tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/radio-history-13752/articlesRadio history – The Conversation2022-02-16T15:12:40Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1770412022-02-16T15:12:40Z2022-02-16T15:12:40ZRadio has a rich history as a weapon of the liberation struggle in southern Africa<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/446073/original/file-20220213-19-16de5ed.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wits University Press</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Radio, known for decades as <a href="https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/02/1111882">‘Africa’s medium’</a>, has many magical qualities. It’s an intimate medium with the ability to transcend borders. It chimes with Africa’s strong <a href="https://www.britannica.com/art/African-literature/Oral-traditions-and-the-written-word">oral culture</a> and it is ephemeral – it lives in the present moment. Because of this, radio served as a powerful tool in the <a href="https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000046767">liberation struggle</a> in southern Africa.</p>
<p>Radio leaves no incriminating paper trail. It allowed freedom fighters to counter colonial propaganda and helped leaders in exile maintain a presence with supporters back home. Unlike print media, which dominates the “first drafts of history”, radio’s ephemerality makes it difficult to study. With little concrete content in archives (and often only in the archives of the oppressor), historical analysis has been parochial, anecdotal and sporadic.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/446074/original/file-20220213-23-jvb7nm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A book cover in green with the words 'Guerilla radios in Southern Africa' and an illustration of a portable radio against a background of camouflage fabric." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/446074/original/file-20220213-23-jvb7nm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/446074/original/file-20220213-23-jvb7nm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/446074/original/file-20220213-23-jvb7nm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/446074/original/file-20220213-23-jvb7nm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/446074/original/file-20220213-23-jvb7nm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/446074/original/file-20220213-23-jvb7nm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/446074/original/file-20220213-23-jvb7nm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wits University Press</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><a href="https://witspress.co.za/catalogue/guerrilla-radios-in-southern-africa/">Guerrilla Radios in Southern Africa: Broadcasters, Technology, Propaganda Wars and the Armed Struggle</a> (2021) is a collection of essays that fills many of the gaps in the study of media’s role in the liberation struggle. Focusing on clandestine radio broadcasting, it shines a light on how rebel broadcasters in Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa disrupted and dismantled the propaganda of colonial powers.</p>
<h2>Battle of the airwaves</h2>
<p>In the second half of the 1900s, southern Africa’s liberation from white colonial powers, including the UK, Portugal, and, in South Africa, the <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/history-apartheid-south-africa">apartheid</a> state, was complicated by the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Cold-War">Cold War</a> between the US and Soviet Union and their allies. </p>
<p>The armed struggle involved a battle for the hearts and minds of citizens. National airwaves were dominated by state-controlled radio designed to maintain the status quo. But this was soon disrupted by the establishment of guerrilla broadcasters – often set up by exiled citizens – in Lusaka, Maputo, Harare, Luanda, Brazzaville, and Luanda. As <a href="https://www.britannica.com/place/western-Africa/The-formation-of-African-independence-movements">winds of change</a> swept the continent, newly independent states often hosted the guerilla stations of nearby states still seeking independence.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/radio-as-a-form-of-struggle-scenes-from-late-colonial-angola-128019">Radio as a form of struggle: scenes from late colonial Angola</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Now, for the first time in a single publication, historians from a range of institutions have published information on these broadcasters’ producers, policies, listeners and content. They did this by sifting through the archives and conducting interviews with former participants and audiences.</p>
<h2>Many challenges</h2>
<p>Edited by Sekibakiba Peter Lekgoathi, Tshepo Moloi and Alda Romão Saúte Saíde, the book’s eleven chapters illustrate how the battle for the airwaves took on a heroic David-and-Goliath character. Rebel broadcasters operated with limited resources and very little training – as discussed in the chapter Radio Republic South Africa by Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu.</p>
<p>Alda Romão Saúte Saíde’s chapter outlines the experiences of the self-taught A Voz da Frelimo (Voice of <a href="https://artsandculture.google.com/story/the-struggle-for-freedom-in-mozambique-jstor/mwVRhh_vPQsA8A?hl=en">Frelimo</a>). Broadcasters trained on the spot, each performing a variety of roles.</p>
<p>Staff were also increasingly scattered, as Robert Heinze’s chapter on <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/south-west-africa-peoples-organisation-swapo">Swapo</a>’s Voice of Namibia explains. And as countries acquired independence and state-owned international services offered to carry guerrilla messages, the stations were weakened through loss of funding and decentralisation.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-zulu-radio-dramas-subverted-apartheids-grand-design-126786">How Zulu radio dramas subverted apartheid's grand design</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Acquiring news was also a challenge. The stations were not especially known for news-breaking reporting. Most recycled news items from the colonists themselves, from local state broadcasts or the BBC’s Africa Service. They reframed them by offering commentary – with information from exiles being an exception.</p>
<h2>Sonic encounters</h2>
<p>Despite these challenges, the book tells how it took only one short, crackling sonic encounter with the voices of the resistance to capture hearts and revive spirits. A major success of the book is its rich qualitative focus on listenership, previously absent in research.</p>
<p>Mhoze Chikowero’s chapter on Zimbabwean exiles explains that the broadcasters themselves had only a sketchy idea of who might be tuning in. Although their message was clear, broadcaster Gula Ndebele remembers: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Our audiences were largely imagined.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So it would be interesting for former broadcasters to read about the memories of their listeners. Although audience statistics are absent, it’s clear the broadcasters weren’t speaking into a void. Many listeners attribute their political awakening to the broadcasts. In the Zimbabwean context, a listener recalls how the broadcasts urged him to sign up for military training.</p>
<p>Marissa J. Moorman’s chapter includes recollections of adolescent <a href="https://theconversation.com/radio-as-a-form-of-struggle-scenes-from-late-colonial-angola-128019">Angolan</a> listeners, many of whom “hid to listen”, often in groups and without their parents knowing.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/radio-in-ghana-from-mouthpiece-of-coup-plotters-to-giving-voice-to-the-people-131709">Radio in Ghana: from mouthpiece of coup plotters to giving voice to the people</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Tshepo Moloi explains how the “trial and error” approach of tuning in to <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/radio-freedom-history-south-african-underground-radio-chris-smith">Radio Freedom</a> in South Africa further electrified audiences. A listener recalls: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>One quiet night as I twiddled a transistor radio, searching for a disco music station, I heard the statement, ‘the terrorist regime of Ian Douglas Smith’, delivered in thick African tones … my body tensed with every turn of the knob.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Moloi’s chapter argues, convincingly, that Radio Freedom helped to revive the <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/african-national-congress-anc">ANC</a>’s dormant reputation among <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/black-consciousness-movement-bcm">Black Consciousness Movement</a> supporters, encouraging them to join the movement’s armed wing, <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/umkhonto-wesizwe-mk">MK</a>, in exile.</p>
<p>The battle for the airwaves became linked with the armed struggle – most famously symbolised by Radio Freedom’s iconic opening machine gunfire riff. Almost all chapters highlight this relationship. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/radio-is-thriving-in-south-africa-80-are-tuning-in-176846">Radio is thriving in South Africa: 80% are tuning in</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The broadcasts also transcended the armed struggle. They suffused all aspects of civilian life – domestic, cultural, even spiritual. For instance, Dumisani Moyo and Cris Chinaka’s fascinating chapter plumbs the memory of Voice of Zimbabwe <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/zimbabawean-independence-day">veterans</a>, who explain how they built links with spirit mediums in order to unsettle the confidence of black Rhodesian army soldiers, appealing to their religious beliefs.</p>
<h2>Insightful</h2>
<p>Edited volumes often lack focus or collate chapters with spurious connections, resulting in interesting but disparate collections. That is not the case here. The editors’ tight focus on a single medium in a connected geographical area has resulted in a cohesive and thought-provoking read. </p>
<p>The book will be an insightful read for scholars of media, culture and history, as well as anybody interested in southern Africa’s past. We may never have a full picture of the role played by guerrilla radio in the liberation struggle, but this book goes some way towards stamping down some important history that might otherwise be lost.</p>
<p><em>Guerrilla Radios in Southern Africa: Broadcasters, Technology, Propaganda Wars and the Armed Struggle is available from <a href="https://witspress.co.za/catalogue/guerrilla-radios-in-southern-africa/">Wits University Press</a></em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/177041/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Martha Evans does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The role played by guerrilla radio in the liberation struggle will not be lost to history, thanks to books like this.Martha Evans, Senior Lecturer in Media Studies, University of Cape TownLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1372152020-05-12T12:33:43Z2020-05-12T12:33:43ZWhat FDR’s polio crusade teaches us about presidential leadership amid crisis<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/331176/original/file-20200428-110785-1ygezfo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C23%2C5201%2C4009&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">President and Mrs. Roosevelt enjoying after-luncheon conversation with patients of the Warm Springs Foundation.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/president-and-mrs-roosevelt-enjoying-after-luncheon-news-photo/515383916?adppopup=true">Bettmann/Contributor via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Throughout much of the last century, a lethal and terrifying virus besieged America. Then, as now, the fear of contagion <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/npr-history-dept/2015/04/10/398515228/defeating-the-disease-that-paralyzed-america">gripped ordinary Americans</a>. And then — unlike now — a president displayed decisive leadership in fighting the virus, maintaining an unfailingly good humor and leaving the immunology to the experts.</p>
<p>The scourge was infantile paralysis, or polio, and the president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was its most famous victim. First clinically described in the <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4212416/">late 19th century</a> and persisting deep into the 20th century, the virus invaded the nervous system and destroyed the nerve cells that stimulate muscle fibers, resulting in irreversible paralysis and sometimes death.</p>
<p>The tally in heartbreak and death was staggering. In <a href="https://global.oup.com/ushe/product/polio-9780195307146?cc=us&lang=en&">“Polio: An American Story</a>,” the historian David M. Oshinsky chronicles the loss. In 1949, of the 428 cases recorded during an outbreak in San Angela, Texas, 84 victims — most of them children — were left paralyzed and 28 died. </p>
<p>In 1946, there were 25,000 reported cases across the country. By 1952, the figure had jumped to 58,000. Unlike the <a href="https://theconversation.com/10-misconceptions-about-the-1918-flu-the-greatest-pandemic-in-history-133994">Spanish flu</a>, whose special horror was to strike down the healthy in the prime of life, and <a href="https://theconversation.com/failure-to-count-covid-19-nursing-home-deaths-could-dramatically-skew-us-numbers-137212">COVID-19</a>, which places the elderly at greatest risk, polio targeted children mainly, crippling and killing with what seemed an almost premeditated malice. Always on the alert for symptoms, generations of parents felt a chill of their own when a child contracted a cold, complained of a headache or had a stiff neck. </p>
<p>In this sense, FDR was both a statistical anomaly and cautionary lesson. He was stricken with the disease in 1921, at the age of 39, grim proof that wealth and privilege granted no immunity. Against long odds, he was elected governor of New York in 1928 and, in 1932, to the first of four terms as president. During his first presidential campaign, Republicans whispered that a wheelchair-bound <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1998/08/05/opinion/IHT-fdr-a-giant-despite-his-disability.html">“cripple”</a> was unfit for the duties of the presidency. </p>
<p>“It is perfectly evident that you don’t have to be an acrobat to be president,” <a href="https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-fenway-park-boston-massachusetts">snarled Al Smith</a>, the former New York governor.</p>
<h2>FDR’s personal crusade</h2>
<p>As president, FDR made the eradication of polio his personal business. For <a href="https://www.amazon.in/Little-Lindy-Kidnapped-Covered-Century/dp/0231198485">media historians</a> like <a href="https://www.brandeis.edu/facultyguide/person.html?emplid=0adcef42793cb212c9d013f9b84de92bfbcf6972">myself</a>, FDR has always been a towering figure for his prescient orchestration of electronic media — in this case, the radio — to forge his persona and further his policies. “My friends,” he would begin intimately, in his calming, conversational “fireside chats.” Less well known perhaps is his pioneering role as executive producer of a programming evergreen: the celebrity-driven fundraiser.</p>
<p>Beginning in 1934, he dedicated his birthday, Jan. 30, to a nationwide series of charity galas and “birthday balls” held to benefit the <a href="https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/science-medicine/roosevelt-warm-springs-institute-rehabilitation">Warm Springs Foundation for Infantile Paralysis</a>, named for the polio treatment site in Georgia he had been visiting since 1924. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt — not just FDR’s strong right arm but his legs as well — typically took on hostess duties, circulating among the guests and hustling back and forth among ballrooms around the capital.</p>
<p>And what swell parties they were. The 1937 bash attracted 15,000 donors and lookie-loos angling to get a glimpse of the main attractions, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer stars Jean Harlow and Robert Taylor. FDR called the money raised from the annual events his “finest birthday presents,” but he was not loath to accept other party favors. “Surround me with pretty girls at the luncheon,” he instructed the organizers of the 1941 celebration — and he was seated between Lana Turner and Maureen O’Hara, as a bemused article in Variety magazine recalled in 1945. </p>
