Madeleine Liseblad is an assistant professor in the Department of Journalism & Public Relations at California State University, Long Beach. She conducts primarily historical and qualitative research and is the author of American Consultants and the Marketization of Television News in the United Kingdom (New York: Peter Lang, 2020). Liseblad is the recipient of the 2022 Rising Scholar Award from American Journalism. This research project won the W. David Sloan Award for Outstanding Faculty Paper from the American Journalism Historians Association in 2021.
Gregory Pitts is a professor in the School of Journalism and Strategic Media at Middle Tennessee State University. His research interests include broadcast history and career professionalism among media employees in the US and around the world. But perhaps the best part of his career experiences is his recollection of reading Billboard while working as an announcer at local commercial radio stations.
Q: How did you become aware of the Billboard exposé?
Liseblad: As we were digging in the archives I kept reading about it, and the funny thing about this case was, I went through the entire Lee Zhito collection at the archive, and I saw that folder with the FCC stuff, but I didn’t know what I had. I was working at MTSU [Middle Tennessee State University], Greg was my boss, and as I was leaving MTSU, I said, “Greg, I’m gonna go down one more time and make sure there wasn’t something I missed.” This time, because I had done so much research, I realized what I had. So, in many ways it was pure luck that we found those primary sources. It was there, it’s just sometimes when you’re starting a new project, you don’t really know what you have. And actually, that’s changed my practices a little bit. When I go and do archival research, I scan everything now. When I’m in the archives, I scan everything, because I don’t know what I have until I start writing.
Pitts: Maddie’s point is really on target. The interesting thing about this case is that it really faded away because there was never a final decision regarding Richards. And so, for Lee Zhito, let’s face it, this helped make his career, and I know he had to feel like this was a public service that he did as a reporter. But the fact that the FCC kind of, well I won’t say they dropped the ball with the political issues and the times, but it was easy to not recognize this. And Maddie, as thorough as she is, I’m ever thankful to have her as my colleague on this project and to be kind of coat-tailing along. Thank you, again.
Liseblad: If you think about this case, it was ‘48 that [Zhito] discovered it, and it was four years later that Richards died, and nothing really happened. The widow was able to sell the stations.
Pitts: For a tidy profit, too.
Liseblad: Right, and we’re looking at 18,000 plus FCC pages of testimony. That’s a huge case, [especially with] the amount of time, and how the FCC communicated when they were out in LA doing investigations, which is not the standard. It was kind of anticlimactic at the end, I guess.
Pitts: It was really not a lot of payoff for the commission or for the public to get the investment of time or resources.
Q: In what ways was Lee Zhito the right man to tell this story?
Liseblad: I tell my students this in my media history class all the time, and I bring in examples, but you can really see someone’s personality in the artifact that they leave behind. [Zhito] was just a real journalist. You look at his communications with his boss, you look at some of his quotes, and he was a journalist at heart, that’s who he was, even when he became a boss. And I think it was that he was young, his tenacity, he slept at the office because he didn’t want to miss a phone call. He was just the right person, and he was a true journalist to me.
Pitts: It’s like the old saying, having fire in his belly for what he was doing, loving everything he was doing no matter what. At one point sleeping four or five hours a night by the time he worked a regular day shift and then did all the things at night. Having that energy and that perspective, again that fire in the belly, that’s what made him the right person for this.
Liseblad: He also realized that this was a huge case. He understood radio and public service and the responsibility of the airways. You can also see the fear in the correspondence with his supervisors, because he knew that this was something that, if he didn’t back it up with evidence, Billboard could get into trouble with libel suits. So, all of his correspondence kind of mentioned, “If you don’t feel I have enough evidence,” “if you want to hold [the story].” You know, he understood how large of a story that was.
Q: Was George A. Richards a rare case, or was he indicative of a much larger problem in news slanting at the time?
Pitts: I’ll go out on not much of a limb and say I do not think Richards was a rare case. We quickly forget the events of the past, and I think Maddie and I both, as we’re working on other elements in this project, there are a whole bunch of people in the United States at the time who really had thoughts and opinions and views that also reflect some of the kinds of attitudes that we see showing up today. We shouldn’t forget that in the 1920s, 1930s, there was a whole group of Americans that believed the United States should be supporting Adolf Hitler. And of course, part of his thinking was an Aryan race and white supremacy, which, by the way, we see some of that happening today. And so, to think that George Richards was isolated in his thinking, no, Richards had to be empowered by some kind of a network of other people, and that’s also something that we’re tiptoeing around now, trying to see what’s there.
Q: If the exposé about George Richards was published today, how do you think the public response would differ from 1948?
Pitts: Social media today would’ve amplified it a lot. It would’ve given you all kinds of new ways to reach audiences. But you go back, and you look at the exposé at the time and then the follow-up with the FCC, and there were a substantial number of groups and organizations that found out about this through whatever means, and then they wrote to the commission as a result of that. And of course, you had Lee Zhito’s exposé getting picked up by other news outlets, Zhito and Billboard not always getting the attribution that they deserved, but nevertheless, the story goes forward. So, even for the day, without social media, with the telegraph and letters, you had people finding out about it and reporting.
