Politics & Power Quote by Linda Ellerbee

Ellerbee’s phrase lands like a neat bit of cultural jujitsu: it takes something ancient and intimate - the campfire - and grafts it onto a mass technology often treated as mere utility. “New” signals both excitement and loss. We’re not at the fire anymore, but we still crave what the fire did: shared attention, shared stories, the feeling that you’re not alone in the dark.

Calling radio a “national campfire” flatters the medium while quietly indicting modern life. A campfire implies a circle, a community that can see one another’s faces. Radio offers only the illusion of that circle, built from voice and ritual rather than proximity. The subtext is about trust: disembodied voices became companions, authorities, entertainers, even surrogate family members. In that way, radio wasn’t just a gadget; it was an emotional infrastructure.

The national angle matters. Campfires are usually local and personal; “national” scales that intimacy into a shared identity. It nods to the 20th century’s peak broadcast era - Roosevelt’s fireside chats, wartime bulletins, serial dramas, Top 40 countdowns - when huge swaths of the country could be pulled into the same narrative at the same hour. That power is double-edged: a warm communal glow that can also become a tool for persuasion, propaganda, and manufactured consensus.

Ellerbee, a journalist shaped by broadcast culture, is also hinting at what later media would erode. TV replaces the voice with the image; the internet fractures the circle into millions of micro-fires. Radio’s genius was making strangers feel like neighbors, and making the nation feel, for a moment, like a room.