<p>In 1937, FDR announced the establishment of a new charity created expressly “to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/04/28/franklin-roosevelts-battle-with-polio-taught-him-lessons-relevant-today/">lead, direct and unify the fight</a> on every phase of this sickness.” It was called the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, but everyone knew it as the <a href="https://www.marchofdimes.org/">March of Dimes</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/332580/original/file-20200505-83751-j5o17j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/332580/original/file-20200505-83751-j5o17j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/332580/original/file-20200505-83751-j5o17j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/332580/original/file-20200505-83751-j5o17j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/332580/original/file-20200505-83751-j5o17j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/332580/original/file-20200505-83751-j5o17j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=533&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/332580/original/file-20200505-83751-j5o17j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=533&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/332580/original/file-20200505-83751-j5o17j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=533&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Eleanor Roosevelt on the portico of the White House with celebrities taking part in the 1937 president’s birthday ball.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44095837">Library of Congress/Harris & Ewing</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Radio and motion picture superstar Eddie Cantor coined the phrase in 1938. He reasoned that even Depression-battered Americans wouldn’t begrudge a dime to a good cause. Cantor’s annual March of Dimes variety shows were simulcast by all the major radio networks, featured the biggest entertainers of the day and set a template for every all-star telethon broadcast by radio’s successor. </p>
<p>“A little change from big people will mean a big change in little people!” chirped Molly of the radio duo Fibber McGee and Molly, the Hollywood Reporter reported in January 1942. Dime by dime, the campaigns raked in millions.</p>
<p>However, as with the victory over Japan and Germany in World War II, the conquest of polio was a surrender ceremony FDR did not live to witness. On April 12, 1945, <a href="https://www.upi.com/Archives/1945/04/12/Roosevelt-dies-of-stroke-at-Little-White-House/6802441123641/">he died of a stroke</a> while visiting the Warm Springs spa.</p>
<p>Repurposed now as a fitting memorial to the late president, the March of Dimes campaign soldiered on. And, eventually, the medical research it supported paid off. On April 12, 1955, on the 10th anniversary of FDR’s death, the field trials for the oral <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6351694/">vaccine developed by Dr. Jonas Salk</a> were declared a success. A wave of nationwide <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/npr-history-dept/2015/04/10/398515228/defeating-the-disease-that-paralyzed-america">jubilation ensued</a>.</p>
<p>In those days, there was no such thing as an anti-vaxxer: Almost every American knew someone who had been stricken. By the mid-1960s, together with a more easily administered oral vaccine introduced by <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2636601/">Dr. Albert Sabin in 1961</a>, polio had been effectively eliminated as a public health menace in the U.S. It <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/polio/progress/index.htm">exists now only in isolated pockets</a> in the poorest regions of developing nations.</p>
<h2>A sorrowful salute</h2>
<p>Shortly after the success of the Salk vaccine, FDR’s fight against polio was given an elegiac salute in Dore Schary’s play <a href="https://www.ibdb.com/broadway-production/sunrise-at-campobello-2670#ProductionStaff">“Sunrise at Campobello</a>,” named after the island off the coast of New Brunswick where FDR was first stricken. It showed the late president as Americans never saw him — flat on his back, carried on a stretcher, falling on his face and crawling backwards up the stairs — before he reemerges to public life, in braces and crutches, at the 1924 Democratic Convention. </p>
<p>A generation of hard-boiled theater critics waxed sentimental at the portrait of a president many had voted for four times. A “deeply moving chronicle … of a vigorous man struck down by a terrible illness,” <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=_g3TvB8kjTgC&pg=PT8&lpg=PT8&dq=What+rose+from+the+invalid%E2%80%99s+chair+was+greater+than+what+had+climbed+into+it&source=bl&ots=Z9x2J_jYsB&sig=ACfU3U3AZbK9Sc3bBCV0bY1uVp3fw7mTSg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi5x_P6-4vpAhWhj3IEHTUXBkYQ6AEwAHoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=What%20rose%20from%20the%20invalid%E2%80%99s%20chair%20was%20greater%20than%20what%20had%20climbed%20into%20it&f=false">wrote Brooks Atkinson</a> in The New York Times. “What rose from the invalid’s chair was greater than what had climbed into it.” </p>
<p>“Sunrise at Campobello” <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054354/trivia">opened on Broadway on Jan. 30, 1958</a> — the president’s birthday — and the film version premiered in New York on <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1960/09/29/archives/review-1-no-title-sunrise-at-campobello-opens-at-the-palace.html">Sept. 23, 1960</a>, in time to give another patrician Democrat with liberal credentials then running for president a vicarious boost. The opening night’s proceeds from both the stage and screen versions were donated, of course, to the March of Dimes. It was a reminder of the other great battle that FDR waged, in public and in private.</p>
<p>[<em>Get facts about coronavirus and the latest research.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=upper-coronavirus-facts">Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter.</a>]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/137215/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Thomas Doherty does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s personal battle with polio, and his steady hand while overseeing a national eradication campaign, highlights decisive leadership against a virus that terrified America.Thomas Doherty, Professor of American Studies, Brandeis UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1257172020-01-05T18:53:21Z2020-01-05T18:53:21ZBroadcast turns 100: from the Hindenburg disaster to the Hottest 100, here’s how radio shaped the world<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/306019/original/file-20191210-95153-gsbx18.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=13%2C0%2C2982%2C2281&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The famous Hindenburg tragedy was heard around the world via recorded radio journalism.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/Hindenburg_burning.jpg">Wiki Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Eighty-one years ago, a broadcast of Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds supposedly <a href="https://slate.com/culture/2013/10/orson-welles-war-of-the-worlds-panic-myth-the-infamous-radio-broadcast-did-not-cause-a-nationwide-hysteria.html">caused mass hysteria</a> in America, as listeners thought martians had invaded New Jersey.</p>
<p>There are varying accounts of the controversial incident, and it remains a topic of fascination, even today.</p>
<p>Back when Welles’s fictional martians attacked, broadcast radio was considered a state-of-the-art technology. </p>
<p>And since the first transatlantic radio signal was transmitted in 1901 by <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/inventions/guglielmo-marconi">Guglielmo Marconi</a>, radio has greatly innovated the way we communicate. </p>
<h2>Dots and dashes</h2>
<p>Before Marconi, German physicist <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Heinrich-Hertz">Heinrich Hertz</a> discovered and transmitted the first <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E46ZU2rsupA">radio waves</a> in 1886. Other individuals later developed technologies that could send radio waves across the seas.</p>
<p>At the start of the 20th century, Marconi’s system dominated radio wave-based media. Radio was called “wireless telegraphy” as it was considered a telegraph without the wires, and did what telegraphs had done globally since 1844. </p>
<p>Messages were sent in Morse code as dots and dashes from one point to another via radio waves. At the time, receiving radio required specialists to translate the dots and dashes into words. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/nazis-pressed-ham-radio-hobbyists-to-serve-the-third-reich-but-surviving-came-at-a-price-90510">Nazis pressed ham radio hobbyists to serve the Third Reich – but surviving came at a price</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The more refined technology underpinning broadcast radio was developed during the first world war, with “broadcast” referring to the use of radio waves to transmit audio from one point to many listeners. </p>
<p>This year, organised broadcast radio turns 100. These days it’s considered a basic technology, but that may be why it remains such a vital medium. </p>
<h2>SOS: the Titanic sinks</h2>
<p>By 1912, radio was used to run economies, empires and armed forces. </p>
<p>Its importance for shipping was obvious - battleships, merchant ships and passenger ships were all equipped with it. People had faith in technological progress and radio provided proof of how modern machines benefited humans.</p>
<p>However, the sinking of the Titanic that year caused a crisis in the world’s relationship with technology, by revealing its fallibility. Not even the newest technologies such as radio could avoid disaster.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/299151/original/file-20191029-183112-tfezxi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/299151/original/file-20191029-183112-tfezxi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/299151/original/file-20191029-183112-tfezxi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299151/original/file-20191029-183112-tfezxi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299151/original/file-20191029-183112-tfezxi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299151/original/file-20191029-183112-tfezxi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299151/original/file-20191029-183112-tfezxi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299151/original/file-20191029-183112-tfezxi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A replica of the radio room on the Titanic. One of the first SOS messages in history came from the ship.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wiki Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Some argue radio use may have increased the ship’s death toll, as the <a href="https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/Navigation/Community/Arcadia-and-THP-Blog/April-2018/How-Amateur-Radio-Sunk-the-Titanic">Titanic’s radio</a> was outdated and wasn’t intended to be used in an emergency. There were also accusations that amateur “<a href="https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/ham-radio.htm">ham radio</a>” operators had hogged the bandwidth, adding to an already confusing and dire situation.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, the Titanic’s <a href="https://www.rd.com/culture/sos-meaning/">SOS</a> signal managed to reach another ship, which led to the rescue of hundreds of passengers. Radio remains the go-to medium when disasters strike. </p>
<h2>Making masts and networks</h2>
<p>Broadcast radio got traction in the early 1920s and spread like a virus. Governments, companies and consumers started investing in the amazing new technology that brought the sounds of the world <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRp2u8d7lrg">into the home</a>.</p>
<p>Huge networks of transmitting towers and radio stations popped-up across continents, and factories churned out millions of radio receivers to meet demand. </p>
<p>Some countries started major public broadcasting networks, including <a href="https://www.bbc.com/timelines/zxqc4wx">the BBC</a>. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/npr-is-still-expanding-the-range-of-what-authority-sounds-like-after-50-years-124571">NPR is still expanding the range of what authority sounds like after 50 years</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Radio stations sought ways around regulations and, by the mid 1930s, some broadcasters were operating stations that generated up to 500,000 watts. </p>
<p>One Mexican station, <a href="https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/ebb01">XERA</a>, could be heard in New Zealand. </p>
<h2>Hearing the Hindenburg</h2>
<p>On May 6, 1937, journalist Herbert Morrison was experimenting with recording news bulletins for radio when the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ4XsHRZmpw">Hindenburg airship</a> burst into flames. </p>
<p>His famous commentary, “Oh the humanity”, is often mistaken for a live broadcast, but <a href="https://apnews.com/f9119c33266f4c5386cb6748787d79de/'Oh,-the-humanity!'-Hindenburg-anniversary,-broadcast-marked">it was actually a recording</a>. </p>
<p>Recording technologies such as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v85ZZrxihw8">transcription discs</a>, and later <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0sdVuX06sQ">magnetic tape</a> and digital storage, revolutionised radio. </p>
<p>Broadcasts could now be stored and heard repeatedly at different places instead of disappearing into the ether. </p>
<h2>Transistors and FM</h2>
<p>In 1953 radios got smaller, as the first all transistor radio was built.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/299154/original/file-20191029-183103-1b1q81i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/299154/original/file-20191029-183103-1b1q81i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/299154/original/file-20191029-183103-1b1q81i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=820&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299154/original/file-20191029-183103-1b1q81i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=820&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299154/original/file-20191029-183103-1b1q81i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=820&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299154/original/file-20191029-183103-1b1q81i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1030&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299154/original/file-20191029-183103-1b1q81i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1030&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299154/original/file-20191029-183103-1b1q81i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1030&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A 1960 ad for a pocket sized Motorola transistor radio.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wiki Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ukDKVHnac4">Transistor circuits</a> replaced valves and made radios very cheap and portable.</p>
<p>Along with being portable, radio sound quality improved after the rise of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3M4cqAMWQs">FM broadcasting</a> in the 1960s. While both FM and AM are effective ways to modulate carrier waves, FM (frequency modulation) offers better audio quality and less noise compared to AM (amplitude modulation).</p>
<p>Music on FM radio sounded as good as on a home stereo. Rock and roll and the revolutionary changes of the 1960s started to spread via the medium.</p>
<p>AM radio was reserved for talkback, news and sport. </p>
<h2>Beeps in space</h2>
<p>In 1957, radio experienced lift-off when the USSR launched the world’s first satellite. </p>
<p>Sputnik 1 didn’t do much other than broadcast a regular “beep” sound by radio. </p>
<p>But this still <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0937239/?ref_=nm_knf_t1">shocked the world</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHCeLvy5z-I">especially the USA</a>, which didn’t think the USSR was so technologically advanced. </p>
<p>Sputnik’s beeps were propaganda heard all round the world, and they heralded the age of space exploration. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/5M-QinwmdKc?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The launch of Sputnik 1 started the global space race.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Today, radio is still used to communicate with <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNEDNOQnwD8">astronauts and robots</a> in space. </p>
