This study explores the theoretical, methodological, and empirical challenges that come with forging a cultural explanation for a particular policy outcome. By theorizing culture as a toolkit of discrete values, two specific cultural values were explored for their role in bounding the agency of various actors in constructing broadcast policy and regulation that favored broadcast networks. The study challenges realist stories that explain policy or regulatory outcomes based on the power of particular interests.This study offers a cultural explanation for the favorable frequency allocation to broadcast networks in the early years of broadcast policy and regulation. Several historical studies (e.g.broadcasting policy in general, or the favored place of broadcast networks in particular. Most accounts of early broadcasting policy are constructed as narratives heavy on description. Elements of explanation enter into these stories, typically to provide closure to the narratives. The present study focuses on explanation and the theoretical and methodological challenges that come with cultural explanation.Media policy history, like most media history, is dominated by realist stories; i.e., stories in which powerful agents achieve outcomes that reflect their intentions (e.g., Barnouw, 1966;Benjamin, 1998;Garvey, 1976, all cite the centrality of Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover in explaining early broadcasting policy) or where policy reflects dominant American values (Rosen, 1980). A realist approach may be flawed as historical explanation for at least four closely related reasons: 1) Realist stories typically carry pluralist assumptions, explaining a policy outcome based on the demands of the most powerful interest. Pluralism begs the question of how those demands are reflected in policy. As Horwitz (1989) notes, pluralism ''slights the structural importance'' of institutional and material factors. 2) Realist stories can be tautological, e.g., identifying which interest is the most powerful by whose policy Tim P. Vos (Ph.D., Syracuse University) is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Missouri. His research interests include media policy history and media sociology.
