A politician in your living room

In A Tower in Babel, media historian Erik Barnouw describes the invention of bleeping at the dawn of the radio age. Or proto-bleeping, I should say, since the earliest system didn’t produce a censorship sound, but rather provided the engineer with a switch to a nearby phonograph that could be flipped to play music in case any troublesome content should appear over the live microphone.

This innovation seems to have been prompted by the 1921 appearance on Newark’s WJZ of one Olga Petrova (born Muriel Harding in 1884), a famous vaudeville actress and singer known (and feared) for her strong views. Petrova was “a fanatic on birth control and always making speeches about it,” according to Barnouw. She was friends with Margaret Sanger, who founded the American Birth Control League, the organization that would later become Planned Parenthood.

One night in 1921, Petrova, then engaged at a Newark theater, went to the local radio station WJZ to perform. The Great War had just ended, during the course of which the government had forbidden the use of private radio equipment. After the armistice the Navy tried to retain monopoly control of radio, but Congress put a stop to their power grab. Wartime restrictions were lifted, but the pioneers of broadcasting such as those at WJZ were mindful of potential government interference, and Petrova had a reputation as a firebrand. She disarmed her hosts by announcing that she would be performing her own versions of Mother Goose rhymes, and then proceeded to read the following:

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe, She had so many children because she didn’t know what to do.

The 1873 Comstock laws, which banned the distribution of “obscene” materials, including information about contraception, were still in force; Petrova had, arguably, kind of broken the law.

The means for censoring broadcast content came years before the emergence of the first national broadcast network

“The staff was terrified,” Barnouw relates. “They were certain there would be trouble from Washington. Westinghouse [then owner of WJZ] executives were already nervous about possibilities of this sort, and had wondered what to do if a 'red' got on the air. An emergency switch was provided for the engineer in the shack.” Thus, he could switch to that “phonograph beside him — on his own judgment or on a signal from the studio.”

Thus it was that the means for censoring broadcast content came years before the emergence of the first national broadcast network, NBC, in 1926, and the Federal Radio Commission in 1927. By then, the technique was well established. Petrova recounts an episode that took place in 1924: she’d been reading a scene from her play, Hurricane, on radio station WOR when the red on-air light suddenly went out. Afterward, she learned she’d been cut off; the engineer told her that “radio audiences were very mixed … it wouldn’t do to offend any of their listeners.”

“One would suppose that radio audiences must be completely paralyzed,” Petrova observed dryly, “and therefore unable to turn off the switches of their own sets the instant their ears were shocked … by what they heard.”

The tug-of-war in the courts, in Congress and in the media over restrictions on free speech in broadcasting has altered very little since then. Justice William Brennan was still making Petrova’s argument in his dissent in FCC v. Pacifica Foundation (1978), the Supreme Court case involving George Carlin’s “Filthy Words” routine: “Whatever the minimal discomfort suffered by a listener who inadvertently tunes into a program he finds offensive during the brief interval before he can simply extend his arm and switch stations or flick the ‘off’ button, it is surely worth the candle to preserve the broadcaster’s right to send, and the right of those interested to receive, a message entitled to full First Amendment protection.”

Decades later, Stephen King repeated the sentiment in a 2002 interview: “If [Howard Stern] is saying stuff that you don’t like, if it offends you, you got a hand, you reach out, take hold of the knob, turn it off. He’s gone, goodbye … You don’t need a politician in your living room to say you’ve got to put a Band-Aid over that guy’s mouth.”