<p>Radio astronomy, which uses radio waves, has also <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2K6P014XXmQ">revealed a lot about the universe to astronomers</a>.</p>
<h2>Digital, and beyond</h2>
<p>Meanwhile on Earth, radio stations continue to use the internet to extend their reach beyond that of analogue technologies. </p>
<p>Social media helps broadcasters generate and spread content, and digital editing tools have boosted the possibilities of what can be done with podcasts and radio documentaries. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/radio-as-a-form-of-struggle-scenes-from-late-colonial-angola-128019">Radio as a form of struggle: scenes from late colonial Angola</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The radio industry has learnt to use digital plenitude to the max, with broadcasters <a href="https://www.rnz.co.nz/series">building archives</a> and producing an endless flood of material beyond what they broadcast. </p>
<p>This year marks a century of organised broadcast radio around the world. </p>
<p>Media such as movies, television, the internet and podcasts were expected to sound its death knell. But radio embraces <a href="https://radio.garden/">new technology</a>. It survives, and advances.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/125717/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter Hoar does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>When the USSR launched the world’s first satellite, Sputnik 1 didn’t do much other than regularly “beep” over the radio. Yet, this simple sound is associated with the beginnings of space exploration.Peter Hoar, Senior Lecturer, School of Communications Studies, Auckland University of TechnologyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1280192019-12-02T14:11:02Z2019-12-02T14:11:02ZRadio as a form of struggle: scenes from late colonial Angola<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/304475/original/file-20191129-95236-1krw2be.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>One August night in 1967 in the village of Mungo in central Angola, the local colonial administrator walked into a bar to buy cigarettes. As he entered, he noticed furtive gestures. The barman, Timoteo Chingualulo, turned down the volume on the radio and Chigualulo’s friend, António Francisco da Silva “Baião,” a nurse at the health delegation, changed the station.</p>
<p>After the administrator left, they returned to the original programming: Radio Brazzaville broadcasting the show <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=XxtNa5hQmacC&pg=PA152&lpg=PA152&dq=radio+angola+Angola+Combatente&source=bl&ots=XukJLj6ITd&sig=ACfU3U3lGGdcwO84EjSFIKSyJyd07twd7Q&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjWnIX2oo_mAhXDrHEKHd9ZBgsQ6AEwCHoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=radio%20angola%20Angola%20Combatente&f=false">Angola Combatente</a> (Fighting Angola). The administrator could hear the show from his veranda. He reported this to the police, who arrested the two men – and took the offending radio. </p>
<p>The police found no evidence that the men were members of the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Popular-Movement-for-the-Liberation-of-Angola">Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola)</a>, the liberation movement fighting for independence from Portugal. The movement was responsible for creating Angola Combatente, which was broadcast from Brazzaville in the neighbouring Republic of the Congo. </p>
<p>But, as the police document recounts:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>it is inferred that the accused are partisans of an independent Angola, who, for now, are trying to satisfy their ambition by sending out the Brazzaville broadcasts publicly.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I heard and read stories like this over and over in interviews and archival research I did on radio and the state in Angola for my new book <a href="https://www.ohioswallow.com/book/Powerful+Frequencies">Powerful Frequencies: Radio, State Power, and the Cold War in Angola, 1931-2002</a>. During research for my previous book <a href="https://www.ohioswallow.com/book/Intonations">Intonations</a>, musicians and others remembered listening in hiding and using the colonial state broadcaster to promote their music. </p>
<p>In Powerful Frequencies, I argue that the colonial state and independent state used radio to project their power. But, like the story of Chingualulo and da Silva, listeners had their own ways of getting and disseminating information and news. Radio broadcasting and listening is not just about content, though. How radio works is as important as what radio says. Technology matters to, but doesn’t determine, how people produce meaning. The history of radio and state in Angola should remind us that the problems of fake news, bots, and infiltrated media ecosystems that make the headlines today have antecedents. They are also human problems that require human solutions. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/304468/original/file-20191129-95236-qwby2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/304468/original/file-20191129-95236-qwby2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/304468/original/file-20191129-95236-qwby2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/304468/original/file-20191129-95236-qwby2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/304468/original/file-20191129-95236-qwby2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/304468/original/file-20191129-95236-qwby2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/304468/original/file-20191129-95236-qwby2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/304468/original/file-20191129-95236-qwby2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The official Angolan broadcaster or Emissora Oficial de Angola under construction between 1963 and 1967.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Fernão Simões de Carvalho</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Clandestine listening</h2>
<p>An <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-13037271">anti-colonial war raged in Angola from 1961 until 1974</a>. This shaped life in the Portuguese territory, including the habits of how Angolans listened to radio.</p>
<p>Many sought out news and information from a variety of sources. The colonial administration censored the local press and radio, controlling for news about the war and the national liberation movements that fought it. People – whether African labourers or black civil servants or white settlers – tuned into national and international broadcasters. The BBC, Radio France Internationale, the Voice of America, and Radio Moscow all broadcast in Portuguese. </p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.country-data.com/cgi-bin/query/r-11011.html">Portuguese secret police)</a> followed these broadcasts, often transcribing them word for word, calling them “anti-Portuguese broadcasts”.</p>
<p>Angola Combatente or Voz Livre de Angola (the National Front for the Liberation of Angola’s programme broadcast from Kinshasa) worried the secret police and Portuguese military the most. Listening to them could get you arrested. That is what happened to Chingualulo and da Silva. </p>
<p>Many listeners remember hiding out to listen – tucking themselves in small quiet places (under beds or desks) or in empty, open-air ones (soccer fields or rural backyards) – and passing along the information to other supporters of independence and nationalist activists. Some radio listeners recall the thrill of secret listening.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/304439/original/file-20191129-95211-ccnmt1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/304439/original/file-20191129-95211-ccnmt1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/304439/original/file-20191129-95211-ccnmt1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/304439/original/file-20191129-95211-ccnmt1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/304439/original/file-20191129-95211-ccnmt1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/304439/original/file-20191129-95211-ccnmt1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/304439/original/file-20191129-95211-ccnmt1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/304439/original/file-20191129-95211-ccnmt1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The author’s latest book on Angolan radio.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ohio University Press</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The records</h2>
<p>In the thousands of pages of transcribed programmes and of police reports related to radio, the secret police and military archives resound with nervousness. Despite winning the ground war, the liberation movement radios, in particular, unnerved Portuguese colonial officials. They speculated that even civil servants and “Europeans” listened. They worried about what they called the “electrifying effects” on listeners of liberation movement broadcasters, whose sounds sizzled across borders. And they proposed jamming the broadcasters but settled on counter-propaganda.</p>
<p>Bouncing electromagnetic waves off the ionosphere in shortwave, what liberation movement broadcasters (and other international radio) gained in distance they lost in quality at the point of reception. </p>
<p>The records I went through included police and military transcriptions that inscribe the fading, the lost sentences, the buzz of atmospheric interference, and the trailing off of sound. </p>
<p>Listeners in the territory, some like Chingualulo and da Silva, amplified the broken messages. Others passed along what they heard, becoming transmitters in their own right. Similar to Algerian listeners of the Voice of Algeria that <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/frantz-fanon/">Frantz Fanon</a> described in <a href="https://groveatlantic.com/book/a-dying-colonialism/">A Dying Colonialism</a>, people in the Angolan territory pieced together choppy sentences, imagining guerrillas in the bush and diplomatic sessions that debated their freedom at the United Nations.</p>
<p>Radio became a form of participating in the struggle. As <a href="http://www.campusincamps.ps/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/fanon-this-is-the-voice-of-algeria.pdf">Fanon</a> wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Claiming to have heard the Voice of Algeria was, in a certain sense, distorting the truth. But it was above all the occasion to proclaim one’s clandestine participation in the essence of the Revolution. It meant making a deliberate choice … between the enemy’s congenital lie and the people’s own lie, which suddenly acquired a dimension of truth. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Canny listeners understood that the liberation movements and the colonial state (in programmes on the Emissora Oficial de Angola/Official Angolan Broadcaster) broadcast propaganda, or what Fanon calls “lies”. </p>
<p>They didn’t believe everything they heard, no matter what the source. But they also understood the stakes: independence or continued oppression under Portuguese rule.</p>
<p><em>Powerful Frequencies: Radio, State Power, and the Cold War in Angola, 1931–2002
by Marissa J. Moorman is published by <a href="https://www.ohioswallow.com/">Ohio University Press</a>. Order your copy over <a href="https://www.ohioswallow.com/book/Powerful+Frequencies">here</a></em>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/128019/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Marissa J. Moorman received funding from Fulbright Hays and the American Council of Learned Societies for the research on radio in Angola. </span></em></p>The Portuguese colonisers were not the only ones who could use radio for control. A new book tells how popular radio broadcasts from Angola’s liberation fighters were used as weapons in the struggle.Marissa J. Moorman, Associate Professor of History, Indiana UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1267862019-11-14T15:29:58Z2019-11-14T15:29:58ZHow Zulu radio dramas subverted apartheid’s grand design<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301548/original/file-20191113-77310-2xouqx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Paul Weinberg/Cambridge University Press</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In Johannesburg, during the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/11/story-cities-19-johannesburg-south-africa-apartheid-purge-sophiatown">Sophiatown era of the 1950s</a>, gangsters would routinely order a writer or journalist like <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/biography-can-themba-aisha-ahmed">Can Themba</a> or <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/william-bloke-modisane">Bloke Modisane</a>, to recite Shakespeare to them on street corners. </p>
<p>For a time, Shakespeare became part of the rhetoric of the streets. One of the favourite requests was for the revolutionary funeral oration by Mark Anthony, in <a href="https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/shakespedia/shakespeares-plays/julius-caesar/">Julius Caesar</a>: “Friends, Romans, Countrymen…” </p>
<p>This may be because the writer and broadcaster <a href="http://www.durban.gov.za/City_Government/street_renaming/Biographies/Pages/KE-Masinga.aspx">King Edward Masinga</a> had earlier translated and put on air Zulu language versions of Julius Caesar and many other Shakespeare plays. Cable radio, very popular in the hostels and in the townships of the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/place/Witwatersrand">Witwatersrand</a>, was the main means of transmission for early programmes.</p>
<p>Masinga’s version of the famous oration at Caesar’s funeral that began, “Zihlobo, Bakwethu, maRomani …” is all that remains in the South African Broadcasting Corporation archives of this rich aural treasure of Shakespeare in isiZulu. Modisane, who wrote in exile for BBC radio drama, would later take the same speech and setting as the crisis moment of his superb play, <a href="https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/c0e9c957c4354c7d9929222f1a94cd5f">The Quarter Million Boys</a>.</p>
<p>These dramas were part of a bouquet offered to South Africa’s large population of isiZulu speakers during apartheid through a radio service that was designed for <a href="http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/media/1997/9709/s970915d.htm">very different purposes</a>. But the original design did not deter the producers of the programmes: they subverted the apartheid agenda and delivered riveting drama that from its first moments produced culturally rich and intriguing reflections of black life.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301308/original/file-20191112-178525-1p3ou1c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301308/original/file-20191112-178525-1p3ou1c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301308/original/file-20191112-178525-1p3ou1c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301308/original/file-20191112-178525-1p3ou1c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301308/original/file-20191112-178525-1p3ou1c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=637&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301308/original/file-20191112-178525-1p3ou1c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=637&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301308/original/file-20191112-178525-1p3ou1c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=637&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">King Edward Masinga broadcasts on Durban’s SABC Bantu programme in 1956.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Drum photographer/ BAHA/ AMO/ Courtesy Cambridge University Press</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Something went wrong</h2>
<p>There is a cliché that lingers about African language radio in the apartheid era and after. Baldly stated, it is that during apartheid the South African Broadcasting Corporation had total control of the airwaves, and that the pliant African language stations which the broadcaster set up through Radio Bantu in 1960, dripped out only endless streams of propaganda to passive black listeners. Designed to control minds, and hold back the liberation struggle and the sounds of freedom coming from the north even before 1960, as it indeed was, it seemed the perfect tool of the master. </p>
<p>And yet. Something went wrong. </p>
