SILVER-TONGUED RADIO

Since about 1930, governments and political parties have sought to harness the power of radio to impress and persuade a mass audience. Of course for many years previously that mass audience had been courted by other media like books, newspapers and cinema but radio soon became the preferred instrument. Goebbels called radio “The Eighth Great Power”.

Early proponents of radio were the Comintern, relentlessly disparaging Western capitalism and imperialism and Mussolini’s Italy, evoking the ancient splendours of Rome and complaining about her exclusion from colonial Africa. However the first recognisable radio propagandist in the modern idiom was the Falangist General Quiepo de Llano, a brute in a brutal civil war, who led the Nationalist Army in 1936 in Andalusia, shooting prisoners as he took Seville.  Quiepo de Llano harangued the Republican supporters on the radio at some length while threatening them with horrors from his Moroccan troops. He had a pleasant wine-soaked voice and he amused many of his Spanish compatriots.

Quiepo de Llano

Nazi Germany understood the importance of radio propaganda perfectly. The Minister responsible was Joseph Goebbels, for years very close to Hitler. Rat-faced, club-footed and under-sized, he was hardly a good advertisement for Aryan Manhood but he was better educated than most Nazis. He was a powerful speaker and his mocking humour appealed especially to Berliners, whose Gauleiter he became. Goebbels was a virulent anti-Semite and his radio poured out poisonous racial slurs. He incited the Sudeten Germans to believe they were persecuted in 1938 Czechoslovakia and throughout World War 2, he fought hard over the air waves to encourage the Nazi armies, boost civilian spirits, demoralise the enemy and idolise the Führer. He poisoned his wife and children and shot himself to cheat retribution in the Berlin Bunker in 1945.

The Nazis also beamed their broadcasts to Britain, most famously using an US-born but Irish-reared fascist William Joyce (known irreverently as Lord Haw-Haw for his peculiar sneering accent) who always began his commentary with “Jairmany calling, Jairmany calling”. After the war the British hanged him for treason, even though his nationality was in some debate.

Arch-propagandist Joseph Goebbels

Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw

 

The Nazis and the Axis lost the War yet the Allies were also ardent propagandists. In the UK, the BBC was a trusted public institution and the leading US networks were well respected. Just how strong the authority of radio had already become was neatly illustrated in 1938 by the mini-panic caused by Orson Welles’ brilliant dramatization of H G Wells’ War of the Worlds. The radio play used all the authentic emergency techniques, interrupting music with news bulletins, casualty announcements and at least some of the audience believed Martians had actually landed in New Jersey. People chose not to question the veracity of the radio. 

Orson warns us of the Martians

FDR gives a fireside chat

 There was also a kind of “peaceful” propaganda, but propaganda it remained. FDR regaled the US radio audience, especially after Pearl Harbor, with his regular “fireside chats”, reassuring the American people about the course of the War, ultimate victory and the other great issues of the day. Mencken mocked him as a “radio crooner” but FDR’s direct and intimate technique was very polished and was warmly received. Perhaps the most celebrated American radio journalist was Ed Murrow, whiskey-voiced but highly eloquent, who presented the British heroically to America as they endured the Blitz and later moved his listeners with his harrowing description of the US liberation of hideous Dachau.

The British were late into propaganda as their belief, partly justified, was that the best policy was simply to tell the truth. Winston Churchill was a great orator of the old school but he never quite mastered the more personal methods of radio. Their best broadcaster was the writer and playwright J B Priestley, but his Yorkshire-accented socialism offended Churchill. The most influential figure later was Richard Dimbleby who was the BBC’s first war correspondent covering D-Day from the beaches and then stunned and horrified British opinion as he accompanied British soldiers as they liberated Belsen.

Ed Murrow in London

Richard Dimbleby at war

After WW2 the Cold War was waged in the propaganda arena. Voice of America was much expanded and the BBC increased its “overseas services” to counter Moscow Radio. How effective all this was is uncertain but it seems that Eastern Europe was influenced by Western broadcasts and longed for the Iron Curtain to fall, as it spectacularly did in 1989. 

A rather horrible reminder of the power of radio came from ethnically polarised Rwanda in 1994, when Hutu radio incited its listeners to “kill the cockroaches” and accordingly some 800,000 Tutsi were butchered.

Radio can of course be an agent of positive change and a bringer of civilisation. Just take care of who is in control of that microphone.

SMD

10.06.14

Text copyright © Sidney Donald 2014