World Radio Day

On 13 February 1946, the newly formed United Nations switched on its own radio service and broadcast its first programme, carrying the voice of the young organisation to listeners who had no other way of hearing it. That date is the reason World Radio Day falls when it does. Marked each 13 February, the day celebrates a medium that asks almost nothing of its audience — no screen, no literacy, often no more than a cheap receiver and a pair of working ears — and yet reaches further into more lives than almost any technology invented since.

Where the day comes from

The day is younger than the medium it honours. The push behind it came not from a government but from broadcasters: the Spanish Radio Academy (Academia Española de la Radio) formally asked, on 20 September 2010, that Spain bring a proposal for a World Radio Day before UNESCO’s Executive Board. UNESCO ran a wide consultation with broadcasting associations, public and community stations, UN agencies and member states, and on 3 November 2011, at its 36th General Conference, proclaimed 13 February as World Radio Day. The United Nations General Assembly endorsed the proclamation in December 2012, making it an observance for the whole UN system. The first celebration took place on 13 February 2012, and in March of that year the Spanish Radio Academy set up a World Radio Day Committee, which held its first meeting in Madrid in September.

History

Radio as a public phenomenon is barely older than a century. The wireless transmission of speech and music grew out of the experiments of Guglielmo Marconi and others around the turn of the twentieth century, but it was the 1920s that turned it into a household object. Regular broadcasting began in 1920 with stations such as KDKA in Pittsburgh, and within a decade the wireless set had become a fixture of the family living room across Europe and North America, gathering households around it for news, music and drama in the years before television existed.

The medium’s reach into politics and the imagination came fast. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “fireside chats”, begun in 1933, showed how a head of state could speak directly and intimately to millions at once. On 30 October 1938, Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre broadcast an adaptation of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds on CBS, staged as a series of news bulletins; the episode became famous — and much exaggerated in the retelling — as an example of how completely radio could command belief. United Nations Radio, whose 1946 debut gives the day its date, was itself part of this story: a new world body reaching for the most direct means it had of speaking to ordinary people.

Why it matters

Radio’s qualities are unglamorous and exactly that is its strength. It is cheap to produce and cheaper to receive, it works on a battery or a wind-up handle where there is no mains power, and it asks for no reading ability, which means it can reach the very communities that newspapers and websites cannot. When floods, earthquakes or conflict knock out electricity and mobile networks, radio is often the signal that remains — the channel through which evacuation orders, the locations of shelters and reunification messages still travel. A day given over to radio is partly a reminder that the newest technology is not always the most resilient. There is also an economic argument folded into the cultural one: in much of the world a radio set costs a fraction of a smartphone and runs without a data plan, which is why national meteorological services, agricultural extension programmes and public-health campaigns still treat broadcast radio as their broadest possible reach. The medium’s low barrier to entry cuts the other way too, letting a single community station be run on a shoestring by volunteers, serving a town that no commercial broadcaster would ever find profitable.

Radio in the emergency

The clearest demonstrations of radio’s value come when everything else fails. After the Indian Ocean tsunami of 26 December 2004, and again following the 2010 Haiti earthquake, battery and hand-cranked radios were among the first aid items distributed, because they delivered warnings and reunification messages where power and telephone networks had collapsed. In the Rwandan genocide of 1994 the medium showed its darker face, as the broadcaster Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines incited killing — a reminder that radio’s reach is morally neutral and depends entirely on who holds the microphone. UNESCO has repeatedly used the day to address exactly this double edge, devoting one annual theme to radio in times of disaster and emergency.

Reinvention

The history of radio is partly a history of its predicted deaths. Television was expected to kill it in the 1950s; instead radio retreated to the car and the kitchen and thrived. The internet was expected to finish the job in the 2000s; instead the medium reappeared as streaming, as digital DAB broadcasting, and above all as the podcast, which is in essence radio-on-demand and has drawn a new generation into the oldest broadcast form. The familiar FM band, introduced commercially in the United States in the 1940s after Edwin Armstrong’s invention of frequency modulation, still carries the bulk of the world’s listening even as those newer channels grow alongside it.

How it is celebrated

UNESCO sets an annual theme — past editions have addressed subjects such as gender equality, radio in emergencies and the link between radio and trust — and stations build special programming around it. The day belongs especially to the smaller broadcasters: community and student stations open their studios, run on-air histories of their own founding, and use the occasion to recruit volunteers. Broadcasting unions, the European Broadcasting Union among them, share archive material and coordinate joint features, while listeners are invited to send in the memories and music that radio has woven into their own lives. Story strands feature prominently too, with stations dedicating airtime to spoken-word readings in the same spirit as World Read Aloud Day.

Cultural variations

Radio means different things in different places, and the day reflects that. In much of sub-Saharan Africa, where mobile reach is uneven and literacy patchy in rural districts, local-language FM stations remain the dominant source of news, farming advice and health information, and World Radio Day there leans heavily towards that public-service role. In India, All India Radio’s vast network broadcasts in dozens of languages, a reach that overlaps with the concerns of International Mother Language Day, since local-language broadcasting is one of the chief ways small tongues stay audible. The day is an occasion to celebrate that linguistic spread. In Latin America, where the Spanish Radio Academy’s campaign began, the day carries a particular pride of authorship. Across Europe and North America the emphasis falls more on heritage and on radio’s reinvention as podcasting and streaming.

Symbols and traditions

The day has no single emblem, but the images that attach to it are consistent: the microphone, the transmitter mast, and above all the receiver itself — the transistor set that, from the 1950s, made radio genuinely portable and personal. The transistor radio is the day’s quiet hero, the object that took broadcasting out of the parlour and put it in a coat pocket, a market stall, a fishing boat. The annual theme functions as a kind of moving tradition, giving each year’s observance a distinct focus while the underlying celebration stays the same.

Fun facts

• The date was not chosen for radio in general but for one specific broadcaster: United Nations Radio, which made its first transmission on 13 February 1946.
• The whole idea was lobbied into being by broadcasters rather than diplomats — the Spanish Radio Academy’s 2010 request is what set the UNESCO process in motion.
• The transistor radio, which made the medium portable, depended on the transistor invented at Bell Labs in 1947; cheap pocket sets followed in the late 1950s and sold in the hundreds of millions.
• The 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast is routinely cited as having caused mass panic, but later research suggests the scale of the alarm was substantially overstated in the press at the time.
• Radio has outlived its own obituaries: predicted dead first by television and then by the internet, it has instead absorbed both, reappearing as internet streaming, DAB digital broadcasting and the podcast.

A closing reflection

There is something instructive in the fact that the most resilient broadcast medium is also the most modest. Radio never demanded the full attention that television and the smartphone now insist on; it was content to be listened to while you did something else, and that willingness to share your attention rather than seize it may be precisely why it has survived every technology built to replace it. The voice in the dark, asking nothing but a moment’s listening, turns out to be very hard to switch off for good.