Abstract

"Waves and Radiation: Broadcasting and the Fear of Biological Harm in the Cold War"

Michael Stamm, Michigan State University (stamm@msu.edu)

This paper explores how anxiety about the possible radioactivity of media devices became a part of everyday American life in the Cold War. In the 1980s, works of fiction like David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) and Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1986) featured prominent plot points involving the release of radiation from television sets at levels that were harmful to humans. These reflected concerns that had been circulating for nearly two decades about the “waves and radiation,” as DeLillo called it, that Americans were unwittingly surrounded by because of a proliferation of communications media. The initial impetus came in the mid-1960s, when a panic erupted over the possibility that as many as five percent of American color television sets were emitting what the Wall Street Journal called “potentially dangerous levels of radiation.” In response, Congress undertook a series of investigations, the findings from which became part of the Radiation Control for Health and Safety Act of 1968, one of a suite of transformative environmental policies enacted during the Johnson and Nixon administrations. Nixon’s Office of Telecommunications Policy later directed numerous research projects on the possible biological effects of new media devices and uses of the electromagnetic spectrum. In late 1976, the New Yorker gave the matter the Silent Spring treatment, publishing a major article by Paul Brodeur spanning multiple issues and warning Americans about what the “military-electronics industry complex” was doing to them. Concerns about radiation and the health effects of media devices persisted in subsequent decades, including around alleged links between mobile phone usage and brain cancer and the health effects of 5G wireless networks. Starting in the 1960s, this paper shows, concern about the “public interest” in media became not just about assessing programming content and quality but also about media devices and broadcast signals, which many feared could be harmful to humans.