<p>For sure, the apartheid state was producing an earlier version of today’s <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/0/fake-news-exactly-has-really-had-influence/">fake news</a>. Radio announcers had little control over the public broadcaster’s standard news bulletins, although a few brave broadcasters tried. At times a reader would preface the newscast with, “These are not my words”, or recite, with a flourish, the praise poems of one of the former Zulu kings, before launching into the doctored news script of the day. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/thokozani-mandlenkosi-ernest-nene">Thokozani Nene</a>, one of the iconic figures of Radio Zulu and later Ukhozi FM did just that, until the order came that he was to desist. </p>
<h2>The communal power of radio drama</h2>
<p>Popular culture, largely in the form of Zulu radio drama, was one of the hidden weapons of sonic resistance that entranced and intrigued black radio listeners <a href="https://open.uct.ac.za/bitstream/item/19975/thesis_hum_2015_mhlambi_thokozani_ndumiso.pdf?sequence=1">even before</a> the inception of <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233183697_'You_are_Listening_to_Radio_Lebowa_of_the_South_African_Broadcasting_Corporation'_Vernacular_Radio_Bantustan_Identity_and_Listenership_1960-1994">Radio Bantu</a>. </p>
<p>Nearly six decades later, radio drama, usually in serial form, still has a strong following on <a href="http://www.ukhozifm.co.za/sabc/home/ukhozifm">Ukhozi FM</a>, one of the descendant stations of Radio Bantu. </p>
<p>How did the dramas become so important? The sound waves carrying the Zulu dramas, which spread quickly as a genre to other African language stations, became a platform for an ambitious, versatile and talented group of men and women who were script writers, performers and producers, all working in isiZulu, and making serial dramas, as well as shorter stand-alone radio plays or musicals. These ran not weekly but daily from Monday to Friday, often twice, even three times a day. <a href="https://www.academia.edu/33982826/Violence_the_occult_and_the_everyday_a_Radio_Zulu_drama_of_the_1980s_Liz_Gunner_Pages_124-139_Published_online_Social_Dynamics_06_Dec_2014_http_dx.doi.org_10.1080_02533952.2014.984456">They flourished</a>. </p>
<p>In 1986, the famous six-month long serial drama, Yiz’ Uvalo (In Spite of Fear), even had an episode played on Christmas Day. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301319/original/file-20191112-178516-1ilbagq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301319/original/file-20191112-178516-1ilbagq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301319/original/file-20191112-178516-1ilbagq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301319/original/file-20191112-178516-1ilbagq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301319/original/file-20191112-178516-1ilbagq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301319/original/file-20191112-178516-1ilbagq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=565&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301319/original/file-20191112-178516-1ilbagq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=565&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301319/original/file-20191112-178516-1ilbagq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=565&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A family group relaxes after work with the radio in Vaalwater, Northern Province.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Reinhardt Hartzenberg/ AMO/ Courtesy Wits University Press</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The radio plays set themselves deep in listeners’ memories and traditions, and became a way to tap into emotions linked to the fascination, strain and pleasure of plots that circled, usually, around the family. </p>
<p>Themes of love, divided loyalties and ethical dilemmas played out in intricate detail. The 1974 serial Ubongilinda Mzikayifani (You Must Wait for me Mzikayifani) was written and produced by Bhekisisa Kunene in the cramped Radio Zulu studios in downtown Johannesburg. Family secrets, rival suitors and a young woman’s strength of character were mixed with a twist of the occult and sprinkled with the poetic language of courtship. The setting was rural, but there was the added attraction of an eloquent male lead who was also a famous football commentator on Radio Zulu. </p>
<p>A few years later, a very different serial drama followed a more adventurous young woman as she picked her way between the advice of female family members and the attractions of off-beat men and noisy taverns. Abangane Ababi (Bad Friends) was written by Abigail Zondi. Power in the domestic space and fidelity in a fast changing society were among the themes brilliantly explored through the 1990s and into the new millennium. </p>
<p>The classic double drama, <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/radio-soundings/radio-drama-in-the-time-of-violence/DAD96C0EF6F4AB5FF491DE9A93FED833">Yiz’ Uvalo/ Umanqob’ Isibindi</a> (In Spite of Fear/ The Victor is Courage) by M.V. Bhengu had a special power. Tense and full of eerie sonic features, it ran for six months from 1986 during the <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-a-chief-defied-apartheid-and-upheld-democracy-for-the-good-of-his-people-121771">low-level civil war in KwaZulu-Natal</a>. As warlords ruled some urban and peri-urban areas in Durban and the Natal Midlands, its focus on fear, desperation, family and the occult resonated with powerful public events which threatened to overturn people’s lives. A man, Sigidi, back in rural Ndwedwe after working in Johannesburg, finds it impossible to provide for his family and turns to the occult for help, with terrible consequences. </p>
<p>What was being made through this theatre of the air, broadcast to an urban and rural listening community including migrant hostel-dwellers, was a public intimacy that sustained daily life and <a href="https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/8a84/c2cae126edc5ebcc12d2c4f7c76466d086cf.pdf">fed the imagination</a>. The dramas were a means of accessing the self in a turbulent and changing world.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301337/original/file-20191112-178502-1s2o6zz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301337/original/file-20191112-178502-1s2o6zz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301337/original/file-20191112-178502-1s2o6zz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=904&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301337/original/file-20191112-178502-1s2o6zz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=904&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301337/original/file-20191112-178502-1s2o6zz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=904&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301337/original/file-20191112-178502-1s2o6zz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1136&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301337/original/file-20191112-178502-1s2o6zz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1136&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301337/original/file-20191112-178502-1s2o6zz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1136&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Paul Weinberg/Cambridge University Press</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Radio created role models</h2>
<p>Listeners also modelled themselves on the radio personalities who had parts in the dramas, sometimes wrote them or produced them, and in some cases had their own programmes. They became cultural icons. </p>
<p>So King Edward Masinga, Guybon Mpanza, Thokozani Nene, Alexius Buthelezi, Winnie Mahlangu and Linda Ntuli, to name a few, each had a place over the decades on South Africa’s sonic stage. </p>
<p>Perhaps the broadcast voices produced a meta counter-voice to the dominant group. This was a resistant modernity, mediated by radio, producing worlds that were culturally dynamic and deeply invigorating. Looking back at it now, we can see it as part of an important black archive, not lost, but not entirely re-discovered.</p>
<p><em>Gunner is the author of Radio Soundings - South Africa and the Black Modern. <a href="http://witspress.co.za">Wits University Press</a> (2019). The <a href="http://witspress.co.za/catalogue/radio-soundings/">book</a> is also published by The International African Institute and <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/">Cambridge University Press</a> (2019).</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/126786/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Liz Gunner received funding from the National Research Foundation for her research project on Radio and the Making of Community in South Africa. She is visiting research professor in the Department of Languages, Cultural Studies and Applied Linguistics (LanCSAL), School of Languages, University of Johannesburg.</span></em></p>Even though they were a product of apartheid’s propaganda broadcasting machine, Zulu language radio dramas proved subversively powerful by reflecting communal black life and creating new stars.Prof Liz Gunner, Visiting Research Professor in the School of Languages, University of JohannesburgLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/905102018-05-01T10:40:36Z2018-05-01T10:40:36ZNazis pressed ham radio hobbyists to serve the Third Reich – but surviving came at a price<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/204286/original/file-20180131-157488-ypcf2t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Joseph Goebbels, left, shows the 'people's receiver' to Adolf Hitler at a radio exhibition in 1933.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.badische-zeitung.de/computer-medien-1/80-jahre-volksempfaenger-des-teufels-megaphon--74455297.html">Badische Zeitung</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>When people have free and unfettered choices of activities, they both entertain and express themselves through their pastimes – whether stamp or coin collecting, scrapbooking, gardening or tinkering with electronic gadgets. But what happens when those free spirits – particularly those whose hobbies have taught them specialized technical skills – suddenly find themselves living in a dictatorship?</p>
<p>As a <a href="http://www.kentuckypress.com/live/title_detail.php?titleid=1643">historian of national socialism</a>, I note that my newest research into German radio hobbyists has found a cautionary tale. Authoritarian governments or movements often subvert and take over civic organizations – including seemingly unimportant hobby groups – as part of seizing power. My work suggests that people involved in technological hobbies, such as radio, may be able to retain a bit more personal freedom than those in less strategically important ones, such as singing or sports. But that liberty can come at the cost of complicity.</p>
<h2>Radio and the Nazis</h2>
<p>In the “<a href="http://www.overlookpress.com/anything-goes.html">Jazz Age</a>” of the 1920s, people were fascinated with new technologies, including <a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674601222">airplanes</a>, motor vehicles and radios. Large industries grew from those fascinations, of course, but so did hobbies and groups of hobbyists.</p>
<p>In Germany – and <a href="http://www.arrl.org/home">other countries</a> – radio hobby clubs thrived. Several hundred thousand Germans joined these groups, in part because <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/media-and-the-making-of-modern-germany-9780199583867">commercial radios were very expensive</a>, and clubs helped people build their own much more cheaply. Once built, they also tinkered with the radios’ insides, partly just because they could and partly to improve reception, particularly of foreign stations, which often offered more light entertainment than <a href="https://doi.org/10.1086/245592">state-controlled German broadcasting</a>. (The clubs also threw <a href="http://www.saischowa.de/y24/geschichte/ball.htm">great parties</a>.)</p>
<p>In 1933, the <a href="https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005204">Nazis took power</a> in Germany. They began a comprehensive and often violent process of remaking all of German society to serve the Nazi Party. Groups as diverse as choirs, political parties, sports clubs and chambers of commerce were shut down outright or taken over and purged of Jews, socialists, outspoken democrats and other people the Nazis deemed “undesirables.”</p>
<p>The groups that survived had to support the new regime. Radio hobbyists were particularly exposed because their skills involved building communications equipment.</p>
<p>The Nazis were especially interested in ham radio operators, who were part of a <a href="http://www.iaru.org/index.html">worldwide community of hobbyists</a> who did much more than just listen to entertainment or news broadcast by others. They transmitted and received messages on their own. In Germany, people couldn’t buy ready-made radio transmitters and other technical equipment that were usable on the frequencies of interest to amateurs. Ham operators had to <a href="http://www.qsl.net/w5afd/5afd%20web%20pages/topview.html">build their own equipment</a>, which went far beyond the simple broadcast-band receivers most hobbyists built. They also had to – as is still true today – pass a fairly <a href="https://www.fcc.gov/wireless/bureau-divisions/mobility-division/amateur-radio-service/examinations">complicated technical exam</a> to earn a transmitting license. </p>
<p>This meant that hams, whether or not they were electrical engineers or other types of <a href="http://www.eecs.psu.edu/News/EE-prof-helps-after-Maria.aspx">scientists by profession</a>, accumulated a fairly high degree of scientific and technical knowledge in electrical engineering and radio-frequency reception and transmission. They also got a lot of practical experience in using radio equipment, which only professional radio operators could match.</p>
<h2>Ham radio’s survival</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/books/review/goebbels-a-biography-by-peter-longerich.html">Joseph Goebbels</a>, the Nazi minister of propaganda and popular enlightenment, <a href="http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/goeb56.htm">understood the power that radio could have</a>, both to <a href="https://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/nazi-germany/radio-in-nazi-germany/">disseminate Nazi propaganda</a> and to connect groups who were resisting the Nazi takeover. So he moved quickly to take control of not only commercial broadcast radio stations but also the radio clubs and their members. Those clubs that wanted only to passively listen to broadcast radio and tinker a little bit were shut down.</p>
<p>The hams, who wanted to transmit their own information, found themselves in a difficult position. The Nazis knew that German hams had a history of illegal transmission without licenses and were likely to have unsupervised radio contacts with foreigners, even those from the Soviet Union or France, Germany’s former enemy in World War I.</p>
<p>Though there were only a few thousand licensed German hams, their technical expertise was too valuable to the regime to be completely dismissed. In fact, German ham radio operators and their clubs found themselves with several powerful Nazi supporters – including in the German military – who protected them from being shut down as other hobby groups had been. The government even doubled the number of available ham transmission licenses. </p>
<p>Hams could continue their hobby, but only if they collaborated, at times in ways antithetical to the hobby’s previous culture. </p>
<h2>What the Nazis wanted from amateur radio</h2>
<p>In the spring of 1933, as the Nazis consolidated power, Goebbels took control of the hams’ national organization, called the “German Amateur Transmission and Reception Service,” known by its German initials as the DASD. While ostensibly a private organization, it was forced to let the Propaganda Ministry choose its president, in consultation with the German military, and give the government veto power over other club leaders.</p>
<p>One of Goebbels’s hopes was that German ham operators could use their connections with ham radio operators in other countries to spread Nazi propaganda around the world. That didn’t prove very valuable: Most radio exchanges with foreign amateurs focused on purely technical information. In any case, the fact that many German hams could be heard on the airways was never taken by outsiders as proof of how wonderful life under national socialism was claimed to be.</p>
<p>German hams never bothered to tell the Propaganda Ministry how silly this international propaganda idea actually was and dutifully reported large numbers of foreign contacts.</p>
