I.

Introduction

Radio, system of communication using electromagnetic waves propagated through space. Radio waves are used in wireless telegraphy, telephone transmission, television, radar, navigation systems, and space communication. They are also used in radio broadcasting; the term “radio” is therefore most popularly applied to sound broadcasting in general.

II.

History

In the last quarter of the 19th century many scientists were attempting to transmit messages over distances without wires. They were not searching for a means of mass-communication, but simply exploring the possibility of using electromagnetic waves in order to communicate between two fixed points. Nevertheless, the history of “wireless” communication eventually became largely the history of broadcasting.

Radio had no single inventor, but grew out of several international developments. The pioneers of radio drew on the work of the British physicist James Clerk Maxwell, who published his theory of electromagnetic waves in 1873. However, it was the German physicist Heinrich Rudolf Hertz who first generated such waves electrically. Hertz managed to create an oscillating electric discharge, which radiated some of its energy in the form of electromagnetic waves. However, the waves produced were incapable of travelling great distances, and the problem of creating effective transmitters and receivers remained.

A.

Marconi

It was the Italian electrical engineer and inventor Guglielmo Marconi who then took the most significant steps, combining technical inventiveness with business acumen. He succeeded in developing both a suitable receiver, or “coherer”, and an improved spark oscillator, which was connected to a crude but effective antenna to transmit radio waves over significant distances. His transmitter was modulated with an ordinary telegraph key, and a crude amplification relay activated a telegraphic instrument at the receiving end.

In 1896 Marconi transmitted signals for a distance exceeding 1.6 km (1 mi) and applied for his first British patent. Within a year of his first demonstration he transmitted signals from shore to a ship at sea 29 km (18 mi) away. In 1899 he established commercial communication between England and France, and in 1901 he succeeded in sending a simple message across the Atlantic. He had demonstrated that radio waves could travel beyond the horizon, and had used his flair for the dramatic to bring the concept of radio to the attention of governmental agencies and business interests.

B.

Transmission of Sound

This was still only wireless telegraphy (the transmission of signals) rather than wireless telephony (the transmission of sound itself). However, on Christmas Eve in 1906 an American, Reginald Fessenden, managed to transmit both speech and music over several hundred miles out to sea from the Massachusetts coast. Over the next few years other demonstrations followed in the United States, Britain, and Europe.

The creation of the “vacuum tube oscillator” helped the steady transition from telegraphy to telephony, since it provided a continuous signal that was effective for transmitting speech, rather than just the short bursts of radio waves generated for early telegraphic messages.

It was, however, the development of the radio valve that proved to be crucial in advancing the transition from wireless to broadcasting. In 1904 the British electrical engineer John Ambrose Fleming experimented with the first thermionic two-electrode valve, or diode; a triode was created by the American Lee de Forest by inserting a third electrode into the valve. This device meant that a weak signal could be amplified. More sensitive wireless receivers could now be made, and radio-telephone messages picked up at far greater distances than had earlier been thought possible.

C.

World War I and the 1920s

The combination of continuous signals being sent out from transmitters and more sensitive receivers laid the technical basis for more wide-scale listening, but there was in the pre-World War I years still little appreciation of the medium’s social possibilities. Radio was thought of at this stage as a private means of point-to-point communication, rather than a more public means of mass communication: the very fact that signals were broadcast, reaching anyone with a receiver, rather than remaining confidential between the transmitter and the particular individual being addressed, was seen as a sign of the technology’s primitiveness.

The first significant users of radio—coastal, marine, army, and intelligence services—were, however, content with this approach. Indeed, World War I, with both British and German forces using radio to communicate to naval forces from the outset, and governments commandeering all wireless stations, seemed to entrench this pattern. World War I also stimulated technical research, boosted large-scale production of the thermionic valve, and introduced many soldiers, sailors, and airmen to radio. When these people were demobilized after 1918, the small and scattered bands of home enthusiasts with primitive receivers of their own were joined by a new and bigger wave of wireless “amateurs”, who began to show the social possibilities of radio as a medium of mass communication.

