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Hey, you're listening to the On The Media Midweek Podcast. I'm Michael Loewinger. This week, we are so excited to be launching Season 2 of The Divided Dial, our award-winning series reported and hosted by Katie Thornton. Season 1, as you may remember, was all about the rightward shift of the AM and FM talk radio spectrum. This season, Katie dives headfirst into the lesser-known world of short waves.
I'll let Katie take it from here. Z with trans-oceanics. This is such a cool radio with the little... Last summer, I met up with a journalist and radio fan named David Gorin. These are like beautiful radios for a few people. I went to his house in Brooklyn, New York, so that we could listen to the radio together. Yeah.
Not any old radio, not AM or FM, nothing you can pick up in your car. But shortwave radio, the little-known cousin of AM and FM, with fuzzy stations that can reach insanely far distances. David's been listening to shortwave since he was a kid in the 70s, when his uncle gave him a radio. And I turn it on, and it's like the radio leapt out of my hand with the North American service of Radio Moscow.
Suddenly, the world was all within reach, available to him right there in this box. In the seventh grade, I became the expert on the next five-year plan in the Soviet Union, the economic plan. Today, he's part of the Library of Congress' Radio Preservation Task Force. And together, on a sweaty Thursday afternoon last July...
We sat down to hear what we could find on the shortwave dial today. Just like when David was a kid, we heard lots of government-run stations, like Radio Marti. The U.S. broadcasting news and information to Cuba. China Radio International, broadcasting in Spanish.
Is there anything else strong? The voice of Italy, broadcasting Italian. On other days, David has picked up English language shows from North Korea. They have very strident, you know, military stuff. And news from Cuba. This is Radio Rebelde, Radio Rebel, and it goes back to the revolution. On the short waves, the global tussle for influence plays out 24-7.
But we didn't just hear news and propaganda. There were beeps and bloops. Coded messages sent between amateur radio operators or between government officials who used the short waves to send military data or secret instructions. And some of what we heard just sounded like normal radio, with lots of music...
And preaching... Strong the Lord in the power of his might against the wiles of the devil. It was hidden just to hide the meaning and the power of the divine name. It is inherent in the name of Yah. That's an end times ministry that also preaches that the earth is flat. Which is very interesting because surely radio wouldn't propagate in a flat earth, you know. But details, details.
In just about an hour of surfing the short waves, we heard prayer and propaganda, news and conspiracy theories, so many languages, and some really decent jams from all over the globe. I felt like I had been welcomed into a club that was somehow secret and yet right there for anyone to join.
And I know it's cliche, but there was something magical about tuning into the world, training my ear to listen through the crackle, hearing the distance. As it turns out, this practice of scanning the dial, finding out what you can hear and from how far away, is a century-old art.
It was popular among radio's early adopters. These early distance fiends, as they were known, uncovered something very strange about how radio waves traveled through space. And what broadcasters did with that information completely altered the trajectory of the 20th century. ♪♪
This is Season 2 of The Divided Dial. I'm your host, Katie Thornton. I've worked in radio since I was a teenager, sometimes behind the scenes, sometimes behind the mic. In Season 1, I investigated how right-wing talk took over AM and FM radio. But in all my years of radio research, I'd never really learned about shortwave radio before. ♪
And listen, I'm not going to tell you that shortwave radio is as influential today as the AM and FM talk radio we covered in season one. It's not. But I, and I think you, love the medium of radio. So this season, we're diving into the often failed promise of a medium that was once ubiquitous, connecting people around the world long before the internet ever did.
But like the internet, shortwave also took a turn for the chaotic. Over the next four episodes, I'm going to explain how shortwave radio became a propaganda tool for governments at war.
And then a propaganda tool for American right-wing extremists and cults. And we'll explore what a little-known battle playing out on the short waves right now between radio fanatics and Wall Street can tell us about what happens when we cede control of our public airwaves. That's all coming up on this season of The Divided Dial. But let's get back to the story.
Radio broadcasting, as in from one to many, it didn't start on shortwave. It started on AM, taking off around 1920. And AM was inherently local. Van Alarston and Mrs. Lester Alarston.
Signals reached up to 50, maybe 75 miles. But at night, those listening at home noticed something strange.
As the sun set, more stations emerged from the static. And they weren't coming from down the street or the next town over. Sometimes listeners in New York... Edison Studios, WAM, located at 1 Bond... ...would hear stations from Chicago. WCFL in Chicago.
A listener in Kansas might hear an opera or a boxing match from the East Coast. After dark, it was like the world cracked open and distance stations faded in and out on ghostly, mysterious winds. Most people had never heard a faraway voice, period.