<h2>Rebuilding the German military</h2>
<p>More importantly, though, German amateur radio hobbyists were a big boost for the Nazis’ secret military rebuilding effort. The <a href="http://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/versailles_menu.asp">Treaty of Versailles</a>, which had ended World War I, strictly limited how many people and weapons the German military could have. Adding – and communicating with – more units beyond the Versailles limits would require technically accomplished radiomen who understood shortwave radios and could send and receive Morse code at high speed. Amateur radio hobbyists fit the bill exactly, and were recruited directly into the armed forces, the intelligence services and the communications service of the diplomatic corps. </p>
<p>They also taught radio skills to <a href="http://www.dokufunk.org/upload/SCHIPS_DASD.MP3">active duty soldiers</a> and future recruits, like the Hitler Youth and <a href="http://schroeder-eversburg.de/teil3.pdf">men preparing to join the German Navy</a>. Having amateur radio hobbyists do the training let the German military avoid tipping off Britain, France, Belgium or the United States that Germany was rearming on a large scale. All the new radiomen on the air could be explained as <a href="http://dokufunk.org/amateur_radio/contributions/index.php?CID=2023&ID=9904">just simple hobbyists</a>. </p>
<p>The German ham radio organization, the DASD, provided other technical expertise too, such as identifying frequencies that might be useful for military communications. The SS Security Service even commissioned the DASD’s main laboratory to design and build miniature radio transceivers spies could use to receive orders and report their findings.</p>
<h2>The price of survival</h2>
<p>To keep transmitting under the Third Reich, German ham operators faced a terrible moral quandary. Like all members of German society, they had to accept close scrutiny from security forces. But to keep operating their radios, German hams had to participate actively in the Nazi regime, driving Jews and anti-Nazis from their hobbyist ranks and collaborating closely with authorities, including the SS and intelligence services.</p>
<p>In retrospect, the DASD’s relationship with the Nazis was too close. But it is in the nature of dictatorship not to allow people to stand on the sidelines. Ham operators who considered resisting the Nazis faced a special challenge: Unlike dance groups or musicians, radio technicians had strategic skills and therefore were more likely to be sought out and compelled to help the regime. Refusal might mean loss of economic opportunity at best, arrest, concentration camp or even execution at worst. The <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/12/my-opposition-the-diary-of-friedrich-kellner-review">potential consequences</a> were clear. </p>
<p>Faced with the choice of flight, open resistance or collaboration, most chose collaboration, particularly because this allowed them to continue their cherished hobby. The problem is, in the Third Reich, there was no such thing as a little complicity. It is a sad irony that even hobby clubs, one of the pillars of civil society, were used by the Nazis to cement their dictatorship.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/90510/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Bruce Campbell is a licensed ham radio operator and member of the American Radio Relay League (ARRL), though he does not speak for that organization in any way.</span></em></p>Under an authoritarian government, freedoms can come at a steep – and lasting – price.Bruce Campbell, Associate Professor of German Studies, William & MaryLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/592932016-07-20T10:08:37Z2016-07-20T10:08:37ZThe 2016 Baseball Hall of Fame inductee you’ve never heard of<p>When the National Baseball Hall of Fame holds its <a href="http://baseballhall.org/hof/class-of-2016">2016 induction ceremony</a> on July 24, the names of the two player inductees – Ken Griffey Jr. and Mike Piazza – will be recognized by even the most casual baseball fan. Serious fans (and most New Englanders) will celebrate the Boston Globe’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Shaughnessy">Dan Shaughnessy</a>, the recipient of the J.G. Taylor Spink Award for baseball writers. </p>
<p>But the fourth name on this year’s list, <a href="http://baseballhall.org/discover/awards/ford-c-frick/2016-candidates/mcnamee-graham">Graham McNamee</a>, winner of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_C._Frick_Award">Ford C. Frick Award</a> for broadcasters, will resonate only with devoted historians of the national pastime. In “<a href="http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Crack-of-the-Bat,676325.aspx">Crack of the Bat</a>,” my history of baseball on the radio, I reviewed McNamee’s seminal contribution to the popularization of World Series broadcasts. </p>
<p>Most other Frick winners have been honored during their lifetimes. (Vin Scully won in 1982 and is still broadcasting today.) But McNamee hasn’t broadcast a game in 75 years; he died at 53 in 1942, when television was only an experiment and radio was just over two decades old. </p>
<p>McNamee’s long wait for recognition raises two questions: Who was Graham McNamee? And why did it take 74 years for the Hall of Fame to honor his contribution to baseball broadcasting?</p>
<h2>The right voice at the right time</h2>
<p>McNamee came to New York in the early 1920s to study singing, only to join the chorus of Gotham’s thousands of struggling vocalists. However, the city was also the center of a nascent network radio industry that had only just begun to generate substantial advertising revenues. </p>
<p>McNamee was in the right place at the right time, with the right voice. In 1923, he joined RCA-owned WEAF <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WNBC_(AM)">(later WNBC</a> as a staff announcer. WEAF was the nation’s most popular station and ran the <a href="http://www.npr.org/2012/08/29/160265990/first-radio-commercial-hit-airwaves-90-years-ago">first-ever radio commercial</a>, a 10-minute ad for apartments in Jackson Heights paid for by the Queensboro Corporation.</p>
<p>Like all first-generation radio announcers, McNamee did every kind of programming: music, news events and sports. His first significant sportscast was a middleweight championship fight in 1923. While boxing had been broadcast before, stations usually used a ringside reporter who relayed the action by phone to an announcer at the station, who then broadcast the play-by-play to listeners. </p>
<p>McNamee, however, broadcast live from ringside. His breathtaking firsthand account of the contest as it unfolded before his eyes captivated listeners. Big-time, live, emotional sportscasts – just like McNamee’s – were beginning to sell a skeptical public on the new medium of radio.</p>
<p>Boxing was a start, but McNamee’s big break in sports came at the 1923 World Series. The previous year’s World Series had been called by legendary sportswriter <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Grantland-Rice">Grantland Rice</a>, but Rice loathed the assignment and refused to broadcast baseball again. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/131152/original/image-20160719-7877-gf5z40.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/131152/original/image-20160719-7877-gf5z40.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/131152/original/image-20160719-7877-gf5z40.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/131152/original/image-20160719-7877-gf5z40.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/131152/original/image-20160719-7877-gf5z40.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/131152/original/image-20160719-7877-gf5z40.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=570&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/131152/original/image-20160719-7877-gf5z40.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=570&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/131152/original/image-20160719-7877-gf5z40.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=570&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Fans file into Yankee Stadium during the 1923 World Series, when McNamee got his big break.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/Yankee_Stadium_1923_World_Series.jpg">Library of Congress</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>So in 1923, Rice’s colleague at the New York Tribune, W.O. McGeehan, took the mic on WEAF. But after two games he’d had enough. Like Rice, McGeehan found radio’s demand for a steady stream of words very challenging; the medium provided little time for composition and none for editing. So the newspaperman left his post in the fourth inning of Game 3, leaving the mic to his assistant, Graham McNamee.</p>
<p>A radio star was born. </p>
<h2>The naysayers emerge</h2>
<p>For the next eight years, McNamee became RCA’s voice of the World Series. As the Series’ broadcast reach expanded from the Eastern Seaboard to the Midwest and, finally, to the entire nation, McNamee’s fame grew exponentially. After the 1925 World Series, McNamee received 50,000 letters from fans of his broadcasts. Listeners loved his strong, pleasant voice and detailed, enthusiastic descriptions of the action, which allowed them to better visualize a game they could only see in their minds. </p>
<p>But not every baseball fan was a McNamee fan. From time to time, his attention would stray from the game and to the celebrities in the stands or a letter he had received. He’d be prone to forget the count and even the batter’s name. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Voices-Summer-Baseballs-All-Time-Announcers-ebook/dp/B001NEIODM/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1468879732&sr=8-2&keywords=voices+of+summer#nav-subnav">According to baseball broadcast historian Curt Smith</a>, McNamee freely admitted to being “an entertainer first and broadcaster second.” </p>
<p>So as the novelty of World Series broadcasts faded, some baseball writers became less impressed with broadcasting’s first superstar. </p>
<p>After one game of the 1927 Series, columnist Ring Lardner famously observed, “I attended a double-header, the game [McNamee] was describing and the game I was watching”; a New York Sun headline read “M'Namee’s Eye not on the Ball: Radio Announcer Mixes Up World Series Fans”; and in a scathing criticism, the Boston Globe identified eight problems with McNamee’s call of the opening game, including forgetting to report balls and strikes and leaving the mic for several minutes to get a soft drink. </p>
<p>But most fans still loved McNamee’s style; plus they had few baseball broadcasts to compare with it. In the 1920s, not many teams – and none in New York, Philadelphia or Washington – regularly broadcast games. For most Americans, McNamee’s World Series calls were all they knew. </p>
<p>McNamee also added a number of other high-profile broadcasts to his resume: the inauguration of Calvin Coolidge, the 1927 Jack Dempsey-Gene Tunney <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/1987-09-22/sports/sp-9617_1_long-count">“long count” heavyweight fight</a>, the 1927 Rose Bowl game and Charles Lindbergh’s return to New York after his solo transatlantic flight. </p>
<p>But by the end of the Roaring Twenties, many announcers began to specialize in covering the national pastime. They included Hal Totten, Quin Ryan and Pat Flanagan in Chicago; Ty Tyson in Detroit; Fred Hoey in Boston; France Laux in St. Louis; Tom Manning in Cleveland; and Harry Hartman in Cincinnati. Each developed his own unique style and vast, local followings. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, though he covered the World Series from 1923 to 1931, McNamee was only working a handful of baseball contests per year because New York teams rarely broadcast regular-season games. </p>
<h2>Famous for being the first</h2>
<p>Baseball broadcasting was passing him by. Major League Baseball Commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis valued seasoned professional announcers and pushed NBC (RCA’s network) to move McNamee to pregame coverage for the 1932 World Series. Though McNamee continued to be involved in coverage of the Fall Classic – <a href="http://www.criticalpast.com/video/65675046236_baseball-match_Detroit-Tigers_Chicago-Cubs_Detroit-Tigers-win">including narrating a newsreel of Game 3 of the 1935 World Series</a> – he’d been marginalized.</p>
<p>Given his initial fame and role in pioneering the coverage of baseball on radio, why has McNamee been overlooked for so long by the Baseball Hall of Fame?</p>
<p>All previous Frick winners have had long careers, usually with one team. Although some eventually had national profiles, most cut their teeth on the day broadcasts, slowly winning the adulation of a team’s fans. But McNamee was baseball’s broadcast primal star, famous for being the first but not necessarily the best. Longtime Braves and Astros announcer <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_Hamilton">Milo Hamilton</a>, himself a Frick winner, gave <a href="http://www.americansportscastersonline.com/mcnameearticle.html">a succinct explanation</a> for why McNamee wasn’t in the Hall of Fame: “He didn’t broadcast baseball long enough.” </p>
<p>But in 2013 the Hall of Fame launched a new system for selecting winners that alternates consideration of announcers from three eras. The era for this batch of inductees – the one ending in the mid-1950s – gave McNamee a second chance.</p>
<p>It’s taken the Hall of Fame some time, and many would call it long overdue. In his 1970 book <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=bpFZAAAAMAAJ&q=the+broadcasters+red+barber&dq=the+broadcasters+red+barber&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi-rcnv2P3NAhUCcz4KHbA5AMAQ6AEIODAF">“The Broadcasters,”</a> famous broadcaster <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Barber">Red Barber</a> celebrated the medium’s pioneers, including Graham McNamee. </p>
<p>As Barber explained, what made them so great was “that nobody had ever been called upon before to do such work. They had to go out and do it from scratch. If ever a man did pure, original work, it was Graham McNamee.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/59293/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>James Walker does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Radio legend Graham McNamee was baseball’s first broadcast star. So why did it take 74 years for the National Baseball Hall of Fame to honor him?James Walker, Executive Director, International Association for Communication and Sport, Emeritus Professor of Communication, Saint Xavier UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/427392015-06-05T08:05:49Z2015-06-05T08:05:49ZKeith Hill’s comments about women in country music cut far deeper than misogyny<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/84020/original/image-20150604-3407-13a9pms.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Country music executives seem intent on crafting a homogenous genre for the masses.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.shutterstock.com/cat.mhtml?country_code=US&page_number=1&position=7&safesearch=1&search_language=en&search_source=search_form&search_type=keyword_search&searchterm=country%20music&sort_method=relevance2&source=search&timestamp=1433453169&tracking_id=H7AJAmx4kq0A_CZz5-ygyg&use_local_boost=1&version=llv1&page=1&inline=256971274">'Concert' via www.shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Since the courtship of the Nashville music industry <a href="http://mentalfloss.com/article/30142/when-johnny-cash-met-richard-nixon">by the Nixon administration</a>, conservative politics and pop country music have been <a href="http://www.kentuckypress.com/live/title_detail.php?titleid=1864#.VXBj5FL9bFE">political bedfellows</a>.</p>
<p>So last week, when country radio promoter Keith Hill controversially suggested that stations should stop playing songs by female artists, it’s easy to label his actions another example of <a href="http://www.salon.com/2014/02/28/republican_misogyny_bad_for_the_country_really_good_for_democratic_fundraising/">misogynistic, conservative politics</a>. </p>
<p>However, Hill’s comments are actually indicative of something much bigger and far more troubling: the consolidation of an entire genre of music, and the type of environment this can create. In the case of country, it’s allowed for the repurposing of the genre’s history, and the exclusion of certain individuals. </p>
<h2>A rich legacy of female stars</h2>
