Conference Agenda

In considering the communications instrumentalities most vital to the national welfare, chief among them is the Emergency Alert System (EAS), the network of television and radio stations through which public safety authorities disseminate warnings of extreme weather, industrial accidents, and national security threats. First implemented in a far simpler form in the early 1950s, EAS embodies the Federal Communications Commission’s highest statutory mandate: regulation of wire and radio “for the purpose of promoting safety of life and property.”

EAS has been used tens of thousands of times to alert populaces to threats ranging from hurricanes to contaminated water supplies, reflecting its vital role in disseminating one of eight “critical information needs” (Friedland, et al., 2013). And yet, despite its centrality in times of crisis, EAS has long suffered from a history of panic-inducing false alerts attributable to “human error,” such as the 2018 “missile alert” in Hawaii,” and failed activations, witnessed in the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires. For decades, the system has been plagued by outmoded technological architecture, a lack of coordination amongst its users, and an overweening reliance on market logics and private outsourcing.

Through the lens of political economy (Mosco, 2009) – and employing Corrigan’s (2018) socio-archival methodology of “burrowing down” and “listening in” – this paper seeks to elucidate the historical and structural determinants generative of this condition. Emphasizing the roads-not-taken in its evolution, it attempts to both “correct the historical record by reclaiming agency and resistance” with respect to the status quo and “inspire future reform efforts” (Pickard, 2013, p. 5).

The paper first presents a detailed archival-based historical summary of EAS – from its Truman-era genesis as the CONtrol of ELectromagnetic RADiation (CONELRAD) system to its transformation in the 1960s and 1970s as the television-centered Emergency Broadcast System – with a particular focus on the impact of public-private partnerships, cost-benefit analyses, and continuing recourse to neoliberal conceits. It then invokes multiple political economies (such as national defense and public governance), as well as literature on social cohesion, citizen engagement, and institutional responsiveness in ameliorating the severity of disasters, to propose three metrics for evaluating its effectiveness: universality (the ability of the system to warn every affected individual within the ambit of a disaster), robustness (the integration of EAS with current and emerging communications technologies), and responsiveness (the active and continuous provision of information to imperiled communities). Deeming EAS deficient in each category, it concludes by looking to the Kennedy-era National Emergency Alarm Repeater project – a system that would have placed low-cost alerting devices in every home and business – as the archetype for reclassifying EAS from communications modality to communications infrastructure.

Scholarship on EAS as a public good is limited. Yet in an age of peril – the effects of climate change and nuclear brinksmanship prompting the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (2026) to declare that we are “perilously close to global disaster” – fulsome political economic inquiry is not only warranted, but urgent, given the disastrous consequences of suborning the national health and safety (cf. Gandy, 1992) to market imperatives (Williams, 1963).