Book Review: Radio Journalism in America: Telling the News in the Golden Age and Beyond, The Early Shortwave Stations: A Broadcasting History through 1945 and The Digital Television Revolution: Origins to Outcomes, by Jim Cox, Jerome S. Berg and Michael Starks

Three on Broadcasting Old and NewRadio Journalism in America: Telling the News in the Golden Age and Beyond. Jim Cox. Jefferson: McFarland, 2013. 272 pp. $45.00 pbk.The Early Shortwave Stations: A Broadcasting History through 1945. Jerome S. Berg. Jefferson: McFarland, 2013. 340 pp. $45.00 pbk.The Digital Television Revolution: Origins to Outcomes. Michael Starks. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 247 pp. $85.00 hbk.Radio Journalism in America is the first attempt in many years to tell the story of American radio news, a business that has now long been in decline. Indeed, many sta- tions provide no news at all, a thing once unheard of.As Cox makes clear in his introduction, his book "is heavily slanted to the golden age encompassing the time period roughly extending from the early 1930s to the late 1950s." The emphasis is on network-level news, chiefly the work of CBS and NBC with some comment on the "lesser" networks. The reason is at least twofold: little survives of most local station programming (especially for the period on which he focuses), however, we have a fair record on the network level, especially of NBC, which years ago deposited its archives in the Library of Congress as well as the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.As television eviscerated network news starting around 1950, local stations (espe- cially in larger cities) took a more active role and some of that is traced here as well- including the rise of early all news operations. At the end of the main text, Cox touches on the impact of television and later media and the role of the twenty-four-hour news cycle driven by social media and mobility.Cox writes in an engaging way with oodles of examples to illustrate key points. But do understand that he is aiming at a popular audience of OTR (old-time radio) fans, not academics. With fourteen prior books on different aspects of radio programming to his credit from the same publisher, Cox is a retired (though apparently not very!) college professor living in Kentucky.Of perhaps the most value for any readers of this journal will be more than 100 historically important radio news figures who are given mini-biographies (about a half page each) in the 50-page biographical dictionary that appears at the end.The Early Shortwave Stations: A Broadcasting History through 1945 is the fourth and final volume in the author's invaluable history of shortwave radio broadcasting, all published by McFarland. Now retired from a Massachusetts legal career, Berg has long been active in shortwave broadcast circles. He clearly kept everything that passed by his transmitter.His latest volume builds on his first (On the Short Waves, 1923-1945, 2008) by care- fully assessing the stations on the air in the first two decades of such shortwave operations-from roughly 1925 to 1945. Arranged chronologically, Berg relates the stories of the many stations around the world (chiefly those in Europe and North America at first, and then other parts of the world by the late 1930s) that broadcast on a scheduled basis to a general audience. …