In the interwar years, cinema and popular newspapers were already providing ever larger numbers of people with entertainment and information on a national scale. Contemporaries noted a breaking down of barriers between classes and geographical areas. Individuals were being conceived of in large numbers as “masses”, and this meant mass markets for all sorts of consumer goods. So when the early wireless amateurs demanded something to listen to, companies such as Marconi in Britain and the General Electric Company and Westinghouse in America were keen to move beyond fitful and experimental broadcasts in order to stimulate a market for mass-produced radio receivers.

D.

Birth of the BBC

In 1920 the first true radio station (KDKA) began regular broadcasting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the United States. Within two years the number of stations in America reached into the hundreds, concerts were being broadcast regularly in Europe from The Hague, and in Britain, Marconi stations broadcast from Chelmsford, Essex, and then London.

It was in Britain that fears over the “chaos of the ether” led to the Post Office and leading radio manufacturers setting up the British Broadcasting Company (BBC). The first programmes by the BBC were broadcast in November 1922. In 1926 it changed from a company into a public corporation, with a monopoly of broadcasting in the country. By this time, radio manufacturing in America had for a brief period been growing faster than the car-making industry, and the number of listeners on both sides of the Atlantic ran into many millions. Radio had moved rapidly from being an attic experiment to a household utility.

E.

Propaganda

Indeed, it was the perceived power of the medium of radio to influence public opinion that shaped the development of international broadcasting. Its potential as a tool of propaganda was recognized instantly by the Nazis, who described radio as “the most modern, the strongest, and the most revolutionary weapon which we possess in the battle against an extinct world”. Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, Josef Goebbels, controlled the operations both of the national German broadcasting organization RRG, and of a whole range of so-called “black” stations, that pretended to come from behind enemy lines. He sought most famously to demoralize British listeners through William Joyce’s “Lord Haw-Haw” broadcasts from Hamburg, now remembered by their opening catchphrase “Germany calling, Germany calling”. The broadcasts succeeded in attracting a sizeable and regular audience, and at least one BBC official felt moved to warn that Nazi broadcasts in English were having some effect. Most other German radio propaganda was generally too crude to be effective.

F.

Post-War Developments

FM broadcasting and cheap, portable receivers were important developments that ensured radio’s survival just at the time when the rival medium of television had its biggest impact. The introduction of regular television broadcasts, falteringly by the BBC in Britain in 1936, and then more systematically on both sides of the Atlantic after World War II, ensured its displacement as the major mass medium of the 20th century. Until radio found new roles and new ways of reaching people, it faced a period of decline: between 1949 and 1958 the BBC’s average evening radio audience fell from just under 9 million to below 3.5 million listeners; during the same period, radio stations in the United States saw their earnings halved.

III.

Key Technological Concepts

A.

Radio Frequencies

Because of their varying characteristics, radio waves of different lengths are employed for different purposes, and are usually identified by their frequency. The shortest waves have the highest frequency, or number of cycles per second; the longest waves have the lowest frequency, or fewest cycles per second.

Heinrich Hertz’s name has been given to the cycle per second (hertz, Hz), with 1 kilohertz (kHz) being 1,000 cycles per second, and 1 megahertz (MHz) being 1 million cycles per second. Low and medium frequencies (30 to 3,000 kHz) are used by radio broadcasters transmitting on those parts of the spectrum traditionally described as long or medium wave, and most early transmissions in Europe and the United States were solely of this type. Because electromagnetic waves in a uniform atmosphere travel in straight lines and because the Earth’s surface is approximately spherical, long-distance radio communication is made possible by the reflection of radio waves from the Earth’s ionosphere. This allows programmes to be received both nationally and beyond national borders. However, these frequencies tend only to be able to use reflection from the ionosphere to bounce round the Earth’s curvature under night-time atmospheric conditions, thus creating the possibility of each radio station covering a much wider area, but simultaneously contributing to increased interference between rival signals.

B.

Transmitters

Essential components of a radio transmitter include an oscillation generator for converting commercial electric power into oscillations of a predetermined radio frequency; amplifiers for increasing the intensity of these oscillations while retaining the desired frequency; and a transducer for converting the information to be transmitted into a varying electrical voltage proportional to each successive instantaneous intensity. For sound transmission a microphone is the transducer; for picture transmission the transducer is a photoelectric device.

