Radio

E

Talk Radio

Relatively few radio stations consist entirely of news. News-gathering is labour-intensive and therefore expensive, and audience ratings are likely to be lower than is the case with music formats. In any case, most stations that concentrate on news often include in their schedules a large element of topical discussion, often with listeners themselves. This form of programming has become a format in itself, and is now more popular than news.

Talk radio, which occurs most often on AM stations, combines interviews and feature material with lengthy phone-ins from listeners. For broadcasters, such programmes are not only cheap to run, they also help to create the impression of radio as a two-way medium, and suggest that a station—particularly a local station, where a sense of shared interests in the audience can be more tangible—is in touch with its listeners. In America in the 1980s, talk radio emerged as an important public forum in the black and Hispanic communities, and the format is now extremely common in local and community radio.

F

Opinion Polling

Talk radio can also be interpreted more widely, as a prime example of broadcasting contributing to the functioning of democracy. Politicians can be brought directly in contact with their electors, and public actions and policies can be tested against the unmediated voice of public opinion. Modern telecommunications technology now even allows for large-scale opinion-polling during live broadcasts.

This positive interpretation needs, however, to be treated cautiously. Phone-ins have a tendency to attract older and more socially conservative listeners, often people who have both the time and the inclination to engage in discussion with a talk-show host. The opinions of callers are also invariably being mediated in some way, often by presenters skilled at eliciting controversy.

At its extreme, this becomes “shock radio”, characterized by charismatic and opinionated presenters desecrating sacred cows and violating taboos, often concentrating on social commentary, political, or sexual themes. Sometimes the presenter will seek to build a reputation, and therefore attract a cult following, by the brutal but witty rejection of many callers’ comments; often the presenter will connive with like-minded callers to push a controversial line of argument, claiming to be a channel for the legitimate expression of those normally without a voice.

G

Foreign-Language Broadcasting

During World War II the British also operated “black” or “grey” radio stations, concocted for national broadcast by the government’s Political Warfare Executive. The BBC, however, continued with its “white” broadcasting, which was largely honest and accurate, if not always complete. As the war progressed the BBC’s broadcasting at home and abroad came to demonstrate the longer-term dividends from truth and consistency over outright propaganda. It expanded upon earlier foreign-language services for the Arab world and South America, and broadcast not just in German and Italian, but in languages such as Polish, Norwegian, Danish, and Dutch.

Before the end of the war the BBC operated 45 foreign-language services, as opposed to Germany’s 52. At each stage the BBC reaffirmed that such services would remain “objective and non-propagandist”. In 1946 the corporation could boast that it could “point to the history of broadcasting in Europe and say that certain good principles in broadcasting have defeated the worst possible principles”.

Foreign-language broadcasting had by this time spread worldwide. Any listener with a powerful enough set could, for example, tune into English-language broadcasts from New York, Moscow, or even Chungking. The Cold War of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s saw further expansion, mostly on short-wave radio; by the 1980s the United States and the Soviet Union dominated the field, with the Voice of America, Radio Marti, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Liberty collectively broadcasting over 2,000 hours per week for the United States, and Radio Moscow a roughly equal amount for the Soviet Union.

Other countries dominating international broadcasting in recent years include China, Germany, Egypt, and Britain. In each case, programmes are usually originated in the mother country, transmitted overseas via leased satellite channels, then received and re-broadcast from local transmitters that are scattered across the target areas.

H

International Broadcasting

Commercial and cultural organizations have also broadcast radio across national borders, either in order to spread a message or to make a profit. Religious broadcasters, for example, have transmitted from high in the Andes and from islands in the Indian Ocean. More widespread still are the large number of pirate radio stations. These are sometimes land-based, reaching highly localized urban audiences, but are more often operating from ships anchored offshore and transmitting from beyond the territorial limits of their target countries. They are therefore able to ignore expensive licensing, copyright, and music performance laws. From large state-run broadcasters to small, illegal pirate operators, the medium of radio enjoyed a monopoly of international broadcasting until satellite technology was applied fully to television in the 1980s.

Such international broadcasts stand at one end of a very wide spectrum of radio programming, but, for most listeners most of the time, radio is either local or national in scope. In many countries the pattern consists primarily of highly centralized, national transmitter networks, rather than the countless stand-alone radio stations designed to serve local markets that have been dominant in the United States.

Most commonly of all, there is an overlapping of national, regional, local, and community-based radio broadcasting. Differences in emphasis often emerge as a result of the funding system behind broadcasting in each country. Historically, in Communist or other totalitarian regimes, and in many developing countries, most or all broadcasting systems are directly financed and controlled by government. Much of Latin America has followed the US model of private, commercial ownership.

The third basic system—most common in parliamentary democracies such as Britain, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Western Europe, and Japan—is that of public-service radio, which is usually funded by licence fees paid by the general public, or by government grants sometimes backed by limited advertising. In 1988 United Nations figures revealed that government-run systems were the most common worldwide, followed by those that combined elements of the three basic models. The collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc regimes has since led to a dramatic increase in the proportion of commercially owned radio systems and various forms of mixed ownership. Globally, the dominant pattern is now one of pluralistic systems, in which public-service and commercial radio operate side by side.

I

Public Service Broadcasting

These patterns have a broad impact on the sort of radio programmes now being heard across the world. Public-service broadcasting usually follows one of two approaches: the first is a very broad range of programming, combining popular light entertainment with minority-taste cultural and news programmes, targeted at the whole population of a country in terms of age, class, and geographical spread, the second is a less costly service, which excludes the sort of output provided commercially and concentrates solely on providing the sort of arts and information programmes that might otherwise be unavailable.

American National Public Radio and, increasingly, ABC in Australia fall into the latter category; while CBC in Canada, NHK in Japan, and the BBC in the United Kingdom typify the former. Indeed, the BBC has long been regarded as the classic example of public-service radio as a chartered organization that is publicly funded but independent from direct political control as well as from commercial pressures. Its clearly stated philosophy has been to avoid what it describes as the “cultural ghetto” approach. It aims to reach as many people as possible with an output of distinction and quality, not with programmes attracting a large audience for its own sake.