Abstract
Twenty years and about 50 volumes, almost exclusively published in Swedish. It is really about time that the long running research programme organised by the Swedish Foundation of Broadcast Media History reached the international research community. A History of Swedish Broadcasting, edited by Monika Djerf-Pierre and Mats Ekström, contains a selection of 14 essays as well as an introduction by the editors and a reflection over the historicality of broadcasting institutions, authored by Paddy Scannell. The majority of the essays build upon previously published books within the research programme and cover research carried out since the start of the programme in 1993. The task of finding an umbrella for a research programme spanning over 20 years is of course a difficult one. In the introduction, Djerf-Pierre and Ekström announce that the volume set out to explore how ‘broadcast media have been developed as forms of public communication’, both by studying the relationships between (public service) broadcasters and audiences, and broadcasting as social and cultural institutions. Towards this background, the book is organised around five central themes: innovations, audiences, media professionals, genres and institutions. Within these themes, we are presented with a wide range of interesting essays, from accounts of the development of early production and distribution technologies (Elgemyr, Wormbs) to recruitment strategies (Engblom) and competition in the era of deregulation (Jönsson). Despite the breadth of these themes and topics, there is still somewhat of a bias towards news and journalism, and there is only one essay directly engaged in entertainment television (Bolin), besides a chapter on the cultural form of televised sport (Reimer). Nevertheless, the collection provides the reader with a wealth of perspectives and empirical accounts of the history of broadcasting in Sweden.
The introduction serves both as a way to present the volume and the chapters included and an opportunity to reflect on the role of broadcast historiography. The editors here have the benefit of hindsight, speaking from a privileged position in the sense that they may discuss the contemporary currents and discussions in media historiography. They make use of the opportunity by discussing three key challenges to contemporary media historiography. First, they note that a ‘this is what happened history’ is often criticised for being too descriptive and to some extent epistemologically naive since it sets out to fully describe and reconstruct historical events and developments. The authors argue the need for a more theoretically driven media history rather than descriptive accounts, and hope that the book will be seen as part of that trend (p. 17). Second, the tendency to produce separate histories of individual media, rather than broader media cultures and intermediality, is problematised. Here, the authors take a more ambivalent position, recognising the need for a broader perspective while emphasising that radio and television broadcasting share unique ways of organising public communication. Finally, the editors draw attention to the recent discussions regarding the drawbacks of producing national broadcast histories and thereby downplaying the transnational aspects of broadcasting. Even though to a large extent a national project, broadcasting cannot be understood without taking into account international influences and interrelationships, and the authors here argue that the ‘interrelations between the national and the transnational should be taken into consideration’. All three challenges are important to a volume like this, and the question raised is of course whether the chapters included can live up to these ideals?
The short answer is both yes and no. For the most part, it is a one-medium history that is presented, apart from the contributions that present interesting accounts of the relation between radio and television broadcasting. Other than that, I would say that questions of, for instance, intermediality play a fairly minor role in the volume. Several of the chapters also remain within the realm of ‘this is what happened’ rather than being theoretically driven. Some of the essays do indeed address theoretical problems, for example, by developing an understanding of the technologies of audience making, or employing a historical–cultural perspective on how television genres are changing. It is nevertheless difficult to discern a coherent theoretical approach and ambition based on the essays included in the volume. Essentially, what is presented is also a national media history. Parallels with other national media systems are continuously highlighted, but I would not say that the volume addresses the relation between the national and the transnational in broadcasting. Rather, the international outlook consists of comparisons with other national histories, mainly the canonised broadcast histories of the United States and United Kingdom.
As already hinted, the explanation for this is to be found in the history of the research programme itself. The Swedish Foundation of Broadcast Media History initiated the programme in the early 1990s, with funding from the public service corporations as well as the national private broadcasting company TV4 and the distributor Teracom. Herein, I suspect, lies the explanation for the difficulties in meeting all three challenges, not least since they are relatively recent additions to the debate on media historiography. The mission statement of the research programme was not to conduct research on intermediality, but on the history of broadcast media in Sweden. In 1993, it was not so much a matter of theoretical development as to make use of the vast empirical resources that were made available through the initiative, and at the time the national perspective was predominant not only in the Swedish context but in broadcasting history generally. In order to truly address the challenges outlined in the introduction, it would be necessary to carry out research that already as its vantage point has the ambition to engage in theoretically driven research, rather the merely producing empirical and descriptive accounts. Only then could problems of intermediality could be thoroughly addressed, and only then could the relation between the national and transnational be thoroughly investigated.
Still, the above should not primarily be read as a critique of A History of Swedish Broadcasting. Instead, I would argue that the volume provides the necessary foundation to carry out such research. In order to produce theoretically driven historical research, we need solid empirical ground, and in order to investigate the transnational, we also need national accounts. A History of Swedish Broadcasting, together with the wider and long-lasting research programme, provides precisely the foundation needed for further research into Swedish media history, and the value of that cannot be underestimated.