Other important components of the radio transmitter are the modulator, which uses these proportionate voltages to control the variations in the oscillation intensity or the instantaneous frequency of the carrier, and the antenna, which radiates a similarly modulated carrier wave. Every antenna has some directional properties, that is, it radiates more energy in some directions than in others, but the antenna can be modified so that the radiation pattern varies from a comparatively narrow beam to a comparatively even distribution in all directions; the latter type of radiation is employed in broadcasting.

The particular method of designing and arranging the various components depends on the effects desired. The principal criteria of a radio in a commercial or military aircraft, for example, are lightness of weight and intelligibility; cost is a secondary consideration, and fidelity of reproduction is entirely unimportant. In a commercial broadcasting station, on the other hand, size and weight are of comparatively little importance; cost is of some importance; and fidelity is of the utmost importance, particularly for FM stations; rigid control of frequency is an absolute necessity. In the United States, for example, a typical commercial station broadcasting on 1,000 kHz is assigned a bandwidth of 10 kHz, but this width may be used only for modulation; the carrier frequency itself must be kept precisely at 1,000 kHz, for a deviation of one-hundredth of 1 per cent would cause serious interference with even distant stations on the same frequency.

B.1.

Antennas

The antenna of a transmitter need not be close to the transmitter itself. Commercial broadcasting at medium frequencies generally requires a very large antenna, which is best located at an isolated point far from cities, whereas the broadcasting studio is usually in the heart of the city. FM, television, and other very-high-frequency broadcasts must have very high antennas if appreciably long range is to be achieved, and it may not be convenient to locate such a high antenna near the broadcasting studio. In all such cases, the signals may be transmitted by wires. Ordinary telephone lines are satisfactory for most commercial-radio broadcasts; if high fidelity or very high frequencies are required, coaxial cables are used.

C.

Allocation of Wavelengths

What people actually listened to was, and still is, crucially dependent, not just on what programme-makers construct but on the allocation of wavelengths and the distribution of transmitters. The discovery that electromagnetic waves could carry radio signals over the horizon had raised the prospect of broadcasting on an international scale, but governments and broadcasting organizations rapidly realized the inherent problems of the growth in the medium: if radio stations operated on the same, or very similar wavelengths, listeners would suffer severe interference in reception.

In 1925 an international agreement over the allocation of wavelengths was reached in Europe in 1925 through the so-called Geneva Plan of the Union Internationale de Radiophonie, and in the United States, Congress passed the Radio Act in 1927 to create the Federal Radio Commission. Regulation of the world’s electromagnetic spectrum has since been enacted largely by national governments through the International Telecommunication Union based in Geneva; however, from these earlier dates onward, transmission technology has been concerned primarily with the range and frequency of the signal being broadcast.

D.

Short-Wave Radio

Short-wave radio uses higher frequencies (3 to 30 MHz) and shares the ability to travel long distances. In this case, however, transmitters can switch their precise frequency several times throughout the 24-hour period to take continuous advantage of the reflective properties of the ionosphere. The first short-wave transmitters of the 1930s opened up the prospect of much more controlled long-distance radio broadcasting, and the International Telecommunication Union has since allocated much of the short-wave spectrum for just such use.

Most remaining parts of the short-wave spectrum are used for amateur (“ham”) radio, and various marine, air, and mobile land services. The very shortest radio waves—designated as very high, ultra-high, and super-high frequencies (VHF, UHF, and SHF)—are not reflected by the Earth’s ionosphere, and their use is restricted to television, satellite transmissions by microwaves, or VHF radio stations, the last now more popularly described by the term “FM” radio.

E.

FM and AM Transmission

“FM” stands for “frequency modulation”, as opposed to “AM”, or “amplitude modulation”. Both terms apply to techniques for imposing a meaningful pattern of variations on an otherwise unvaried stream of energy during transmission, but they have also come to be applied to whole categories of broadcast radio.

AM modulates the carrier radio wave by varying the amplitude (strength of the wave) in accordance with the variations of frequency and intensity of a sound signal, such as a musical note. Such modulation is vulnerable to electrical interference, and the sound quality is variable. Throughout the first half of the century, most standard radio broadcasting was achieved using this technique, and today some music and a great deal of speech radio, which does not necessarily demand high-quality reception, is still found on the AM dial.

