1. Baron John Charles Walsham Reith, Broadcast over Britain (London, 1924), 217.Google Scholar

2. Judith Cary Waller, Radio: The Fifth Estate (Boston, 1946), 8.Google Scholar

3. Roth-Ey, Kristin, Moscow Prime Time: How the Soviet Union Built the Media Empire That Lost the Cultural Cold War (Ithaca, 2011), 135–39.Google Scholar Maoist China too sought to make radio a communal experience, including sponsoring “broadcast assemblies” in the Great Leap Forward. Liu, Alan, Radio Broadcasting in Communist China (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), 51.Google Scholar Thanks to Anne O’Donnell and Liat Spiro for their help with the Soviet and Chinese cases, respectively.

4. Tworek, Heidi J. S., “Peace through Truth? The Press and Moral Disarmament through the League of Nations,” Medien & Zeit 25, no. 4 (2010): 19.Google Scholar For theoretical reflections, see Cohen, Deborah and O’Connor, Maura, eds., Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective (New York, 2004).CrossRefGoogle Scholar For a practical illustration of a diachronic three-country comparison, see Maier, Charles S., Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany, and Italy in the Decade after World War I (Princeton, 1988).Google Scholar On the importance of transnational media research in radio, see Hilmes, Michele, “Radio-Nationen: Die Bedeutung transnationaler Medienforschung,” in Radio Welten: Politische, soziale und kulturelle Aspekte atlantischer Mediengeschichte vor und während des Zweiten Weltkriegs, ed. Hampf, M. Michaela and Lehmkuhl, Ursula (Münster, 2006), 84–93.Google Scholar

5. Stamm, Michael, “Broadcast Journalism in the Interwar Period,” in Making News: Historical Perspectives on the Political Economy of the Press in Great Britain and the United States since 1688, ed. John, Richard R. and Silberstein-Loeb, Jonathan (Oxford, forthcoming 2015)Google Scholar; Hilmes, Michele, Network Nations: A Transnational History of British and American Broadcasting (New York, 2012)Google Scholar; Hagen, Wolfgang, Das Radio: Zur Geschichte und Theorie des Hörfunks–Deutschland/USA (Munich, 2005)Google Scholar; Lacey, Kate, Listening Publics: The Politics and Experience of Listening in the Media Age (Cambridge, 2013)Google Scholar; Marssolek, Inge, “Radio Days: Did Radio Change Social Life in Germany and the United States?” in Atlantic Communications: The Media in American and German History from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Finzsch, Norbert and Lehmkuhl, Ursula (Oxford, 2004), 247–70.Google Scholar Pascal Griset has compared the interwar British, French, and German radio industries. Griset, Pascal, “Innovation and Radio Industry in Europe during the Interwar Period,” in Innovations in the European Economy between the Wars, ed. Caron, François, Erker, Paul, and Fischer, Wolfram (Berlin, 1995), 37–63.Google Scholar

6. Peterson, Theodore, Schramm, Wilbur, and Siebert, Fred S., Four Theories of the Press: The Authoritarian, Libertarian, Social Responsibility, and Soviet Communist Concepts of What the Press Should Be and Do (Freeport, N.Y., 1973)Google Scholar; Nerone, John C., ed., Last Rights: Revisiting Four Theories of the Press (Urbana, 1995).Google Scholar For another classic example and a recent reassessment, see Hallin, Daniel C. and Mancini, Paolo, Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics, Communication, Society, and Politics (Cambridge, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brüggemann, Michael et al., “Hallin and Mancini Revisited: Four Empirical Types of Western Media Systems,” Journal of Communication 64, no. 6 (2014): 1037–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7. On the concept of institutional arrangements, see Davis, Lance E. and North, Douglass C., Institutional Change and American Economic Growth (New York, 1971)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; North, Douglass C., Joseph Wallis, John, and Weingast, Barry R., Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (New York, 2009).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8. Hong, Sungook, Wireless: From Marconi’s Black-Box to the Audion (Cambridge, Mass., 2001).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9. Marconi, cited in Bredow, Hans, Aus meinem Archiv: Probleme des Rundfunks (Heidelberg, 1950), 18.Google Scholar