<p>Try to imagine for a moment radio’s other major markets – pop, rock, R&B – with fewer women. What would contemporary music look like today without Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Rhianna, Beyonce and Ke$ha?</p>
<p>It goes without saying that women have a long, <a href="http://www.countysales.com/products.php?product=PRETTY-GOOD-FOR-A-GIRL-%252d-Women-in-Bluegrass-by-Murphy-Hicks-Henry">storied</a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Finding-Her-Voice-Country-1800-2000/dp/0826514324">celebrated history in country music</a>. </p>
<p>Each decade since the 1950s has featured women who have landed in the pantheon of musical artists known worldwide by their first name: <a href="http://www.kittywells.com">Kitty</a>, <a href="http://www.patsycline.com">Patsy</a>, <a href="http://dollyparton.com">Dolly</a>, <a href="http://www.biography.com/people/reba-mcentire-9542065">Reba</a>, <a href="http://www.biography.com/people/shania-twain-9542122">Shania</a> and <a href="http://taylorswift.com">Taylor</a>. </p>
<p>It’s also noteworthy that each of these women since Patsy Cline has achieved significant crossover, mainstream appeal, whether it’s Whitney Houston’s R&B genre-defining cover of Dolly Parton’s original song <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gS-F4rfU4ns">I Will Always Love You</a>, or Taylor Swift’s recent rubbing of elbows <a href="http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/videos/taylor-swift-paul-mccartney-performance/">with Sir Paul McCartney</a>. Not surprisingly, these powerful artists have all had a contentious relationship with the country music industry, confounding the expectations of what a female country star can and should do, from their lyrical choices, to their wardrobes, to their roles in TV and film.</p>
<p>It’s this very dynamic that plays out weekly on the television show <a href="http://abc.go.com/shows/nashville">Nashville</a>, whose main characters are powerful women pushing back against the constraints of an industry led by a highly consolidated network of media moguls.</p>
<p>One might go so far as to say that the popularity of female country stars threatens Nashville’s obsession with defining – to paraphrase scholar <a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/Reading-Country-Music/">David Sanjek</a> – what is country music, and what country music is.</p>
<h2>Revisionist history</h2>
<p>But there are larger – and more threatening – systemic forces at play. </p>
<p>Country music’s centralization in Nashville mirrors the centralization of radio over the past 50 years, and the scary amount of control that comes with such consolidation. </p>
<p>When country music promoters, agents, publishers and producers chose to consolidate the genre in Nashville in the late 1950s, they began applying new definitions, new aesthetics and a new history to the music. Even the name “country” is a re-brand: its precedents of “hillbilly,” “folk,” “hill and range” and “western” were eradicated. Thenceforth, country music would be strictly characterized as a southern, white, working-class cultural export.</p>
<p>Today, the political, racial, geographical and faith-based diversity of country music’s many non-mainstream subgenres – bluegrass, alt-country, Americana, old-time and trucker music – is proof that country music encompasses far more perspectives and voices than those that are deigned to be “playable” on country radio. </p>
<h2>Voices silenced by the powerful few</h2>
<p>Again, in many ways the politics of country music is incidental here, though it effectively illustrates the dangers inherent in media consolidation, whereby industry insiders – rather than the public – define who and what gets played for us on radio. </p>
<p>The Dixie Chicks’ public critique of then President George W Bush <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/26/natalie-maines-george-bush-dixie-chicks_n_3163296.html">serves as a prominent example</a>. Popular, powerful women in country music voiced a political opinion that may have resounded with many of their loyal fans, but ran counter to the conservative politics of country music’s brand. Their resulting disappearance from country radio was nothing short of political censorship. </p>
<p>Were country music to have a liberal brand – and its executives exercised a similar censorship of conservative voices – it would be no less threatening to democratic free speech. </p>
<p>Then there’s racial marginalization: it’s in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Segregating-Sound-Inventing-Refiguring-American/dp/0822347008">the music industry’s DNA</a>, and country is no exception. </p>
<p>People of color – particularly African Americans, American Indians and Latinos – have been major participants in the creation and performance of country music. But they’ve never been marketed as such. As a result, society accepts their absence from the genre as a cultural fact. </p>
<p>On the other hand, the marginalization of women in Nashville country music has been a trick of revisionist history. The grand narratives of the music genre point to Kitty Wells and her hit It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels as the “birth” of women in country. </p>
<p>But an examination of any regional history of country music tells a different story. New England had Betty Cody and <a href="http://www.massfolkarts.org/object_detail.asp?ObjectID=8220144">Georgia Mae</a>. The <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PJqqSmKAdQ">Coon Creek Girls</a> emerged from the region surrounding Cincinnatti. Then there was Patsy Montana from Arkansas, Pennsylvania’s Chickie Williams and California’s Rose Maddox.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/uEB1fD1jEA8?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Rose Maddox’s Move it on Over.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The marginalization of these female stars – along with lesser-known, but equally important women – is a troubling consistency in the story of the country music industry.</p>
<p>There’s space in other genres for political, racial and gender diversity. One can listen to rock radio and hear a Jimi Hendrix song, followed by a Ted Nugent song, followed by a Fleetwood Mac song. </p>
<p>Apparently, not so in country.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/42739/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Clifford Murphy does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>For 50 years, country music executives in Nashville have tried to dilute the genre’s rich, diverse history.Clifford Murphy, Adjunct Lecturer of American Studies, University of Maryland, Baltimore CountyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/419212015-05-18T19:28:46Z2015-05-18T19:28:46ZHow BB King’s days in radio helped shape his career and music<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/82071/original/image-20150518-25407-1lrr5nv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">BB King performs in Hamburg, Germany in this 1971 photograph.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/47686431@N04/4370929781">Heinrich Klaffs/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>BB King is remembered as one of the most important artists in the history of blues, with a long career that spanned seven decades and included classic hits such as Three O’Clock Blues (1951), The Thrill is Gone (1969) and 1989’s When Love Comes to Town (recorded with U2). Widely considered one of the most influential guitarists of the 20th century, he became, in his later years, a celebrated icon of blues authenticity.</p>
<p>Had it not been for his early days in radio, however, things might have turned out differently for a young Riley King.</p>
<p>When Riley King came to Memphis, Tennessee in the late 1940s and gained prominence as a DJ, he put himself at the center of one of the country’s most active blues scenes. </p>
<p>Whether it was access to a large record collection or gigs fueled by his growing celebrity as a DJ, the young bluesman brilliantly exploited each opportunity that came his way.</p>
<h2>The right place at the right time</h2>
<p>Radio in the years after World War II was changing rapidly. The nationally syndicated networks that had driven radio in previous decades were now devoting their resources to a new technology: television. </p>
<p>As TV increasingly drew a mass, national audience, radio homed in on appealing to local and regional listeners. This shift gave stations the freedom to innovate. One change was an uptick in the airing of rhythm & blues music, sometimes in late-night spots and sometimes – like at WDIA Memphis – all day and night. </p>
<p>The DJs spinning R&B records were often white: John R Richbourg at WLAC in Nashville and Zenas “Daddy” Sears at Atlanta’s WGST. (One of these white DJs, Ohio’s Alan Freed, would become pivotal in the birth of rock and roll.)</p>
<p>In late 1948, a young BB King was an aspiring blues artist then performing under his birth name, Riley King. He made his way from Indianola, Mississippi to Memphis by working on a delivery truck to pay his fare. He’d already visited the River City once as the guest of his cousin, Bukka White. </p>
<p>King, who had worked primarily in the cotton fields of Mississippi while singing with a gospel choir and playing blues on the street, sought out greener pastures in the music business. </p>
<p>So for this second visit, young Riley had a plan: he would get himself on blues singer Sonny Boy Willimson’s <a href="http://www.gypsynester.com/bluestrailkingbiscuit3.jpg">King Biscuit Time</a> show on KFFA – a broadcast King loved from his days picking cotton. Williamson put King on the air singing Blues at Sunrise, and got him a performing gig at the 16th Street Grill in West Memphis. To keep this new gig, King had to get the club mentioned on the radio.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/82093/original/image-20150518-25417-xb4k7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/82093/original/image-20150518-25417-xb4k7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/82093/original/image-20150518-25417-xb4k7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=808&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/82093/original/image-20150518-25417-xb4k7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=808&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/82093/original/image-20150518-25417-xb4k7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=808&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/82093/original/image-20150518-25417-xb4k7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1015&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/82093/original/image-20150518-25417-xb4k7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1015&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/82093/original/image-20150518-25417-xb4k7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1015&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">King modeled his on-air personality after national radio star Arthur Godfrey.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3954/15579357896_b43a272d7d_o.jpg">Classic Film/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>After his impromptu performance at KFFA, King ambitiously headed off to WDIA in Memphis, a white-owned station that employed an all-black on-air lineup, which included Nat D Williams, Maurice “Hot Rod” Hulbert and Rufus Thomas. King initially got a regular 10-minute spot promoting an elixir called Pepticon (“good for whatever ails you”), while even writing a jingle (and getting in a plug for his gig). </p>
<p>Soon the young DJ had a more extended slot as host of Sepia Swing Club. He later <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Blues-All-Around-Me-Autobiography/dp/0062061038">said</a> that he partly modeled his on-air personality on the nationally known white radio host and performer <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/movies/person/27350/Arthur-Godfrey/biography">Arthur Godfrey</a>. </p>
<p>A radio star was born: BB King.</p>
<h2>Exposure, influence – and stardom</h2>
<p>King’s regular spot on the radio gave the DJ name recognition, and his performing gigs continued to roll in. Soon, he was playing regional shows in addition to the local Memphis ones. Being on the radio also helped King understand audiences: he learned what listeners wanted and how to craft an on-stage personality.</p>
<p>As a regular at WDIA, King had access to the station’s record library. This allowed him to become familiar with a wide range of musical styles within rhythm and blues – something that would not have been possible for almost anyone outside of the industry. Aside from being exposed to new sounds, he got to know the artists and the industry representatives who came through town to promote their records.</p>
<p>King had bombed with his first record release as an artist, Miss Martha King, which he recorded at WDIA and released by Bullet Records. (King would <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Blues-All-Around-Me-Autobiography/dp/0062061038">joke</a> that it was “bad enough to drive Bullet into bankruptcy.”) </p>
<p>But when Jules Bihari and his brothers came through town promoting Modern Records at the station, they met King, who had been recommended to them by Ike Turner (King and Ike had done some gigs together). King signed with the Bihari brothers, who released his singles on RPM (a subsidiary of Modern), even recording some of these at Sun Studios with Sam Phillips. (Sun would later be home to Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and Roy Orbison.)</p>
<p>One record BB King often played while deejaying at WDIA was a single by Lowell Fulson, Three O'Clock Blues. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Blues-All-Around-Me-Autobiography/dp/0062061038">According to Fulson</a>, King played the record more than any other DJ in the country. Soon, King decided to take a stab at his own version of Fulson’s song.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nPeTtg3fTB8?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">BB King’s first was a cover of Lowell Fulson’s ‘Three O'Clock Blues.’</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>King’s version of Three O'Clock Blues went to number one in the national rhythm and blues charts in early 1952. Having a chart-topper meant that BB could hit the road, and he began a life of extensive touring that would continue for decades. Being on the road so much made it impossible for him to continue as a DJ, and his success as an artist effectively ended his career in radio. </p>
<p>But in looking back at the musician’s long and successful career, the impact of radio on BB King’s rise can’t be understated. </p>
<p>It opened a door for the young King, one that he was happy to walk through.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/41921/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>John Covach does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Before being crowned the “King of the Blues,” a young Riley King honed his on-stage persona and made crucial contacts as a radio DJ.John Covach, Director, Institute for Popular Music, University of RochesterLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/381502015-04-10T09:48:08Z2015-04-10T09:48:08ZWhen baseball almost banned broadcasts<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/77559/original/image-20150409-15219-1c5ggw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Fear of the unknown: would free radio broadcasts hurt gate receipts?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.shutterstock.com/cat.mhtml?country_code=US&page_number=1&position=15&safesearch=1&search_language=en&search_source=search_form&search_type=keyword_search&searchterm=baseball%20radio&sort_method=relevance2&source=search&timestamp=1428596935&tracking_id=6lA6mylfOtCtZ-4rNFnxtQ&use_local_boost=1&version=llv1&page=1&inline=130709714">glove and radio from www.shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In December 2011, when the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim and Texas Rangers signed away their local television rights for about $3 billion apiece, the sport media heralded a new record for local television rights fees. Accounting for <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/kurtbadenhausen/2015/04/06/opening-day-graphic-mlb-revenue-today-vs-2010/">roughly 43%</a> of MLB’s $8 billion haul in 2014, media revenues have made the players rich and the owners even richer. </p>
<p>Today, the idea that a team would <em>ban</em> its games from being broadcast is unthinkable, so ingrained are TV and radio contracts in the marketing and business practices of the sport. </p>