FM works by varying the frequency of the carrier wave within a narrowly fixed range at a rate corresponding to the frequency of a sound signal. It is used within the VHF band, so that the terms “VHF” and “FM” have become synonymous for most radio listeners. FM reaches only to the horizon, so a transmitter’s remit is local rather than national in scale. This geographical restriction has the advantage of reducing interference, and coverage is therefore more stable, day or night. The signal itself is inherently static-free, unlike that for AM, and a suitable receiving-set can take advantage of its more generous frequency range and dynamic range to reproduce high-fidelity sound.

FM’s quality advantage over AM, exaggerated further with the development of stereo, has proved particularly suitable for the broadcasting of music and explains the rapid growth in the number of FM stations—often associated with rock and pop—in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s (see Sound Recording and Reproduction).

F.

Digital Broadcasting

Both AM and FM radio depend on traditional analogue technology, where the signal consists of a continuously changing pattern corresponding to the continuous flow of sound captured by a microphone. Such signals are inherently vulnerable to all sorts of distortions which restrict their ability to carry information without degradation. Digital processing, which breaks a signal down into a stream of individual energy pulses assigned a binary code, can resist distortion and convey far more information. Most large-scale radio broadcasters are now developing digital audio broadcasting, which promises a quality of sound equivalent to that of a CD, and an increase in the number of radio services available within the existing electromagnetic spectrum.

G.

Receivers

The technology of the radio receiving-set has also changed dramatically since the origins of broadcasting. The first commercially available radio receivers were crystal sets, which required headphones. They soon gave way to valve receivers with loudspeakers, which enabled people to listen in groups. Growing demand led to larger-scale production of valve receivers, and the price of sets dropped throughout the 1930s.

Even so, the wireless valve remained a relatively expensive item to replace, consumed much primary power, and meant large and cumbersome sets. In 1948 the first manufactured transistor revolutionized reception. It allowed radios to be built that were more reliable, used far less power, and, crucially, were much smaller and cheaper. Transistor radios were mobile in a way that the television sets of the 1950s and 1960s could never be.

The essential components of a modern radio receiver are: (1) an antenna for receiving the electromagnetic waves and converting them into electrical oscillations; (2) amplifiers for increasing the intensity of these oscillations; (3) detection equipment for demodulating; (4) a speaker for converting the impulses into sound waves audible to the human ear (and in television a picture tube for converting the signal into visible light waves); and (5) in most radio receivers, oscillators to generate radio-frequency waves that can be mixed with the incoming waves.

The incoming signal from the antenna, consisting of a radio-frequency carrier oscillation modulated by an audio-frequency or video-frequency signal containing the impulses, is generally very weak. The sensitivity of some modern radio receivers is so great that if the antenna signal can produce an alternating current involving the motion of only a few hundred electrons, this signal can be detected and amplified to produce an intelligible sound from the speaker. Most radio receivers can operate quite well with an input from the antenna of a few millionths of a volt. The dominant consideration in receiver design, however, is that very weak desired signals cannot be made useful by amplifying indiscriminately both the desired signal and undesired radio noise. Thus, the main task of the designer is to assure preferential reception of the desired signal.

Most modern radio receivers are of the superheterodyne type in which an oscillator generates a radio-frequency wave that is mixed with the incoming wave, thereby producing a radio-frequency wave of lower frequency; the latter is called intermediate frequency. To tune the receiver to different frequencies, the frequency of the oscillations is changed, but the intermediate frequency always remains the same (at 455 kHz for most AM receivers and at 10.7 MHz for most FM receivers). The oscillator is tuned by altering the capacity of the capacitor in its tank circuit; the antenna circuit is similarly tuned by a capacitor in its circuit.

One or more stages of intermediate-frequency amplification are included in all receivers; in addition, one or more stages of radio-frequency amplification may be included. Auxiliary circuits such as automatic volume control (which operates by rectifying part of the output of one amplification circuit and feeding it back to the control element of the same circuit or of an earlier one) are usually included in the intermediate-frequency stage. The detector, often called the second detector (the mixer being called the first detector), is usually simply a diode acting as a rectifier, and produces an audio-frequency signal. FM waves are demodulated or detected by circuits known as discriminators or radio-detectors that translate the varying frequencies into varying signal amplitudes.

