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Carrion Luggage #1103881 added December 18, 2025 at 9:34am
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Casting Call
I always like knowing the origins of words, at least as far back as we can trace them. Here's one I knew from being raised around agriculture, but NPR explains it better than I could have:
Broadcasters keep popping up in the news.
Really? Because it seems to me actual "broadcasting" is dying.
Commercial TV networks have made headlines: CBS announced the cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert this summer. ABC drew ire in September when it yanked Jimmy Kimmel off the air...
Those sources are, of course, two of the three "classical" commercial TV networks, the other being NBC.
Broadcasting — distributing radio and television content for public audiences — has been around for a century, but is facing a uniquely challenging landscape today.
And I can kinda see the word being used for cable TV, but I'm not sure about streaming. Would you call Netflix a "broadcaster?" I wouldn't. That sort of thing is a "streamer," a word which has an almost opposite implication: broadcasting is wide; streaming is narrow.
It's kind of like "podcast," itself a portmanteau of iPod and broadcast. Though they stopped making iPods, so that word is an anachronym.
[Broadcast] originally described a method of planting seeds, particularly for small grains like wheat, oats and barley.
Oh, and here I thought it referred to hiring the female lead in an old movie. (Broad? Cast? I'll be here all week, folks; try the veal.)
Various dictionaries have traced the verb's first written use — to sow seed over a broad area — to 1733 and 1744.
Modern farming techniques broadcast seeds mechanically, but the basic technique is the same: just scatter the little suckers.
The use of the term "broadcasting" to describe radio first hit the mainstream in the early 1920s. Radio signals (formerly called "wireless telegraphy") and amateur broadcasts existed before that, Socolow says.
What I think the article glides past is the "wireless telegraphy" part. A telegraph, like the later telephone, had a sender and a recipient. Broadcasting has a sender and a large number of potential recipients.
It was a piece of legislation that officially cemented broadcasting's new definition: The Communications Act of 1934 defined it as "the dissemination of radio communications intended to be received by the public, directly or by the intermediary of relay stations."
Technically, broadcast TV uses radio waves, just in a different segment of the EM spectrum.
These days, people tend to use the word to describe any sort of dissemination of information — even if it comes from cable news networks, social media platforms and streaming services, which are not technically broadcasters under the government's definition, Socolow says.
Well, okay, then. Obviously, words change over time. I just hadn't heard of Netflix or Prime Video ever referred to as "broadcasters."
The article tries to explain why it matters, but to me, it's just another quirk of language. And a source of really bad, sexist puns. After all, dames don't like to be called broads. |
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