10. Tworek, Heidi J. S., “Wireless Telegraphy,” 1914–1918 Online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, 8 October 2014, http://encyclopedia.1914–1918, online.net/article/wireless_telegraphy.Google Scholar

11. On American construction of spectrum scarcity, see Stamm, Michael, “The Space for News,” Media History 21, no. 1 (2015): 55–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On how the Portuguese government created artificial scarcity of radio frequencies for its own political advantage in the 1930s and 1940s, see Ribeiro, Nelson, “Censorship and Scarcity: Controlling New and Old Media in Portugal, 1936–1945,” Media History 21, no. 1 (2015): 74–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12. Schwoch, James, “The American Radio Industry and International Communications Conferences, 1919–1927,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 7, no. 3 (1987): 289–309CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gorman, Daniel, “Freedom of the Ether or the Electromagnetic Commons? Globality, the Public Interest, and Multilateral Radio Negotiations in the 1920s,” in Empires and Autonomy: Moments in the History of Globalization, ed. Streeter, Stephen, Weaver, John, and Coleman, William (Vancouver, 2009), 138–56.Google Scholar

13. Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899–1922, 290. See also John, Richard R., Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications (Cambridge, Mass., 2010), chap. 7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14. Richard Slotten, Hugh, Radio and Television Regulation: Broadcast Technology in the United States, 1920–1960 (Baltimore, 2000), ix.Google Scholar On corporate liberalism in broadcasting, see Streeter, Thomas, Selling the Air: A Critique of the Policy of Commercial Broadcasting in the United States (Chicago, 1996).CrossRefGoogle Scholar For the classic work on American corporate liberalism, see Sklar, Martin, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916: The Market, the Law, and Politics (New York, 1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15. Sykes Committee, Broadcasting Committee Report, 1951 (London, 1923), 15.Google Scholar For more, see Scannell, Paddy, “Public Service Broadcasting: The History of a Concept,” in Understanding Television, ed. Goodwin, Andrew and Whannel, Garry (London, 1990), 11–29.Google Scholar

16. Sykes Broadcasting Committee, Report, 6.

17. Johns, Adrian, Death of a Pirate: British Radio and the Making of the Information Age (New York, 2010), 31.Google Scholar

18. On patents, see Arapostathis, Stathis and Gooday, Graeme, Patently Contestable: Electrical Technologies and Inventor Identities on Trial in Britain (Cambridge, Mass., 2013), chap. 6.Google Scholar

19. In 1921, the Postal Ministry received a subsidy of 1,244,194 Marks. Bundesarchiv Berlin (henceforth BArch) R3301/2098, 101.

20. Lacey, Kate, Feminine Frequencies: Gender, German Radio, and the Public Sphere, 1923–1945 (Ann Arbor, 1996), 31.Google Scholar On regional broadcasting companies, see Dussel, Konrad, Hörfunk in Deutschland: Politik, Programm, Publikum (1923–1960) (Potsdam, 2002), 49Google Scholar; Christian Führer, Karl, Wirtschaftsgeschichte des Rundfunks in der Weimarer Republik (Potsdam, 1997), 17ff.Google Scholar; Lerg, Winfried B., Die Entstehung des Rundfunks in Deutschland: Herkunft und Entwicklung eines publizistischen Mittels (Frankfurt am Main, 1965), 245ff.Google Scholar

21. Führer, Wirtschaftsgeschichte des Rundfunks, 19. On RRG, see Lerg, Winfried B., Rundfunkpolitik in der Weimarer Republik (Munich, 1980), 194ff.Google Scholar

22. Dussel, Konrad, Deutsche Rundfunkgeschichte: Eine Einführung (Konstanz, 1999), 75ff.Google Scholar; Lerg, Rundfunkpolitik in der Weimarer Republik, chap. 7; Ross, Corey, Media and the Making of Modern Germany: Mass Communications, Society, and Politics from the Empire to the Third Reich (Oxford, 2008), 279ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23. Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting, 317.

