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Catherine Martin

Catherine Martin is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Media Studies in Denison University’s Department of Communication. Her book project expands on her dissertation, You Don’t Have to Be a Bad Girl to Love Crime: Femininity and Women’s Labor in US Broadcast Crime Programming, 1945-1975, to interrogate the intersection of gender, race, and power in post-World War II representations of crime on US radio and television. Her work has appeared in The Velvet Light Trap, Radio Journal, and Journal of Radio and Audio Media

Eliminating “Blood and Thunder” from Containment Culture: Audience Efforts to Censor Postwar Radio Programming in the Run-Up to Television

The decade after WWII (1945-1955) was distinct and pivotal in the formation of American media policy, and in establishing postwar social norms.[1]  The major broadcast networks (NBC, CBS, and ABC) had profited from wartime spending and garnered some regulatory goodwill through their work with the Office of War Information.  Still, they struggled as they transitioned programming from radio to television – while fending off regulation efforts from Congress and an activist FCC.  At the same time, a range of progressive and conservative groups debated how to define “the American Way.” Ultimately, Wendy Wall (2008) argues, the postwar emphasis on “getting along” silenced progressive voices, including minorities and women who objected to the postwar reassertion of patriarchal gender norms.[2]  Instead of giving everyone a voice, postwar consensus or containment culture privileged and sought to universalize beliefs and arguments made by conservative social groups seeking to define the United States as emphatically […]