Liseblad: Also, back then was different, right? We had the Mayflower doctrine where you couldn’t editorialize, and we had the Fairness Doctrine. Today’s climate is completely different. So, obviously some of the terminology that was used back then, people would not accept today, but we also have a completely different climate. Had we still had the Fairness Doctrine, we probably wouldn’t have as much talk radio and all the issues that we have today. Maybe that’s more my personal opinion, but it was such a different time period that it’s hard to compare.
Q: What would have happened had Zhito’s exposé not come out? Would broadcasting still be as we know it today?
Liseblad: I think that it would have come out at some point, just because there was an article a couple of years earlier that kind of vaguely talked about people getting fired at Richards’s stations, and I think that eventually, it would have come out. That’s just kind of my gut instinct. There was enough, also, within the employees, enough gathering of strength for it to come out.
Pitts: Across southern California, there really weren’t that many, at the time, principally radio outlets. There were a lot of people who wanted to be in the business, but there really weren’t that many jobs. And I think Maddie’s comment about employees sharing details with each other, the story would have come out, whether it would have had the kind of impact that ultimately meant the Richards family sold the stations and so forth. I mean, if it didn’t come out in a significant way, then Richards could very well have picked up his television station licenses, and who knows where the empire would have gone from there.
Liseblad: The other thing that probably helped was, we had the radio news club here in LA, and it formed just a couple months before this case, and I think you have a bunch of radio people getting together and kind of supporting each other. Although, I see later in the archives that there is a little bit of a disconnect between some of the people in the club. You know, having that support system too, as you’re going up against a big battle, may have played into it a little bit too.
Q: Do you think news and media outlets still prioritize or act in the public interest?
Pitts: Boy, that’s a tough question, and I think it depends on where you go to start to think about public interest and so forth. I’m a management sales guy on the broadcast side, and I even say to students now that media outlets are in the business of collecting eyeballs and ears that they will resell to advertisers. But at the same time, I believe very strongly in local broadcasting, because as we see news deserts today [communities without new outlets or coverage], that newspaper goes away, the radio station is on the air 24/7 in lots of small towns, and that becomes the one way to provide that public service. So, I like and believe in public service broadcasting, but I know that it has gotten so big, you don’t have mom-and-pop kind of stations. I started off a million years ago working at a mom-and-pop radio station in a small town, and people in town knew the employees, because in a small town, that’s just the way it is. That was part of the responsibility, part of the mandate to be good community citizens toward one another.
Liseblad: I grew up in Sweden, so we have public service television, Channel 1 and Channel 2 growing up, and I’ve worked a lot in the US and in local news. I still believe that at the local level, you really want to cover news that matters to your audience, but the commercial aspects of it are gonna creep in, right? Because, you have to make money, and if you don’t have an audience, you’re not making money, and you’re not on the air. But I still believe that the journalists that work in local news are there for the right reasons.
Pitts: And the good side is Pew [Research Center] and other organizations note that people don’t trust national news outlets, but they do tend to trust local.
Q: What were the benefits of writing with a co-author on this piece, how was your teamwork?
Liseblad: I’ll start first. So, he makes me better. Like, he finds stuff that I don’t find, and he’s the radio guy, I’m the historian, so it’s just kind of a perfect mesh, and we work well together, we know each other, we can tell each other if the other person’s doing something that’s not so great, you know? We’re not afraid to fix each other’s mistakes. But in many ways, he massages my copy, he makes me sound smarter, he makes my research better in every way.
Pitts: Well, I will be quick to say that I am so thankful to be a part of these projects. You know, Maddie, all those years ago now, when we went down, I just thought it might be a fun historical topic for you, and I’m eternally thankful, I will always be very thankful to you personally, professionally to be a part of this. I’ve said to Maddie, I feel like these articles, this Zhito research saved my life, because it gave me a new direction to get back to topics that I love and that are just stimulating. I’d been in an administrative role and suffered through Covid, suffered through administering the academic unit through Covid. So, this has been wonderful, and I don’t know that I could do this kind of work without Maddie, because she really does set the agenda, and that keeps us moving along. I had this particular paper that I worked on through three cycles of submissions, and Maddie made it better. So, we’re hoping to do something with that.
Liseblad: It won a top paper award, he’s being modest! But, when you’re a media historian, that usually [means] you work on your own. It’s hard to work as a co-author because it’s a timeline narrative, and you don’t have sections like normal research projects do. So, most media historians work solo. If you can find someone that you can work well with, it’s just such a more enjoyable project, and I think you can just get more out of it intellectually. He’s adding things that I didn’t know about, and I’m adding things that he didn’t know about, and all of the sudden we have a much stronger paper because two people are looking at the same case. So, I really would like to encourage media historians to work together if they can find a way to work together in a way that Greg and I have.