Long-distance telephone calls were the costly domain of dignitaries and government officials. And even those were fed across long, scratchy copper lines. A disembodied voice, without a wire, without a fee, from hundreds of miles away? That awed and baffled people. Even scientists, some of whom believed that radio, perhaps, could be used to communicate with the dead. ♪♪
But, of course, there was an explanation for these voices in the night. Let us follow through the steps and the processes in transmitting or sending radio messages. Here's what was happening. The way AM normally works is that radio waves get shot from the top of a tall tower, which is often on top of a tall hill. The radio messages leave the antenna as electromagnetic wave and travel with the speed of light.
The waves travel over the ground, basically line of sight, from the tower to you. It's called a ground wave, and it's the thing that fades out a few dozen miles from the tower. But when you shoot out an AM signal, there's another thing that happens, almost a byproduct. Radio waves are set out in all directions. It's called a sky wave, and the sky wave goes up into the atmosphere.
Susan Douglas is a professor of communication and media at the University of Michigan. She says that these lower layers of the atmosphere are made up of ions that get all charged up by the sun. And in the daylight, those layers are where radio waves go to die.
But at night, when the sun sets, these layers disappear, and the ones above them, they combine to form a dense layer, and it acts like a mirror to sky waves.
At night, these sky waves, the sort of byproduct of AM transmission, they keep going until they bounce off this other layer of the ionosphere. And they come back down to Earth vast distances away. When these waves strike the antenna of a receiving set, this entire process is reversed. We hear sound originating at that very moment, or even thousands of miles away.
That's what these late-night AM radio listeners were hearing. A radio wave that had ricocheted off the ionosphere to get to them. And it rocked their world. Long-distance channel surfing became a fad called fishing in the night, with listeners casting out into the ether and seeing what they could catch. They had a map on the wall with map tacks that
And every time they reeled in a station, they would put a map tack on where that broadcast emanated from. Was it Kansas City? Was it Washington, D.C.? Wherever. Radio manufacturers ran ads with slogans like, concerts from 14 cities in one evening. In newspaper editorials, distressed housewives and sometimes husbands lamented that their significant other was spending every evening out in their radio shack.
But while AM broadcast listeners burned the midnight oil to marvel at all the faraway stations, there was one group of people who weren't so surprised by radio's ability to go long. They were the amateur radio operators, what you might know as ham radio. Basically, guys who weren't broadcasting but were tinkering with radio equipment just to chat one-to-one, like long-distance walkie-talkies.
Back in the days before broadcasting, almost all radio transmission was one-to-one. The radio waves were mostly used by ship captains or the military and the hams, who were just having fun.
But in World War I, the U.S. government got worried about interference on those AM airwaves. So they eventually assigned specific frequencies for ships, for the military, and for those meddling amateurs. They were kicked down to the waves that were thought utterly worthless, short waves. Back then, people thought the short waves with short wavelengths, picture a really tight squiggly line, just wouldn't go very far.
Even Guglielmo Marconi, the father of radio, thought that longer wavelengths would mean longer distances. But the amateurs weren't put off. They began experimenting with them. And as it turned out, the short waves weren't the short end of the stick. They were getting really far. They were getting stations in Australia and New Zealand or stations in England and France. For the most part, reception was clearer at night, but it didn't have to be dark to go the distance.
Amateurs reported spanning distances as great as 10,000 miles, which was unthinkable. Australia and New Zealand were described in the fall of 1923 as a bedlam of Yankee signals. The amateurs proved something huge. Shortwave could do round-the-clock what AM could only do at night. It could use the ionosphere as a springboard.
And this changed the game for AM broadcasters who wanted their station to reach more people. In 1923, Pittsburgh's KDKA, the country's first commercial radio station, they got their station on shortwave and reached as far as South Africa. New shortwave stations started up in Switzerland and Japan and Venezuela.
And with the scars of World War I still fresh, this burgeoning international medium was a source of hope. There was a lot of utopian discourse around radio that, you know, having allowed people to communicate across all these borders, you know, would there be no more wars? Michelle Helms is a retired professor of media studies who has written a lot about radio.
It would solve all kinds of problems. Just a huge enthusiasm over the possibilities of shortwave as a medium.
Entire magazines were devoted to helping people discover new shows on international radio. Listeners would write to far-flung stations, and the stations would reply with these beautifully decorated cards branded with the station name, and maybe some imagery that evoked the national culture of wherever they were broadcasting from. They're called QSL cards. It's international code for I Confirm Receipt of Your Transmission.
Shortwave listeners around the world amassed collections of these ornate cards, tangible evidence of their part in an ethereal global community. By the late 1930s, almost all home radio sets had AM and shortwave settings.
