From media audience to media public: a study of letters written in reaction to FDR's fireside chats

Abstract

This article investigates the process by which media audiences become media publics in an analysis of Franklin D. Roosevelt's (FDR) fireside chats. Data for this analysis includes 380 randomly selected letters written in reaction to the first ten chats delivered by FDR during his first term of office. I show that FDR borrowed the `for-anyone-as-someone' structure of broadcasting to address listeners as particular individuals and as members of a mass public. In response, listeners adopted this structure to speak for themselves and for a mass public. In this manner, listeners associated themselves with a larger collectivity, but on the basis of collective rather than personal feelings. These feelings inspired bouts of sociability - serial conversations with family, friends, neighbors, and strangers - that look very much like an instance of collective reflexivity. Thus I conclude that the mass public which formed around FDR's fireside chats represents an instance in which a media audience transformed itself into a media public.