IV.

Radio as a Medium

A.

Advantages of Radio

With the growth of television after World War II, many broadcasters predicted the complete demise of radio. A reliance on sound, when images were available, seemed an anachronism. In time, it became apparent that the medium had many unique characteristics that helped distinguish it from both the press and television. Some of these characteristics seem more like limitations, but many can also be turned to the medium’s advantage.

A.1.

Imagination

Radio is a “blind” medium, and the type of programmes it produces is derived largely from the simple fact that, unlike television, it provides no visual message to the listener. Radio programmes, unlike the printed pages of books or newspapers, are also ephemeral products: very few people bother to record radio programmes, so they cannot be so easily “re-read”.

Radio programmes therefore have to provide the listener with extra auditory clues to compensate for the lack of images, and must ensure that these clues are understood by the listener at the first—and almost certainly only—hearing. Programme-makers often claim that these difficulties provide listeners with a greater challenge, and thus a greater stimulation to their imagination. Communication theorists suggest that, if people tend to interpret the world largely through their ability to see it, then being deprived of visual clues will compel them to supply such clues for themselves. Thus, when listening to a radio play, one needs to imagine not only a character’s thoughts but also that person’s appearance and surroundings. Radio dramatists argue that this offers greater intellectual and emotional reward to a listener—as opposed to a viewer—and allows the writer to create stories and characters that are truly experimental or fantastical, and that the medium of television would have to struggle to recreate visually for the viewer.

This appeal to the imagination is not confined of radio drama, since listeners of radio news and current-affairs or talk shows also have to create their own mental images of the people speaking and their physical surroundings. Programme-makers of all types will often concentrate, therefore, on portraying the sound of a person, a place, or an action as much as possible, in a way that prompts the listener to fill in the gaps accurately. Since each individual listener will create a different mental image, radio is also often described as an “intimate” medium: the ability to create a unique picture of a person speaking on the radio allows the listener to form a close relationship with that speaker as imagined, rather than as someone pre-realized on the listener’s behalf.

A.2.

Intimacy and Convenience

This sense of intimacy is encouraged by the way most people listen to the radio. Television watching is often communal: families or small groups of people gather in the same room to watch a programme; most people listen to the radio alone. Presenters on the radio therefore tend to enhance the sense of intimacy by addressing the listener individually: a disc jockey will talk to “you” in the singular rather than “you” in the plural. Listeners feel that they are being talked to personally rather than being talked at as part of a large undifferentiated mass, and they respond by forming close attachments to individual presenters.

Since receiving sets are also highly portable, it is also easier to do something else while listening to the radio, whether it be housework, factory- or office-work, jogging, or driving a car. It is thus often described as a “secondary” medium. Television sets can be portable, but most of what a TV programme is trying to say is lost if viewers do not actually look at the screen. The radio, however, is often on in the background, without any loss in utility. Radio is therefore assimilated into a listener’s daily life much more than are the other media: it reaches the listener when he or she is alone, in private, and while doing almost anything in almost any place.

Some of these characteristics of radio present difficulties when identifying listening habits. While it might now be easier than ever before to listen to the radio wherever a person is in the world, there is no guarantee that the listener is fully attentive. In Britain the BBC’s own audience research has drawn a distinction between those who stress radio’s “predominant role—as a source of entertainment” and those who stress its “subordinate role—as an accompaniment to other activities”. The former category of listeners might search for radio that challenges the intellect and perhaps even aspires to be an art form on its own merits; the latter might demand of the medium what has been described as “acoustic wallpaper”—that is, an undemanding background noise.

Audience attitudes suggest that a whole range of listening habits is likely, depending not just on a listener’s personal tastes or even the time of day, but also on the type of programme being broadcast. Even so, the growth in the number of push-button receivers, as distinct from older sets requiring manual retuning, has increased the “promiscuity” of listeners during the 1980s and 1990s: they can—and do—change stations if they do not like what they hear. If rival broadcasters wish to protect advertising revenue by retaining their market share of listeners, the economic imperative often leads programming in the direction of ever more unchallenging—and therefore unobtrusive—output.

