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The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications. By Paul Starr. (New York: Basic Books, 2004. xii, 484 pp. $27.50, ISBN 0-465-08193-2.)
Paul Starr has produced a book that many historians of communication have called for. Written with a broad readership in mind, it is simply the best available synthesis of the largest range of topics relevant to the history of the media. Moreover, it advances a strong argument that has encouraging policy implications. It is a major accomplishment by an important thinker. It takes pride of place among similar projects: broader than Michael Schudson's The Good Citizen (1998), more concrete than Asa Briggs and Peter Burke's A Social History of the Media (2002) or Armand Mattelart's The Invention of Communication (1996), more thorough than Daniel Czitrom's Media and the American Mind (1982), more coherent than the multivolume A History of the Book in America (volume 1 appeared in 2000; the other four are in various stages of preparation).
Starrs subtitle signals his argument. Moments of "constitutive choice" (p. 1) set the media down particular "paths of development" (p. 2) within particular national histories. Constitutive moments tend to come at points of crisis and conflict. In the United States, the inaugural constitutive moment was the Revolution, which led to policies of active promotion of communication, especially through the postal system, along with tolerance toward open political debate expressed in protections of freedom of the press. Starr calls this path of development "liberal constitutionalism" (p. 2). World War I was another constitutive moment, and it produced...