<p>But in 1921, when radios first began making their way into American homes, a number of baseball team owners weren’t quite sure what to make of the emerging technology. In fact, the owners were sharply divided over whether or not broadcasting games on the radio would benefit or deeply damage revenues. A 20-year battle among owners would ensue. </p>
<h2>East Coast opposition</h2>
<p>While radio’s popularity couldn’t be denied, half of baseball’s barons – mostly located along the East Coast – viewed radio as a fifth estate thief, robbing them of paying customers at the gate. And in this era, the gate was everything. </p>
<p>But other owners, led by Chicago Cubs owner William Wrigley and located primarily in the Midwest, saw radio as a promotional machine that would sell baseball to women and, more importantly, children – the next generation of paying fans. </p>
<p>Each group had sound reasons for its stance. Squeezed along the Atlantic coast, the eastern franchises drew most paying customers from dense, urban populations who used streetcars and subways to get to the ballparks. These teams worried that radio might keep some of those fans at home.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/77554/original/image-20150409-15219-gnv3m3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/77554/original/image-20150409-15219-gnv3m3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/77554/original/image-20150409-15219-gnv3m3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77554/original/image-20150409-15219-gnv3m3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77554/original/image-20150409-15219-gnv3m3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77554/original/image-20150409-15219-gnv3m3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77554/original/image-20150409-15219-gnv3m3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77554/original/image-20150409-15219-gnv3m3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Onlookers watch a game at the Polo Grounds, home of the New York Giants. Note the trains in the background.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/34/Merkles_Boner_game_Polo_Grounds_Sept23_1908.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Midwestern owners, generally located in smaller cities, depended more on out-of town weekend and holiday guests, who arrived by car and bus. In their minds, baseball broadcasts would reach across the region’s vast farm fields and into the living rooms of small town America, tempting tens of thousands to come to the city and see what they could only hear through the ether. </p>
<p>In the 1920s, teams that did broadcast games on the radio usually charged nothing for the rights, settling for free promotion of their on-field product. For Wrigley, who was accustomed to paying retail rates to advertise his chewing gum, the prospect of two hours of free advertising for his Chicago Cubs was generous enough compensation. But the anti-radio owners, led by the three New York clubs, the Yankees, Giants and Dodgers, wanted to deny Wrigley his two-hour Cubs commercial. </p>
<p>Although he jealously guarded his control over World Series radio rights, MLB Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis believed local radio rights were a league matter and left the decision to broadcast regular season games to the owners. At several NL and AL owners meetings in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the anti-radio forces proposed a league-wide ban on local broadcasts of regular season games. </p>
<p>Pro-radio clubs, led by Cubs’ President Bill Veeck, Sr, were adamant that the choice to broadcast belonged to his club. It was no more of concern to other clubs, he argued, than the decision whether or not to sell peanuts to the fans in the stands. </p>
<p>But to teams like the St Louis Cardinals, it was a concern: Because the Cubs’ radio waves reached the Cardinals’ fan base, they were convinced that the broadcasts negatively influenced their own attendance numbers. The decision of whether or not to broadcast games, they reasoned, was not the Cubs alone to make.</p>
<p>What finally won over the Cardinals – and enough of the owners to prevent the passage of a league-wide radio ban – was the classic “slippery slope” argument: If the League could dictate radio rights, what other team rights might be at stake? To them, team autonomy was paramount. </p>
<p>From there, the best the anti-radio forces could muster was a tie vote at the 1934 American League meeting; team control over its media rights was codified by the slimmest of margins. </p>
<p>The matter appeared settled: pro-radio teams would continue to exploit the medium and anti-radio barons would limit coverage to the home opener and a handful of other games. </p>
<h2>General Mills pounces</h2>
<p>But the makers of the “Breakfast of Champions” had other ideas. General Mills, producer of Wheaties, realized that broadcasts of the national pastime and other sports were direct avenues into the American home. Sports sold breakfast food to kids and their moms, so General Mills invested heavily in game broadcasts, becoming the leading sponsor of the sport by 1936. General Mills bought major league broadcasts where available and even tried to purchase league-wide contracts in 1936, presenting survey evidence that “baseball broadcasting, properly handled, definitely increases attendance at the parks.”</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/77546/original/image-20150409-15225-1nbju5v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/77546/original/image-20150409-15225-1nbju5v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=614&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77546/original/image-20150409-15225-1nbju5v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=614&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77546/original/image-20150409-15225-1nbju5v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=614&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77546/original/image-20150409-15225-1nbju5v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=772&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77546/original/image-20150409-15225-1nbju5v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=772&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77546/original/image-20150409-15225-1nbju5v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=772&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">General Mills was an early proponent of radio broadcasts.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/generalmills/7045084273/">GeneralMills/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>General Mills also sponsored training conferences to professionalize baseball, announcing and offered prizes to announcers who did the best job of increasing the home gate. </p>
<p>Radio didn’t even require an announcer to be at the ballpark. Games could be “re-created” out of any station using telegraph reports of the games (with a few sound effects peppered in to enhance the realism of the broadcast). In 1933, General Mills sponsored re-creations of Cubs and White Sox games by “Dutch” Reagan – future president Ronald Regan – over Iowa stations WOC and WHO. General Mills’ aggressive push alarmed NL President Ford Frick who worried that his senior circuit might become “a breakfast food league.” </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/77538/original/image-20150409-15228-x21o0i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/77538/original/image-20150409-15228-x21o0i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/77538/original/image-20150409-15228-x21o0i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=432&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77538/original/image-20150409-15228-x21o0i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=432&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77538/original/image-20150409-15228-x21o0i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=432&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77538/original/image-20150409-15228-x21o0i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=543&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77538/original/image-20150409-15228-x21o0i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=543&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77538/original/image-20150409-15228-x21o0i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=543&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">According to the Sporting News, the young Ronald Reagan had ‘a thorough knowledge of the game, a gift for narrative and a pleasant voice.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/Ronald_Reagan_as_Radio_Announcer_1934-37.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But mighty as it was, General Mills was initially frozen out of the nation’s biggest baseball market.</p>
<p>In 1932, the three New York clubs had agreed to ban local broadcasts for five years. The teams had little regular local coverage and even restricted broadcasts from visiting teams back to their home cities. Undaunted, General Mills began sponsoring re-creations of Boston and Philadelphia home games on New York’s WMCA, opening up the New York market without the consent of the Yankees, Giants or Dodgers. While not as popular as their local teams’ games might be, New York listeners finally were finally receiving a regular dose of MLB play. </p>
<p>Pressure on anti-radio teams to broadcast was growing in other markets. In Pittsburgh, stations were re-creating games without consent of the local team, using observers at the park, or monitoring other broadcasts. Owners now realized their property rights were at stake: if they didn’t meet the public’s demand for daily baseball broadcasts, others would. </p>
<p>The owners began to cooperate, sharing information on the value of their local broadcasts rights. In 1937, Leo Bondy of the New York Giants shocked NL owners by reporting that his team turned down $100,000 for the rights to broadcast home games.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/77552/original/image-20150409-15265-kdvzfu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/77552/original/image-20150409-15265-kdvzfu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/77552/original/image-20150409-15265-kdvzfu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=746&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77552/original/image-20150409-15265-kdvzfu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=746&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77552/original/image-20150409-15265-kdvzfu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=746&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77552/original/image-20150409-15265-kdvzfu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=937&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77552/original/image-20150409-15265-kdvzfu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=937&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77552/original/image-20150409-15265-kdvzfu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=937&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Red Barber would go on to become the wildly popular voice of the Brooklyn Dodgers.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8a/Red_Barber.jpg">Library of Congress</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Soon, owners realized that baseball on the radio was more than promotion: it could generate some serious cash. To protect their increasingly valuable rights, owners took on broadcast bootleggers in federal court. In 1938, the Pittsburgh Pirates successfully sued local station KQV, which had been pirating the team’s broadcasts. </p>
<p>The court’s decision solidified the ownership of broadcast rights of local teams, opening the door to billions in future media rights revenues. In 1939, after the New York teams’ five-year ban expired, the Dodgers brought famed broadcaster Red Barber from Cincinnati to Brooklyn. The city quickly embraced the talented Barber. The Yankees and Giants followed suit, also allowing home broadcasts in 1939. </p>
<p>The 20-year conflict over radio was over. The two were now joined in an increasingly profitable partnership – one that, with the advent of TV, would go on to reap billions.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>This article is based on material in “<a href="http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Crack-of-the-Bat,676325.aspx">Crack of the Bat: A History of Baseball on the Radio</a>.”</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/38150/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>James Walker does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>With owners deeply divided over radio, a 20-year tug-of-war would ensue.James Walker, Executive Director, International Association for Communication and Sport, Emeritus Professor of Communication, Saint Xavier UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/357492014-12-23T10:47:39Z2014-12-23T10:47:39ZEntertaining the masses: sports spectacles of today began in the 20s<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/67853/original/image-20141219-31560-8xzjv9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">This may be the fight that started all the hoopla </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Library of Congress/Prints & Photographs Division</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the 1920s American sports became big business, a billion dollar industry with “stars” created by the media and represented by professional agents and promoters. </p>
<p>One of the pioneers of this new industry was radio revolutionary David Sarnoff,a young executive at the newly created Radio Corporation of America, RCA. In the summer of 1921, Sarnoff had RCA, exclusively and for the first time, broadcast a live sporting event. Working with George “Tex” Rickard, the country’s top boxing promoter and President of New York’s Madison Square Garden, Sarnoff had a microphone placed at ringside for the heavyweight championship fight between famed slugger Jack Dempsey and French challenger Georges Carpentier. An estimated 400,000 listeners heard the blow-by-blow account of Dempsey’s victory by knockout over the handsome French <a href="http://books.simonandschuster.com/Supreme-City/Donald-L-Miller/9781416550198">war hero</a>. Sarnoff predicted that modern radio sets, affordable to most consumers, had the potential to transform society, and they did. </p>
<p>Professional boxing in New York State had been dead and Rickard and Dempsey revived it, turning it into a multimillion-dollar business centered in Rickard’s Madison Square Garden offices. They made heavyweight championship fights, battles once held before raucous, all-male crowds in Western mining towns, into urban spectacles staged in big metropolitan arenas, with ringside seats reserved for the rich and the notable, male and female. “The one could scarcely survive without the other,” New York Times reporter James Dawson wrote of the partnership that gave boxing “a tone and affluence <a href="http://books.simonandschuster.com/Supreme-City/Donald-L-Miller/9781416550198">hitherto unknown</a>.” </p>
<h2>Record crowds</h2>
<p>Tex Rickard’s new Madison Square Garden, on Eighth Avenue, became Dempsey’s home base but the menacing fighter outgrew the arena as radio and newspaper sports sections turned athletes into international celebrities with enormous followings. Rickard staged Dempsey’s biggest fights – against Gene Tunney, Jack Sharkey and Argentinian Luis Firpo, the “Wild Bull of the Pampas” – in immense, open-air stadiums in New York, Philadelphia and Chicago, some of which seated over 100,000 spectators. Five of Dempsey’s fights in the 1920s were million dollar gates; there was not another one until the Ali-Frazier era in the early seventies. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/67854/original/image-20141219-31548-123dsin.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/67854/original/image-20141219-31548-123dsin.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=842&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/67854/original/image-20141219-31548-123dsin.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=842&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/67854/original/image-20141219-31548-123dsin.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=842&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/67854/original/image-20141219-31548-123dsin.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1058&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/67854/original/image-20141219-31548-123dsin.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1058&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/67854/original/image-20141219-31548-123dsin.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1058&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jack Dempsey.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">US Library of Congress/Prints and Photograph Division</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Dempsey’s controversial “long count” fight against Tunney at Chicago’s Soldier Field in 1927 drew the largest fight crowd of all time. And fifty million Americans, along with boxing fans in fifty-seven other countries, listened to it on Sarnoff’s National Broadcasting Company, NBC, the world’s first national radio network. </p>