V.

Radio Formats

Music radio—often the most unobtrusive output of all—is now the dominant form of programming across the world, but it is not the only one and it has not always been thus. When the BBC began broadcasting in Britain in the 1920s it established a pattern of mixed programming. The output of a single station or service embraced a wide range of music, comedy, features, talks, drama, religion, sport, and news.

Even when the BBC first offered listeners a choice between two networks (the National Programme and the Regional Programme), both carried mixed programming, with very little difference in content or tone. The range of programmes offered over the course of each day and week catered for different social needs (education, information, or entertainment) and for different sectional interests (such as children, workers, or women), all within one network.

A.

The Reithian Ideal

This mixed format owed much to the vision of the BBC’s first director-general, John Reith. His approach, often described as paternalistic , was to offer listeners “something a little better” than they thought they wanted, and a varied output was seen as a way of introducing listeners to a subject they had not previously sought. Radio, Reith believed, had the power, and therefore the responsibility in a democratic society, to lead opinion and tastes rather than merely reflecting them. Even in the United States, some early figures in radio, such as David Sarnoff, argued that broadcasting represented a “job of entertaining, informing, and educating the nation, and should therefore be distinctly regarded as a public service”.

B.

Post-War BBC Radio Stations

Nevertheless, the pattern of mixed programming slowly gave way to a more segregated one, responding to the demands of listeners. In 1940 the BBC introduced a Forces Programme to entertain the troops of the British Expeditionary Force with dance music, sport, and variety. Its tone was overwhelmingly light, and it soon attracted a larger share of listeners than the more traditional Home Service.

After the war a tripartite system was introduced: the Forces Programme was replaced by the very similar Light Programme, the Home Service continued with its mixed fare, and the Third Programme was introduced as an unashamedly highbrow network of serious music and discussion. The programming was still mixed, but the range of programmes was narrowed to create a uniformity of tone.

The scheme rested on a conception of the listening public as a broadly based pyramid slowly aspiring upward: the largest number of people might start with the Light Programme, but since it overlapped with the slightly more demanding Home Service, they might be induced over the years to choose more worthwhile programmes, and move up the pyramid.

In fact, the continued lack of identity of the two most popular networks proved difficult to sustain in the face of competition for audiences from television and from pirate radio stations broadcasting (illegally from ships operating in international waters) the sort of popular and youthful music the BBC was slow to embrace. In 1967 the BBC replaced its three services with four new ones, one of which, Radio 1, broadcast pop and rock music. Of the other three, one concentrated on light music; another on speech; the third, on classical music.

By the 1970s it was recognized that listeners expected radio to be based not on the Reithian concept of mixed programmes inviting serious attention, but on the principle of the specialized network, offering a continuous stream of one particular type of programme. This evolving concept of radio programming coincided with the spread of FM transmission, which created much more room on the broadcasting spectrum. For the first time a multitude of stations, each offering its own specialized output, became technically possible.

C.

Popular Music

The new pop music stations that formed such a large proportion of these specialized networks often looked across the Atlantic for inspiration. In the United States, despite the early attempts to argue for public service broadcasting, the dominant pattern rapidly became a commercial one, with manufacturers and amateurs resisting the idea of a government monopoly of broadcasting. The US radio boom produced 530 radio stations by the end of 1924, with music dominating the output from the very beginning.

In the years before World War II much of the music broadcast, like that abroad, consisted of live concerts as much as gramophone recordings. After the war, when television threatened radio audiences and removed many star performers as well as drama, variety, and quiz shows from the radio stations, the output became dominated by cheaper and more readily available recorded music as never before.

The new musical culture of rock and roll in the 1950s entrenched this pattern: the short duration of the new 45-rpm single record fitted neatly into the requirement of commercial stations to provide short but frequent advertising breaks. By the start of the 1960s, radio audiences were being built up again by the growth in top-40 programming: disc jockeys were rigidly limited to a prescribed playlist of current best-selling records.