24. On the distinction between audience and public, see Lacey, Kate, “The Invention of a Listening Public: Radio and Its Audiences,” in Mass Media, Culture, and Society in Twentieth-Century Germany, ed. Christian Führer, Karl and Ross, Corey (Basingstoke, UK, 2006), 61–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25. Marszolek, “Radio Days,” in Finzsch and Lehmkuhl, Atlantic Communications, 247–70.

26. Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting, 305.

27. “The Joint Resolution to Amend the Radio Act of 1927,” cited in Robert Fortner, Radio, Morality, and Culture: Britain, Canada, and the United States, 1919–1945 (Carbondale, 2005), 97.

28. Moss, David and Fein, Michael, “Radio Regulation Revisited: Coase, the FCC, and the Public Interest,” Journal of Policy History 15, no. 4 (2003): 389–416CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stamm, Michael, Sound Business: Newspapers, Radio, and the Politics of New Media (Philadelphia, 2011), 45–54.Google Scholar

29. Caldwell, Edward C., “Censorship of Radio Programs,” Journal of Radio Law 1, no. 3 (1931): 473.Google Scholar See Richard Slotten, Hugh, Radio’s Hidden Voice: The Origins of Public Broadcasting in the United States (Urbana, 2009), 120f.Google Scholar

30. Briggs, Asa, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom: The Birth of Broadcasting, vol. 1 (London, 1961), 131.Google Scholar

31. Gehlen, Boris and Schulz, Günther, “National Regulatory Traditions? Introductory Remarks,” in Regulation between Legal Norms and Economic Reality: Intentions, Effects, and Adaptation: The German and American Experiences, ed. Schulz, Günther, Schomeckel, Mathias, and Hausman, William J. (Tübingen, 2014), 3.Google Scholar

32. Bredow, Hans, Im Banne der Ätherwellen. Festschrift zum 75. Geburtstag des Verfassers am 26. November 1954, vol. 2 (1954; Stuttgart, 1960), 166.Google Scholar

33. Hilmes, Network Nations, 2.

34. For a discussion of this idea in the American context, see Craig, Douglas, Fireside Politics: Radio and Political Culture in the United States, 1920–1940 (Baltimore, 2000)Google Scholar, chap. 11. For an English translation of Tönnies, see Tönnies, Ferdinand, Community and Civil Society, ed. Harris, Jose, trans. Margaret Hollis (Cambridge, 2001).Google Scholar On transatlantic exchanges of social thought, see Rodgers, Daniel T., Atlantic Crossings: Social Thought in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass., 1998).Google Scholar

35. Lacey, Feminine Frequencies, 34.

36. Heilmann, Ernst, cited in Lerg, Rundfunkpolitik in der Weimarer Republik, 84Google Scholar.

37. The political theorist Carl Schmitt took this view. Though Schmitt thought that the political was unavoidable, he believed that the state should put cinema to the service of creating order or even homogeneity. See Schmitt, Carl, Verfassungslehre (Berlin, 1954), 168.Google Scholar

38. Dussel, Hörfunk in Deutschland, 43.

39. Stamm, Sound Business, 15; Robertson, James C., The British Board of Film Censors: Film Censorhip in Britain, 1896–1950 (London, 1985).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

40. Craig, Fireside Politics, 206. See also Goodman, David, Radio’s Civic Ambition: American Broadcasting and Democracy in the 1930s (New York, 2011).CrossRefGoogle Scholar On fears of the crowd sparked by the nineteenth-century popular press, see Sumpter, Caroline, “The Cheap Press and the ‘Reading Crowd,’” Media History 12, no. 3 (2006): 233–52.Google Scholar

41. McChesney, Robert W., Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy: The Battle for the Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928–1935 (New York, 1993), chap. 4.Google Scholar

42. Lacey, Feminine Frequencies, 35.

43. For an example of disparaging amateurs, see Thurn, H., “Erste grundlegnde organisatorische Maßnahmen (1924),” in Bredow, Aus meinem Archiv, 26.Google Scholar

44. Avery, Todd, Radio Modernism: Literature, Ethics, and the BBC, 1922–1938 (Aldershot, UK, 2006), 16.Google Scholar

45. Reith, Broadcast over Britain, 17.

46. Lacey, Feminine Frequencies, chap. 9. In the 1930s, the male archetype of the newsman emerged in the United States.

47. Bredow, Hans, cited in Heinz Pohle, Der Rundfunk als Instrument der Politik (Hamburg, 1955), 60Google Scholar. On collective listening practices in Britain and Germany, see Lacey, Listening Publics, chap. 7.