<p>Time magazine claimed that prize fighting drew a large audience because by “watching it, civilized people are vicariously purged of their <a href="http://books.simonandschuster.com/Supreme-City/Donald-L-Miller/9781416550198">primitive inclination</a>.”</p>
<p>People were drawn to Babe Ruth for the same vicarious fulfillment. In 1919, the Boston Red Sox sold Ruth’s contract to the Yankees. Fans came to see the Bambino swing for the seats, but his bad boy ways – drinking prodigiously and ignoring nighttime curfews imposed by Yankee management – made him even more popular. White-collar workers fearful of flouting authority and telling off their bosses could take secret pleasure in Ruth’s insubordination.</p>
<h2>Sports reporting takes hold</h2>
<p>The New York Daily News, America’s first tabloid newspaper, exploited this upsurge of interest in mass spectator sports. Beginning in the early 1920s a rising standard of living and a shortened workweek freed up Saturday afternoon and Sundays for leisure pursuits. The sports section of American newspapers grew phenomenally. </p>
<p>By 1927, New York’s major newspapers were devoting between 40 and 60 percent of their local coverage to sports, with the Sunday sports section often running as long as <a href="http://books.simonandschuster.com/Supreme-City/Donald-L-Miller/9781416550198">twelve pages</a>. The reporters who made New York the sports writing capital of the world were the elite of their papers and became the best-paid reporters on the New York dailies. Legendary sports writer Grantland Rice pulled in over $100,000 a year, in 1920s money, more than the Yankees paid Babe Ruth and more than President Coolidge’s <a href="http://books.simonandschuster.com/Supreme-City/Donald-L-Miller/9781416550198">yearly salary</a>.</p>
<p>Paul Gallico of The New York Daily News pioneered what became known as “participatory journalism,” stepping into the ring with Jack Dempsey at the champion’s training camp. Less than an hour after being knocked out by Dempsey, Gallico was writing his piece for the paper. Writers like Gallico and Damon Runyon built up drama for every heavyweight championship fight, every World Series, every major college football game, and turned athletes like Ruth, Dempsey, and golfer Bobby Jones into “Golden People” – Jazz Age sports legends. These sports heroes sold newspapers, just as newspapers sold them. </p>
<h2>The sports personality comes into focus</h2>
<p>The New York Daily News publisher Joseph Patterson developed a new approach to baseball coverage. He instructed sports editor Marshall Hunt to cover Babe Ruth twelve months a year, chronicling his off-season barnstorming tours, his vaudeville gigs, his workouts, his trips to hospitals to visit sick children, and his stormy marital life. And though Hunt never reported on it, he also followed Ruth into gambling dens and whorehouses. Ruth’s sexual exploits with women were kept out of the news by Hunt and other obliging reporters. Regardless, he was the most storied and publicized baseball player in history, and one of the most photographed figures of the decade. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/67855/original/image-20141219-31542-14hx5e5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/67855/original/image-20141219-31542-14hx5e5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=977&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/67855/original/image-20141219-31542-14hx5e5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=977&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/67855/original/image-20141219-31542-14hx5e5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=977&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/67855/original/image-20141219-31542-14hx5e5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1228&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/67855/original/image-20141219-31542-14hx5e5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1228&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/67855/original/image-20141219-31542-14hx5e5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1228&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Babe Ruth.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">US Library of Congress/Prints and Photograph Division</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>People flocked to the Polo Grounds, which the Yankees
rented from the New York Giants, to watch Babe shatter every existing home run record. The Yankees broke all major league attendance records, drawing more than a million fans at home—- over double what the Giants brought in. A bigger ballpark was needed, so the team’s flamboyant owner, Jacob Ruppert, built Yankee Stadium in an amazing 284 days on the site of an old lumberyard in the Bronx. </p>
<h2>Yankees take off</h2>
<p>On opening day, April 18, 1923, Ruth baptized the new park with a three-run shot into the short right field “porch,” to the delight of a standing-room crowd of 62,000. Soon the stadium was dubbed “the <a href="http://books.simonandschuster.com/Supreme-City/Donald-L-Miller/9781416550198">house that Ruth built</a>. </p>
<p>With Ruth’s emergence, a new type of fan began to come to the ballpark -— "the fan” as one sports reporters wrote, “who didn’t know where first base was but had heard of Ruth and wanted to see him <a href="http://books.simonandschuster.com/Supreme-City/Donald-L-Miller/9781416550198">hit a home run.”</a> And people learned all about him from stories written by his own syndicate of ghostwriters. </p>
<p>In 1921, the year Ruth hit 59 home runs, he hired America’s first ever sports agent, Christy Walsh. A self-described “happy hustler,” Walsh arrived in New York with the idea of forming a syndicate of sports reporters to ghostwrite stories for famous athletes. Walsh could not believe that Ruth was “on the loose,” unsigned by any big syndicate. In Ruth’s first year with Walsh his newspaper earnings jumped from $500 to $15,000. Walsh estimated that his syndicate’s total output for sixteen seasons would have covered over <a href="http://books.simonandschuster.com/Supreme-City/Donald-L-Miller/9781416550198">5,600 solid newspaper pages</a>. In the winter of 1925 Babe entrusted his finances and all his business dealings to Walsh. </p>
<p>Christy Walsh was to Babe Ruth as Tex Rickard was to Jack Dempsey. Rickard’s master idea, the idea that made him the greatest boxing promoter of all time, was that each fight must be a story, a drama heightened by a blaze of publicity. “We got to dramatize this one for the newspaper boys,” he told Dempsey at one pre-fight meeting, “go easy on the other guy.”</p>
<p>Not many sports fanatics know that in the 1920s, the “Golden Age of Sports,” promoters, athletes, radio revolutionaries, and newspaper reporters combined their energies, talents, and gift for dramatization to create modern mass spectator sports, a new and permanent thing on the American scene.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/35749/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Donald L. Miller does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In the 1920s American sports became big business, a billion dollar industry with “stars” created by the media and represented by professional agents and promoters. One of the pioneers of this new industry…Donald L. Miller, Professor of HIstory, Lafayette College Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/342942014-12-22T19:19:08Z2014-12-22T19:19:08ZCarols by Candlelight defines the Aussie Christmas on the couch<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/65752/original/image-20141128-9776-1yr5m4g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Carols by Candlelight is a fixture of the Australian festive season.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP Image/Alan Porritt</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The strange northern hemisphere tradition of the television “Christmas Special” is somewhat alien to us on this end of the world. No Mr Bean with a turkey on his head or fantastically awkward Christmas Office special double episode for us. Maybe it’s because it’s too hot to be inside watching telly.</p>
<p>One of our most significant broadcast traditions, Carols by Candlelight and associated events, has developed across media and with interesting commercial crossovers. Collective Christmas carol singing is of course not unique to Australia, but the broadcasting of the tradition is something that marks our festive season.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/YiL-iOfuZmI?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">There’s no equivalent on Australian TV to the Mr Bean Christmas special.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>First it was carols by Bakelite</h2>
<p>Carols by Candlelight as a broadcast event predates television, starting as a radio broadcast tradition out of Melbourne in the late 1930s. </p>
<p>As media historian <a href="https://www.mq.edu.au/about_us/faculties_and_departments/faculty_of_arts/department_of_media_music_communication_and_cultural_studies/staff/academic_staff/professor_bridget_griffen-foley/">Bridget Griffen-Foley</a> explains, the idea for the event came from a 1938 Summer evening walk along St Kilda Road in Melbourne, as star 3KZ announcer Norman Banks became <a href="http://books.google.com.au/books?id=WqJAoXpsp5YC&pg=PA138&lpg=PA138&dq=carols+by+candlelight+griffen+foley&source=bl&ots=EgTZFJuhiG&sig=pga2ocCdraXNmo1sfyrfgqNrMUQ&hl=en&sa=X&ei=e3ZyVPe4KsLbmAWG5oCoCg&ved=0CDgQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=carols%20by%20candlelight%20griffen%20foley&f=false">inspired</a> by the vision of “an open window [with] an old lady listening by candlelight to her radio playing Away in a Manger”. </p>
<p>Banks used the broadcast event as a way to draw otherwise isolated community members together for the festive season, as well as to raise funds for hospitals and other charities. Griffen-Foley confirms the importance of the institution as it grew, but also notes that “during the war other radio stations decided to exploit the goodwill bonanza represented by the carols”. </p>
<p>Carols by Candlelight on television has continued that community-meets-charity-meets-commercial opportunity ethos of wartime Melbourne radio. The two major metropolitan commercial broadcasters, Channel 9 and 7, feature events from Melbourne and Sydney respectively each year. </p>
<p>Both currently support major charities while also featuring major corporate sponsors – and sometimes less than subtle promos for the stations themselves. </p>
<h2>Channel 9’s Carols from the Sidney Myer Music Bowl</h2>
<p>The <a href="http://carols.visionaustralia.org/">Melbourne event</a> screened on Channel 9 has been on air since 1969, and over its history has hosted a huge number of artists and performance types. The current event ties itself to Banks’ original radio broadcast expressly as part the “history of carols” section of its website. </p>
<p>And the development of carols from a community event to a concert event is tracked here too, as the organisers <a href="http://carols.visionaustralia.org/the-main-event/history-of-carols">recall</a> the 1942 event where “Gladys Moncrieff, Australia’s ‘Queen of Song’ became the first celebrity singer to perform on the night”. That same year a new broadcast technology was being showcased with a “state-of-the-art radio hook-up” from London and New York. </p>
<p>The spreading of festive cheer, and the promotion of new broadcast and commercial opportunities has continued over time. As this 1980s channel advertisement shows, the event has continued to be used by the broadcaster as an evolving cross promotion opportunity. While the words and melody of Silent Night might be the same at any number of events spread across the season, only on Channel 9’s broadcast could it be experienced in “Stereovision”:</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/uonMoh20qps?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">An 80s era advertisement for Melbourne’s Carols by Candlelight.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Channel 7’s Carols in the Domain</h2>
<p>Not to be outdone by another city or another network, Channel 7’s <a href="http://www.carolsinthedomain.com">Carols in the Domain </a>has been on air since the early 1980s. Staged in Sydney’s Domain the weekend before Christmas, it gets one up on the competition in terms of timing – and also avoids going head to head with its southern rival. </p>
<p>While the live audience for Carols in the Domain is likely only made up of Sydneysiders and tourists already in town, the promotion for the event attempts to engage a wider community. Currently sponsored by Woolworths, this year is described on its website as “Australia’s largest free Christmas concert”. The aim is encourage those at home to consider themselves part of a festive, but also national, sense of community.</p>
<p>The crossover between community, commercial entity and concert event is part of strange appeal of televised Carols events. This 1999 clip of Lisa McCune, during her stint as a Blue Heelers star, for Channel 7 also gave her a chance to plug the stage version of The Sound of Music she was appearing in at the time. What does that show have to do with Christmas? Nothing. But the advertising of its run in Sydney didn’t hurt.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dcLiydOwi0E?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Lisa McCune’s star turn in Carols by Candlelight.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Last year the Grease segment also took a good few minutes before it acknowledged Christmas at all, save for the odd inclusion of the words “elves” and “Santa” in the chorus. A commercial scrooge might just say this was an excuse to show off the stage play and some classic tunes, with the carols an opportunity to reach a rather large audience. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8TegIqG3aPQ?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The stars of Grease the Musical didn’t make much effort to give their act a festive twist.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The importance of collective viewing and engagement</h2>
<p>At a time when audiences can watch anytime, anywhere, broadcast events like Carols by Candlelight are increasingly rare opportunities for the industry. Timed to match the season, these events work the same way as big sports matches do – viewers will change their plans in order to watch as it goes to air. </p>
<p>The Carols certainly do well for their broadcasters in terms of ratings, with these events making appearances in Screen Australia’s <a href="http://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/research/statistics/archwftvtopprog.aspx">collected Top 20 programs</a> shown on Australian television over recent years. </p>
<p>The development of community via such broadcasts, particularly ones that do involve the promotion of charitable giving, is complex. These events are cheesy but well meaning – like most mainstream festive events. </p>
<p>An unexpected upside for scrooges who perhaps feel drawn in despite themselves is the cringeworthy moments these events can provide. Take, for example, this 2006 clip of Hugh Jackman at the Sydney event – complete with awkward introductions. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/a8XKEvClA-k?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Hugh Jackman’s festive treats.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Perhaps this was the training that prepared him for other big television events such as the Oscars. A slightly better dressed cast, bigger budget and audience, but still guilty pleasure viewing.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/34294/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Liz Giuffre does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The strange northern hemisphere tradition of the television “Christmas Special” is somewhat alien to us on this end of the world. No Mr Bean with a turkey on his head or fantastically awkward Christmas…Liz Giuffre, Lecturer of Media, Music and Cultural Studies, Macquarie UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.