Establishing the music policy of a radio station has since become a much more precise task, aimed at creating a clear format to distinguish each station from its competitors. There are countless variations, but among the most widespread in the Western world are adult contemporary, which uses a broad array of popular music and “golden oldies” to appeal to a broad range of adult listeners; contemporary hit radio, which concentrates on the most recent chart hits to appeal to teenagers and young adults; and album-orientated rock, which mixes rock classics with less familiar album tracks from well-known artists.

In many ways music has always been the ideal output for radio, since it can be so easily enjoyed on the medium with little sense on the part of the listener of being disadvantaged by the lack of vision. With pop music, this natural advantage has become embodied in a dominant pattern of segmented radio, with output consisting of an ongoing succession of acoustic parcels, such as a single or album track, an advertising break, news bulletin, or phone-in quiz—each of just a few minutes’ duration, and skilfully blended together to create a smooth and homogenized whole.

Programming has become a more precise science, blending showmanship with audience research and marketing, each station seeking to build its own brand. Continuous pop music, combined with warm and relatively unchallenging disc-jockey chatter, emerged as the ideal format for the transistor age, when radio has slipped ever more into the background of daily life.

D.

News Broadcasting

Two other widespread genres of radio programming are the news and talk formats. In Britain the BBC had been obliged in the 1920s and 1930s to avoid any sense of competition with a suspicious press, so its news coverage was negligible. World War II marked a crucial change. A desire by listeners to be kept informed about the progress of the war, combined with the increasing technical ability of broadcasters to provide recorded reportage from the front, led to a dramatic increase in news coverage. Towards the end of the war the BBC’s main evening news bulletin was reaching nearly half of the available audience, and a spokesman for the corporation remarked that news had “swept culture into the background”. Journalists were recruited to join the writers, intellectuals, and entertainers as core members of the broadcasting profession.

By the post-war period, listeners had come to expect topicality from their radio sets, and broadcasters were finding new ways to weave news and current affairs into the output just as skilfully as music. In Britain the mixed programming of the BBC’s Home Service continued to make use of separate programmes, punctuated by regular bulletins of news, usually hourly. In America, the major broadcasters were quicker to develop a rolling news format, with news and information repeated and gradually updated in continuous cycles of 20 minutes or so. The assumption was that busy listeners could be tuning in at any time—possibly only for periods of about 20 minutes—in order to catch the news. This format has now become a global phenomenon.

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.

J.

Commercial Radio

Commercial radio, on the other hand, seeks to deliver sizeable audiences of consumers to those advertisers and sponsors who provide its income. It will tend to favour popular programmes over those which might appeal only to a minority, and will target heavily populated rich markets rather than thinly populated poorer markets. Commercial radio may also, however, develop very specialized formats, such as jazz or classical music, in order to capitalize on relatively small but high-spending niche markets. Output is characterized by aggressive marketing, and slick, image-conscious presentation.

K.

Future Trends

At the end of the 20th century technological, political, and commercial trends are blurring many of these traditional distinctions. Commercial local radio stations often find that large companies are taking control of a majority of their shares. Ownership is being concentrated in fewer hands, and a pattern of syndicated programming, beamed throughout a commercial network by ever more sophisticated satellite distribution technology, is leading to many formerly independent community-based stations adopting identical programme and music formats. Public-service broadcasters, such as those in France, Germany, Australia, Canada, and Britain, have faced tighter budgets and greater competition from deregulation, with the result that many now rely on advertising for a larger share of their revenue and face a declining share of their respective national audiences.

Digital audio broadcasting, which allows for a huge increase in the number of radio channels that can be fitted on to the world’s electromagnetic spectrum, is likely to accelerate the steady move away from nationwide mixed programme services towards a vast array of special-interest channels. Some broadcasters, with an eye to the commercial potential of the so-called information superhighway, are even developing approaches to radio that may eventually turn broadcasting in an opposite direction by moving away from continuous streams of radio that is produced, formatted, and scheduled by a core of professional staff towards a pattern of providing audio on demand. This would allow listeners to assemble their own schedules from archives of music and news reports that are now accessible via computer technology. However, the essential nature of radio as an unobtrusive medium, part of the background or “aural wallpaper” of daily life, means such moves to a more interactive future are likely to be gradual.