Reinventing radio, 1945–60

Postwar rebuilding

Building on its wartime experience, radio expanded exponentially after 1945, with many countries adding new languages and services and a number of fairly small nations playing a prominent role on the air. Indicative of the changing world scene, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) international service added Russian language programs late in 1946.

For many countries, the years after World War II were focused on rebuilding or replacing prewar radio stations and network links. In 1945–50 Allied occupation authorities in Germany and Japan required dramatic changes in both programs and management, chiefly in order to diminish centralized control and excessively nationalistic content. The number of radio transmitters in Japan grew from 195 in 1953 (after the occupation ended) to 400 a decade later, in part because of the introduction of a parallel system of privately owned stations.

After Germany’s defeat, the occupying powers immediately decentralized radio to the länder (states) and encouraged regional, cultural, and news content. These stations were supervised in part by elected advisory councils of local citizens. The Soviet zone, which became the German Democratic Republic (or East Germany), operated a centralized state-controlled radio service (paralleling that of Moscow) until 1989. The British and American zones largely copied the BBC’s public-service example. Germans took over management of the various länder-based West German radio services in the late 1940s.

Reconstruction in other European countries included both AM and long-wave services. Given the total destruction of their broadcasting systems, Poland, Greece, and much of the Soviet Union virtually had to start over. The number of transmitters in Europe increased from 566 in 1950 to more than five times that number by 1962, those in Russia alone increasing fourfold (to more than 400) in the same period. Radio Luxembourg resumed its highly successful commercial service heard throughout Europe and Britain, again attracting large audiences. While most stations operated with funds from listener license fees, advertising time was sold on some stations in Austria, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain.

In the postwar period, Australia continued its dual system of government and private stations, while New Zealand relied upon government stations alone—although one network was supported by advertising. The first radio services also began to appear on many of the populated islands in the Pacific.

From the first wave of decolonization in the late 1950s, the potential of radio to assist in economic development was slowly recognized, if not so widely implemented. In most developing countries, radio stations were found clustered in major cities, with little or no service available in rural regions. Many externally funded experiments that applied radio to some aspect of the developmental process ended when the money ran out. UNESCO and the World Bank were the chief supporters of such experiments, as radio was seen as the most useful mass medium in places where literacy levels were low and television or newer media were prohibitively expensive to install and maintain.

Growth of the BBC

BBC radio inaugurated the Third Programme in September 1946 to provide erudite talk and high-quality music programming “for the serious minded, for the educated and those who wish to be so.” In many ways, this was the peak of traditional public service, very much in the prewar John Reith tradition. The Third Programme, though it appealed to less than 10 percent of the British audience, was widely emulated in Europe and on the slowly growing number of American educational radio stations. Soon there were three separate BBC program services: Home, Light, and Third. Each of the three provided different content for different audiences, the stated intent being to elevate listener taste slowly to “more worthwhile” content. The Home Service continued as the main BBC service and was always the best balanced of the three. It included substantial time devoted to both serious and lighter music, educational and children’s broadcasts, most of the BBC’s talk and discussion programs, and 60 percent of its news. It generally served up to a third of the British radio audience at any one time. The Light Programme first aired in July 1945 in an attempt to hold listeners who were increasingly returning to a revitalized and entertainment-oriented Radio Luxembourg. Reaching 70 percent of BBC listeners, it focused more on popular (light and dance) music, drama, and outside (remote) broadcasts. The Third Programme devoted more than half its airtime to “serious” music, drama, talk, and culturally oriented discussion. The BBC described its newest service as being designated for the educated rather than to be educational. Individual program offerings on the three services changed little from year to year.

Twice in this period, beginning in 1949 and again in 1960, the BBC was the focus of parliamentary inquiries, which after extensive research recommended continuing the BBC’s structure and its ban on advertising. The inquiries also resulted in many suggestions, some attempting further to popularize the radio service. Between the BBC’s separate radio and television services, tension was palpable as they competed for funds and personnel. Other European public-service broadcasters faced similar tensions because of the voracious appetite of television for both money and programs.

Economic and political concerns

European and American radio services faced both political and financial crises through the 1950s and ’60s. The BBC external service had a difficult time with its own government when it included negative press comment on the British role in the 1956 Suez Crisis. Later that same year Radio Free Europe (RFE) was roundly attacked for appearing to have encouraged the bloody and failed Hungarian uprising against the Soviet Union. (A dozen years later radio services would again be criticized, this time for encouraging the brief, largely bloodless Prague Spring resistance to Soviet control.) British and American international radio services consistently suffered from a lack of sufficient domestic political support (and, in the United States, from occasional communist witch hunts), often being the subject of fierce infighting about funding priorities. From the 1950s through the 1980s, the Russians and their satellite nations spent huge sums on electronically “jamming” incoming Western broadcast signals.

The United States continued officially to sponsor the Voice of America (VOA), operating first from studios in New York and then moving to Washington, D.C., in the early 1950s, with transmitters in many different countries. It also secretly supported two other postwar radio services with narrower audience aims. The supposedly private RFE, which broadcast to Eastern Europe beginning in 1950, and Radio Liberty (RL), which broadcast into the Soviet Union beginning in 1953, were actually secretly funded by the Central Intelligence Agency until the early 1970s and more openly from then on. Transmitters were built in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. American efforts were expanded with Radio Martí (for broadcasts into Cuba) in the late 1970s and Radio Free Asia (for transmission into mainland China) in the 1990s. Content was sometimes quite benign: for nearly 40 years the most popular VOA program was Willis Conover’s program of American jazz music, which achieved a worldwide audience of 100 million, though it was totally unknown in the United States, where VOA was forbidden to operate.