Images of Crime and Justice in Early Commercial Radio—1932 to 1958

• Date: 01 March 2010
• DOI: 10.1177/0734016809348358
• Published date: 01 March 2010
• Author: Derral Cheatwood
• Subject Matter: Articles

Images of Crime and Justice in

Early Commercial Radio—1932

to 1958

Derral Cheatwood

1

Abstract

Between 1929 and 1962, radio reached audiences comparable to those of contemporaneous pulp

magazines or motion pictures and was one of the most significant mass media in the construction

of America’s fundamental values and attitudes. This study examined radio logs and over 200

hours of radio programming drawn from 97 crime-related programs broadcast between 1932 and

1958 and confirmed that crime-related programs were a significant portion of radio programming to

the American public. An analysis of the programs themselves found that three subgenres dominated

crime radio: Outsider or Detective programs (over 50%of the total), Police or Criminal Justice Dra-

mas, and Mystery programs. Radio programs continued a tradition derived from pulp magazines and

dime novels and distorted the actual nature of crime and criminal justice. In the programs, the crim-

inal justice system was presented as strongly front end loaded, with police work being the sum of

crime fighting. The characteristics of crime and criminals were inverted in radio (as in older pulp

magazines and more recent visual media), with murders planned and carried out by middle-to-

upper class White males being common. These images were repetitive and stereotypical, as were

images of race and gender, in early commercial radio.

Keywords

media, crime, radio

The Sounds of Crime: Radio, Crime, and the Criminal Justice System

Sounds, as well as visual images, that originated in the mass media have become icons of crime and

justice in American culture. In 1989, the program Cops initiated real-life police drama on television,

and the song ‘‘Bad Boys (Whatcha gonna do?)’’ became inseparably associated with the operation of

the police—and with car chases. However, 40 years earlier, in their third broadcast, the radio pro-

gram Dragnet opened with four notes that, as later television ads claimed, were the second most

widely recognized four notes in the world, following only the opening phrase of Beethoven’s

Fifth Symphony. In fact, the original images of crime and criminal justice in electronic media were

1

Department of Sociology, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, Texas

Corresponding Author:

Derral Cheatwood, Department of Sociology, University of Texas at San Antonio, One UTSA Circle, San Antonio, TX 78249.

Email: adrian.cheatwood@utsa.edu

Criminal Justice Review

35(1) 32-51

ª2010 Georgia State University

Reprints and permission:

sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/0734016809348358

http://cjr.sagepub.com

32

heard rather than seen and derived from one of the first truly democratic mass media, early

commercial radio.

The sounds of crime and the images and attitudes that the media brought to the public through

commercial radio extend back to the late 1920s, long before the advent of television and

contemporaneous with the earliest sound motion pictures. Radio had a significant role in shaping

the perceptions, attitudes, and values of America from 1929 through the 1950s. ‘‘Radio’s business,’’

Michele Hilmes (1997) wrote, ‘‘consisted precisely in the construction and circulation of represen-

tations and narratives—symbolic constructions—that not only served a commercial purpose but

spoke directly to and about this new society in the making’’ (p. 6). Radio was an extension of a tra-

dition of crime entertainment in the media that derived from a long history of crime and criminals in

folklore. This tradition began to crystallize in the mass media with Edgar Allen Poe’s detective fic-

tion and took off with the congruence of the popularity of detectives such as Sherlock Holmes and

the reality of crime in the expanding cities of the United States at the turn of the 20th Century.

Modern media use a variety of genres, formulas, and conventions to convey images of crime and

justice to the American people. The problem is that the images, conventions, and stereotypes of

crime and the criminal justice system presented in the media bear little correspondence to reality.

They are media creations, yet the public understands crime and the criminal justice system on the

basis of these distortions. Examining the images of crime in early radio is important, if for no other

reason, to flesh out the decades in which radio dominated in the creation of these myths, the 1930s,

1940s, and into the 1950s. The goal was to determine not just what was presented in this medium, but

just how great the impact of that presentation may have been and, as a consequence, how entrenched

these myths are.

To investigate this, radio logs, transcripts, and over 200 hours of radio broadcasts were examined

and analyzed. These were drawn from 97 crime radio programs from the period 1929, when the first

successful radio program appeared, to 1962, when Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, ended and closed

down the era of drama programs on the radio (Dunning, 1998). Derived from the literature on media

and on crime, three questions were addressed:

First, just how prevalent were crime programs in early commercial radio and, by extension, how

extensively were audiences exposed to them?

Second, did the distortions of crime and the criminal justice system that have been documented

in modern electronic media exist in early radio?

And third, what characterized the content of crime and criminal justice programs present in early

commercial radio?

Media, Radio, and the Construction of Crime

Two streams of literature are relevant to this topic. In media studies, a group of scholars have

demonstrated that early radio was an important medium, vying with, and perhaps surpassing,

movies, magazines, and newspapers as the dominant medium from the 1930s through much of the

1950s. In social studies, scholars have researched the crucial role modern media, particularly books,

television, and movies, played in creating the images and stereotypes the public holds of crime,

criminals, and criminal justice. Yet, oddly, the flow of these two streams has never converged.

Media Studies

From media studies, a number of books on early radio mention a crime-related program or two, some

devote a few pages to police dramas, and some even have a chapter on detective or mystery pro-

grams (for a good overview see, MacDonald, 1979, pp. 155-194; but also see Douglas, 1987;

Cheatwood 33

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