But the peacenik aspirations for shortwave didn't last. It was the first time that human beings had had it in their power to be heard around the world. And a lot of governments figured out that this could be a really powerful tool for the common good, but also, of course, for the waging of wars.
Lots of the world's governments had taken to the short waves by the 1930s, but no nation used them quite like Germany. This is Germany calling. We are going to present tonight a regal play entitled Visions of Invasion. Zeeson, Germany's state-run shortwave service, had spent years building a large following in America and around the world, playing things like orchestral music.
But in time, they started pushing out Nazi propaganda, tailored for specific countries in 12 different languages. And with its own festering Nazi movement, the U.S. was a key target. You had people like Axis Sally. This is Berlin calling. And I'd just like to say that when Berlin calls, it pays to listen.
She was an American living in Berlin. She became the first American woman to be convicted of treason after the war that she was broadcasting into the United States on shortwave. Women of America, waiting for the one you love. Thinking of the husband who has been sacrificed by Franklin D. Roosevelt.
You might have heard of a person called Lord Ha Ha. The great exodus from Britain is well underway. He was a British man named William Joyce who was working in Germany broadcasting on their shortwave service. The rich and affluent are removing themselves from their valuables.
as fast as they can. There was also a big band called Charlie and His Orchestra, run by the German Ministry of Propaganda. They'd take popular big band and swing songs and add or change lyrics to berate Roosevelt or denigrate Jewish people. All the Jewish family has a brand new air. He's their joy, heaven's end. And they proudly present Mr. Franklin D. Roosevelt Jones. Yes, sir.
They were trying to persuade Americans that the Germans had the right side in the war and that it was crazy for them to fight. Non-intervention, how he shows it.
His decision to send troops along. The U.S. government had banned all editorializing on domestic radio stations during the war, making it illegal for Americans to promote the Nazi cause on the AM airwaves. But the feds didn't have any control over shortwave broadcasts beaming in from Germany. So the content was still there for the many Americans who wanted to listen.
Journalists at CBS and NBC launched counteroffensives. The networks had what were called shortwave listening posts in New York. Susan Douglas again. And they had people who were fluent in foreign languages monitoring international shortwave broadcasts. And then they turned their findings into entertainment.
like the hit CBS radio series hosted by a popular detective novelist named Rex Stout. It was called Our Secret Weapon. The truth is a weapon that isn't secret in our country, but it's a big secret to the people who live in Germany, Japan, and Italy.
Our enemies don't have this weapon. They don't dare let their people know the truth. Every week, radio sleuth Stout debunked enemy shortwave propaganda. First a broadcast of the official German news agency on August 2nd. The meeting between Churchill and Stalin was very excited and hysterical. On August 8th, being that England. This morning, Churchill shook hands with Stalin at the Kremlin. As we now know, Churchill actually arrived in Moscow on August 12th.
You can't beat that for a scoop. The rest of the Allies were also busy fighting Germany's shortwave radio propaganda. It was during World War II that the BBC ramped up what would come to be known as the World Service on shortwave. This is London calling in the overseas service of the British Broadcasting Corporation. They broadcast news to the world with just a bit of pro-Ally spin. The Danes have already had a taste of what German protection means.
A better word for it would be plunder, for the Germans are seizing goods and property at will. And in early 1942, the U.S. followed suit. The federal government debuted its shortwave radio service, The Voice of America, with an in-language broadcast to Germany. This is a voice speaking from America. Our voices are coming to you from New York, across the Atlantic Ocean to London.
The Voice of America started as a government-run radio show, and they partnered with networks like NBC and CBS to get it out worldwide. NBC and CBS were already broadcasting overseas via shortwave. ♪
But shortwave quickly proved so central to the war effort that the U.S. government did something unprecedented. They nationalized all the roughly one dozen shortwave stations broadcasting from U.S. soil, filling the international airwaves with approved broadcasts. Daily at this time, we shall speak to you about America and the war.
The news may be good or bad. We shall tell you the truth. And for the most part, they did that, if a bit selectively. Michelle Hilmes. They were walking a fine line between willful propaganda and sort of putting a good spin on things. As the U.S. sent more troops into battle, it used shortwave to boost morale. They began to transmit entertainment programming via shortwave to
Susan Douglas again. And this was so important during holidays like Christmas and New Year's when there you are freezing and alone and scared. They had programs that would allow troops to speak to people back at home, you know, oh, here's mailbag and we have letters from soldiers and they would read them aloud. Dear mother, tonight I'm very lonely. I've never written that before and maybe it's a shock to you.
