeting different segments of society. This history provides an important context for understanding radio’s current role in reproductive health communication in Kenya.

This study offers a new perspective on documentary drama in the television, cable and streaming eras by mapping the trajectory of US media industry discourse about docudrama from the early twentieth century to the present. It uses aggregate data from eight entertainment trade journals to show that docudrama emerged in broadcasting and film in the 1930s and has played a significant role in US media culture ever since. It analyzes trade journal commentary and radio broadcasting practices to demonstrate that the two key components of docudrama-dramatization and a discourse of factuality-developed in the network radio era. The key radio innovation was dramatization, which required producers to re-create actual events, conform to generic expectations, and promote a particular ideological perspective on social events.

This study traces the history of conservative media to the late 1930s and the radio broadcasting activities of Representative Martin Dies Jr., who chaired the House Special Committee on Un-American Activities 1938-1944. Using archival research and critical discourse analysis, this inquiry shows how Dies wielded his congressional position to build an anti-New Deal media apparatus. It analyzes how his national network radio speeches engaged audiences and associated New Deal liberalism with communism and "un-American" activities. Dies positioned himself as a mainstream mediator for populist conservative beliefs and established an enduring model of how to shape and drive media coverage.

This study investigates a battle over music and identity at Radio Zapotitlán, a community radio station in the state of Jalisco, Mexico. An analysis of over 20 interviews with station organizers, volunteers and listeners conducted in 2009 and 2010 indicates that while organizers and older listeners celebrated Ranchera music as the station’s predominant musical content, younger listeners fought to broadcast contemporary Banda music. An historical and theoretical analysis of Ranchera music explores its cultural role in mediating experiences of migration and nostalgia. This study finds that Radio Zapotitlán organizers promoted Ranchera music in order to engage the national and transnational nostalgia of Zapotitlán’s displaced migrants, and to meet the expectations of government regulators and transnational nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). It concludes that local, regional, national and transnational interests cannot be disentangled in musical articulations of identity at Radio Zapotitlán.

This article investigates the role that community media play in the translocal negotiation of local culture in Latin America. Translocal is a concept that captures the way that local cultural producers engage with national and transnational forces in shaping everyday cultural practices. This study focuses on community radio station Ecos de Manantlán in Zapotitlán de Vadillo, Mexico (Radio Zapotitlán), during the years 2006–2012. Radio Zapotitlán is officially categorized as a campesino or agricultural laborer/peasant station and presents its campesino identity through radio and Internet content. Analyses of that content, along with interviews with station associates and listeners, reveal the complex cultural mediations between local media producers, national regulators, and transnational donors. This study investigates the local production of a transnationally funded radionovela, or radio soap opera, as a window onto the station’s role as a cultural mediator. This article argues that station participants used the radionovela to express local values and meanings and to marginalize the educational goals of the transnational agency funding the project. Radio Zapotitlán offers a concrete case of cultural negotiation in which local interests engage with – and transform – donor-funded content aimed at the local community.

Focusing on the period 1999–2003, this study examines the cultural content of the Howard Stern Show in order to develop a theory of shock radio. We argue that while Stern's sexist and anti-feminist agenda framed his treatment of women's bodies, his broader obsession with bodily excess reflected the particular cultural moment of the late 20th century and the long-term problem of embodiment via the radio medium. We draw on Linda William's concept of body genres, M. M. Bakhtin's grotesque body, and recent radio scholarship in order to conceptualize the relationship among the voice, the body, and the medium in shock radio . Joy Elizabeth Hayes (Ph.D., University of California, San Diego, 1994) is associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa. Her research and teaching interests include the cultural history of broadcasting in the U.S. and Mexico, community radio in Latin America, and media history and theory . Dana Gravesen is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa. His current research interests include nationalism and identity with regard to Dominican-American media, U.S. broadcasting history, and critical cultural media theory .

This study investigates the radio roots of a discourse of domestic whiteness that is typically associated with family sitcoms of the 1950s. Through analysis of a highly popular evening serial. One Man's Family (NBC, 1932-1959), the article tracks the production of domestic whiteness in sound, narrative, and vocal performance, situating it within the institutional and social contexts of 1930s radio.