48. Bredow, Hans, “Dem ‘Deutschen Rundfunk’ zum Geleit” (1923), in Bredow, Aus meinem Archiv, 15Google Scholar.

49. Dussel, Hörfunk in Deutschland, 137–75. On pioneers of radio plays and radio content, such as Hans Flesch’s “Enchanted Radio,” see Hagen, Das Radio, 89–112.

50. Bredow remained a staunch opponent of extremist politics, resigning his post the day after Hitler became chancellor. After World War II, Bredow became a key figure in radio, serving as head of the administrative council of Hessian radio from 1949 to 1951.

51. Saldern, Adelheid, “Rundfunkpolitik, Nationalidee und Volkskultur (1926–1932),” in Marssolek and Saldern, Radiozeiten, 59–82Google Scholar.

52. Führer, Christian, “Auf dem Weg zur Massenkultur? Kino und Rundfunk in der Weimarer Republik,” Historische Zeitschrift 262 (1996): 776.Google Scholar

53. Riddell, Lord, Sykes Broadcasting Committee, 29 May 1923, cited in Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, vol. 1, 157.Google Scholar

54. Reith, Broadcast over Britain, 217.

55. Calculated from table in Briggs, Asa, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom: The Golden Age of Wireless, vol. 2 (London, 1965), 35.Google Scholar

56. Coyle, Michael, “Radio,” in TS Eliot in Context, ed. Harding, Jason (Cambridge, 2011), 146.Google Scholar

57. Cited in Avery, Radio Modernism, 17.

58. Hoover, Herbert, “Opening Address to National Radio Conference, February 27, 1922,” cited in Stamm, Sound Business, 46Google Scholar.

59. Hoover, Herbert, “Address to National Radio Conference in 1924,” cited in Craig, Fireside Politics, 46Google Scholar.

60. Lenthall, Bruce, “Critical Reception: Public Intellectuals Decry Depression-Era Radio, Mass Culture, and Modern America,” in Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural History of Radio, ed. Hilmes, Michele and Loviglio, Jason (New York, 2002), 41–62.Google Scholar

61. Aitken, Hugh, The Continuous Wave: Technology and American Radio, 1900–1932 (Princeton, 1985), 94–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

62. Slotten, Radio’s Hidden Voice.

63. Stamm, “Broadcasting Journalism.” Stamm also has the most up-to-date work on Anglo-American broadcast news in the interwar period.

64. Leatherwood, Dowling, Journalism on the Air: An Abridged Textbook for a Course in Radio Journalism, with Laboratory and Microphone Exercises (Minneapolis, 1939), 87.Google Scholar

65. On the press-radio wars of the 1930s, see McChesney, Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy; Stamm, Sound Business.

66. Douglas, Susan J., Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination, from Amos ‘n’ Andy and Edward R. Murrow to Wolfman Jack and Howard Stern (New York, 1999), 164.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

67. BArch R3301/2098, 20 December 1923, 67.

68. Lacey, Feminine Frequencies, 34.

69. BArch R1501/114232, March 1925, 49.

70. BArch R1501/114231, March 1926, 88.

71. Greiner, Klaus, “‘Mit dem Gongschlag ist es ...’: Die Nachrichten im Hörfunk,” in Margot Hamm, Bettina Hasselbring, and Michael Henker, Der Ton, das Bild. Die Bayern und ihr Rundfunk 1924–1949–1999: Begleitbuch zur Ausstellung des Hauses der Bayerischen Geschichte und des Bayerischen Rundfunks (Augsburg, 1999), 123–30.Google Scholar

72. Sarkowicz, Hans, “Das Radio im Dienst der nationalsozialistischen Propaganda,” in Medien im Nationalsozialismus, ed. Heidenreich, Bernd and Neitzel, Sönke (Paderborn, 2010), 209.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

73. RM POST 33/704, 3 October 1922, pt. 2.

74. Hamilton Fyfe, editor of Daily Herald, Royal Mail Archives (henceforth RM) POST 89/27, Crawford Broadcasting Committee, 3 February 1926, 1, para. 3.

75. Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, vol. 2, 35.

76. Bromley, Michael and O’Malley, Tom, eds., A Journalism Reader (London, 1997), 325.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

77. Sykes Broadcasting Commission, 5 June 1923, RM POST 89/20, 1977. For the same stance at the 1935 Ullswater Commission, see British National Archives (henceforth BNA) CAB 24/259, sec. 81. On news-gathering arrangements, see Stamm, “Broadcast Journalism.”

78. BNA CAB 24/259, Ullswater Commission Report, 1935, para. 81.

79. Report of interview between Turner, Moloney, Murray, and the BBC, 18 July 1939, BBC Written Archives Centre, London, R28/162/1.

80. Scannell, Paddy and Cardiff, David, A Social History of British Broadcasting (Oxford, 1991), 136.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

81. Lommers, Suzanne, Europe on Air: Interwar Projects for Radio Broadcasting (Amsterdam, 2012).Google Scholar On private, commercial European stations like Radio Normandy and Radio Luxembourg, see Spohrer, Jennifer, “Ruling the Airwaves: Radio Luxembourg and the Origins of European National Broadcasting, 1929–1950” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2008).Google Scholar

82. RCA and Marconi had started experimenting on shortwave transatlantic broadcasts in 1927. On transatlantic shortwave, see Vaillant, Derek W., “At the Speed of Sound: Techno-Aesthetic Paradigms in U.S.-French International Broadcasting, 1925–1942,” Technology and Culture 54, no. 4 (2013): 888–921.Google Scholar

83. Horn, C. W., “International Broadcasting,” in Radio and Its Future, ed. Codel, Martin (London, 1930), 88.Google Scholar On similar beliefs in the power of engineering to promote peace, see Meer, Elisabeth van, “The Transatlantic Pursuit of a World Engineering Federation: For the Profession, the Nation, and International Peace, 1918–48,” Technology and Culture 53, no. 1 (2012): 120–45.Google Scholar

84. James Potter, Simon, Broadcasting Empire: The BBC and the British World, 1922–1970 (Oxford, 2012), 14.Google Scholar See also Anduaga, Aitor, Wireless and Empire: Geopolitics, Radio Industry, and Ionosphere in the British Empire, 1918–1939 (Oxford, 2009).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

85. Burmester, Eberhard, 30 Jahre Deutsche Welle (Munich, 1983), 7–16Google Scholar; Schwipps, Werner and Goebel, Gerhart, Wortschlacht im Äther: Der deutsche Auslandsrundfunk im Zweiten Weltkrieg: Geschichte des Kurzwellenrundfunks in Deutschland, 1939–1945 (Berlin, 1971).Google Scholar

86. Nelson, Michael, War of the Black Heavens: The Battles of Western Broadcasting in the Cold War (Syracuse, 1997)Google Scholar; Siefert, Martha, “Radio Diplomacy and the Cold War,” Journal of Communications 53, no. 2 (2003): 363–73.Google Scholar On jamming practices and foreign broadcasting in the Soviet Union, see Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, chap. 3.

87. Anderson, Benedict,Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London, 1991), 54 n. 28.Google Scholar

88. Lenk, Carsten, Die Erscheinung des Rundfunks: Einführung und Nutzung eines neuen Mediums, 1923–1932 (Opladen, 1997), 253.Google Scholar

89. On interwar German visions of the future, see Graf, Rüdiger, Die Zukunft der Weimarer Republik: Krisen und Zukunftsaneignungen in Deutschland, 1918–1933 (Munich, 2008).Google Scholar

90. Lacey, Feminine Frequencies, 25.