And then again, maybe you've read between the lines and have known it all along. There was a very popular program called G.I. Jive with Jill. Here's Jill and the G.I. Jive. Hi, you fellas. This is G.I. Jill with G.I. Jive. You know, the World Series. The 1942 World Series broadcast. You've got to have the World Series. The Yankees are out in front five to nothing.
The Voice of America was very highly respected, and many people think that it, you know, did a great deal to help us win the war. By the end of the Second World War, the Voice of America blanketed much of the world. It ran in about 40 languages. But they were about to get lots of company on the airwaves. Because in the Cold War, the short waves exploded. That's coming up after the break. This is the Divided Dial from On the Media. ♪
This is On the Media. I'm Katie Thornton, host of OTM's Divided Dial series. We're right in the middle of episode one of our second season. Before the break, we heard about how groups like the VOA dominated the short waves at the end of World War II.
But during the Cold War, shortwave would become so much more. Radio UK. This is Tehran Radio Iran. The Australian Forces Radio. You are tuned to the North American service of Radio Moscow. The VOA, the BBC, the Soviet Union, China, Egypt, Iran, Argentina, and so many others were on shortwave, broadcasting their national identity to the world in stories and song.
They were joined by newly decolonized nations like Libya and Ghana, whose leaders saw the short waves as a way to promote their independence and to fuel an international anti-colonial movement. But the global superpowers, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, were two of the most dominant voices on shortwave. And shortwave became one of the most ferocious battlegrounds of the Cold War. At bat for the Soviet Union was Radio Moscow.
Founded in 1929, the USSR's government-run network broadcast in over 70 languages. With news, propaganda, and human interest stories, it offered a Soviet alternative to the BBC and the VOA. America hit a new high in crime, and according to FBI reports to the president, nearly half of the criminals were young people.
The causes of this menacing situation are well known. The pornographic pictures distributed among adolescents and the exhibitions of abstract paintings and statues that say nothing to either the heart or the mind. The BBC and the VOA were expanding too, sending more and more coverage over the Iron Curtain. But the United States government wanted to reach people in Eastern Europe with messages that weren't so obviously propaganda as the literal Voice of America.
So they lied. Radio Free Europe gets through with the truth every day. Debuting in 1950, Radio Free Europe was a flame-throwing anti-communist shortwave network. Into the closed communist countries of Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania go the facts. The people are not allowed to hear the truth.
The truth that helps them hold on to the will and the drive... It was portrayed as grassroots, run by emigres and exiles, and it did employ those folks. But secretly, it was funded by the CIA, which was busy meddling in global politics and supporting pro-capitalist coups during these Cold War years. The voice of free Czechoslovakia is calling. Radio Free Europe. The voice of free Czechoslovakia is calling.
Staff at Radio Free Europe launched weather balloons into the Eastern Bloc and airdropped over 300 million leaflets, instructing listeners on how to tune in. The Soviet Union did not like any of this. They spent tons of money trying to drown out Western broadcasts. They'd flood the short waves with ear-splitting noises that listeners recalled sounding like a buzzsaw or a machine gun.
Sometimes the battle went beyond the airwaves, like when a Czechoslovakian double agent poisoned the salt shakers at Radio Free Europe's Munich office. That plot was foiled before any of the 1,200-plus employees sat down for lunch. Years later, a Radio Free Europe journalist died after allegedly being stabbed with a poison-tipped umbrella.
But these U.S.-run shortwave stations weren't just beaming out journalism. Willis Conover speaking. This is the Voice of America Jazz Hour. The music of jazz parallels the freedom that we have in America, something that not every country has.
In the 1950s and 60s, music, especially jazz, was a key component in the U.S. government's shortwave campaign. This is the voice of America. The federal government ran a jazz ambassador program that sent musicians like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington on tours around the world. They focused on countries that the Soviet Union was also hoping to win over.
All the while, though, many of these very same musicians faced racism and segregation at home.
And on the short waves, Radio Moscow and others were ready to exploit this contradiction. The revolutionary people of Cuba sympathize with all people who struggle for social justice. In the early 1960s, Cuba's government-run service, Radio Havana, regularly beamed this show, Radio Free Dixie, up to the United States. It is in this spirit that we proudly allocate the following hour in an act of solidarity, peace, and friendship with our oppressed North American brothers.
Radio Free Dixie invites you to listen to the free voice of the South. Radio Free Dixie was hosted by U.S. Black power activist Robert F. Williams. He was on the lam in Cuba fleeing drummed up charges that were later dropped. And he broadcast a perspective that couldn't be found in the mainstream U.S. media. One Negro goes to the White House as a member of the president's cabinet.
while another is gunned down like a wild dog for using a white folks' toilet. It should be more than clear to us that if we are ever going to be free, we must liberate ourselves. Outlets like Radio Moscow and Radio Havana want followers around the world with their mix of propaganda and just factual reporting on civil rights abuses in the U.S.,
Governments saw winning people over on shortwave as a key path to winning the Cold War. So even after the CIA's secretive role at Radio Free Europe was revealed in the early 70s, not much changed. In fact, Congress increased its budget. And they kept pumping out news and tunes. Increasingly, they played the defiant and oh-so-American sound of rock music, which was heavily censored in the USSR and Eastern Bloc. ♪
On the U.S.'s government-run, taxpayer-funded shortwave stations, they broadcast groups like Metallica and Motley Crue to listeners around the world. By the early 1980s, the U.S. government's shortwave stations reached an estimated 80 million people each week. It took tons of manpower, and it was a huge infrastructure project, too. The government had miles upon miles of fields filled with antennas.
But one man didn't think that was enough. We're as far behind the Soviets and their allies in international broadcasting today as we were in space when they launched Sputnik in 1957. On the home front, Ronald Reagan had vetoed public broadcasting budgets and overseen a massive deregulation of the airwaves that allowed for big businesses and conservative and religious broadcasters to dominate AM and FM radio. You know, season one of The Divided Dial.
But on international radio, on shortwave, the great deregulator had no qualms about spending taxpayer dollars. He poured public money into the VOA and Radio Free Europe. I'm pleased to call on Director Wick and Minister Filali to sign this agreement, an important step towards strengthening the signal of the voice of America.
Reagan's administrators wrung their hands over what to do about rock music. Lots of them didn't believe it represented the best of Western culture. But after long internal debates, they decided to keep the rebellious racket going on the short waves. Meanwhile, on the journalism side, Reagan led a shakeup by sidestepping one of the Voice of America's long-held tenets, the idea that a free press is the U.S.'s best advertisement.
Sure, that idea hadn't always been perfectly executed, but Reagan opted instead for more heavy-handed anti-communist propaganda. Reagan's VOA ran explicit editorials on behalf of the administration. Many longtime leaders resigned, replaced by more amenable colleagues, including Richard W. Carlson, father of right-wing bloviator Tucker Carlson.
And it was Reagan who launched a costly new shortwave service targeting Cuba with hardline anti-communist messages. Today I'm appealing to the Congress, help us get the truth through. Support our proposal for a new radio station, Radio Marti, for broadcasting to Cuba. While public broadcasting floundered at home, government-subsidized propaganda and bad hair metal reverberated on shortwave from the U.S. to the world.
In its first seven decades of life, shortwave transformed from an idealistic experiment in global cooperation into a hardened government tool of information warfare. And then, in the late 1980s, much of the medium's reason for being crumbled.
In Eastern Europe, which the Soviets had held by force since World War II, Mikhail Gorbachev said that Moscow would no longer interfere. Serious fighting begins in the early morning, a staccato of machine gun bursts punctuated by cannon fire. In the last weeks and months, we've seen one communist party after the other in Eastern Europe knocked off its perch by the people. The Cold War was over.
On this medium that seemed almost tailor-made for propaganda, there was vacancy, airtime for rent. And in the U.S., a particular group of people was ready to snatch it up.
You must form your militia unit. No heed to the federal government, which is a counterfeit enemy foreign government. Are you a white woman such as myself who is sick of being harassed and tormented? Call Aryan Nations for a whiter, brighter America. We don't want to have to kill you. We hope to not have to kill you. But we can kill you. And if need be, we will kill you. Well, what are a few lives in the grand scheme of liberty?
I'm sure you are now seeing reports of some things that are regularly said over the airwaves in America today. These stations and the programs grew and they took over. They dominated. What is associated in the public's mind was shortwave. It's no longer the BBC World Service. Now it's the guys who helped Timothy McVeigh bomb a federal building.
Next time on The Divided Dial, it's the shortwave story you've never heard. The private citizens who took over a fringe medium with a fringe message and used it to build a movement that fundamentally changed mainstream U.S. politics.
The Divided Dial is written and reported by me, Katie Thornton, and edited by OTM's executive producer, Katya Rogers. Music and sound design is by Jared Paul. Jennifer Munson is our technical director. Fact-checking by Graham Heysha. This series was made possible with support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
Thanks for listening to the first episode of the new season of The Divided Dial. The next remaining episodes are going to air over the next three weeks, so tune in for more tales from the short waves. In the meantime, follow OTM on Blue Sky, TikTok, and Instagram, where we've been posting some video clips of the interviews that you hear on the show. Just search On The Media. I'm Michael Loewinger.
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